Borrowed cat yields kittens

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on November 30, 2007

An intriguing new item popped up on some of the elementary school blogs this week. Vivian Liu is selling Siamese kittens - and what an interesting back story they have.

The six kittens, born on Oct. 8, are the offspring of Suzie, a Siamese queen, the name for a pregnant Siamese, that Liu and husband John Warren "borrowed" from a New Hampshire cattery known as Cann-Dee-Apples.

Warren is a Siamese cat fan from way back, having grown up in Vermont with three Siamese females, two of whom he saw give birth to kittens. The third one "got married in the woods," as Liu delicately put it. "She returned with half black kittens and half Siamese kittens and the black kittens were sort of wild."

Warren and Liu got their own Siamese cats, Jasmine and Melina, when they were married in the mid 1990s, in Shelburne, Vt. "So they were our babies," Liu said - until she and Warren had three children, Michael, Emily and Andrew, in 1999, 2000 and 2003.

"Once we had kids, the cats wouldn't have anything to do with the kids. They won't even play with them," Liu said. "They stay hidden all day until my husband and I go to bed, and then they come out."

Liu and Warren wanted the children to have the experience of having a kitten and also seeing kittens being born. "But we didn't want to be breeders," she said. "We aren't ready for that."

They researched catteries on the Internet and found Can-Dee-Apples, whose owners, Joe and Mary Jo Cannarella, were looking for people to take care of their pregnant cats while they traveled to Australia. The owners bred several queens and leased them for free, first mentoring Liu and Warren, who traveled to New Hampshire three times to study how taking care of a queen is done. The Cannarellas, in turn, visited Amherst to check out Liu's and Warren's home, and determined it was a good location.

On their first trip to the cattery, Michael, 8, picked up a cat and said, "This is the first time I've held a cat."

Emily, Michael and Andrew got to watch the birth of the kittens, traditional "applehead" cats, as did the children on Emily's soccer team.

Liu and Warren get to keep half the kittens or half the money they make selling them at $600 each. They have already sold two.

They haven't decided which one they are going to keep or whether they will just keep the last one sold. Emily, though, has formed an attachment to one of the kittens with a giant head and a flat face.

"We call that one Pumpkin," Liu said. "My husband and the two boys wanted to call her fathead."

Cat-fanciers, Liu can be reached at VivanFLiu@comcast.net.

Contact Mary Carey at mary.carey@att.net with ideas for School Zone.