We all love inspiring stories about overcoming challenges. Here’s one about Wyatt, a beautiful and very happy little orange kitten with many medical challenges.
(edit: at one point I say “mother kitten” — but you know I meant “mother cat”!)
Listen on Podbean:
Listen on YouTube:
Resources:
Kitkat Playroom YouTube channel, including livestream
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
[Audio of Jen Mack from Kitkat Playroom]: “Some people don’t understand why I’ve adjusted my entire life to care for Wyatt’s needs. The simple answer is because seeing Wyatt overcome so many obstacles and spread so much unity among strangers brings me more joy than anything else I could be doing with my time. When Wyatt looks at me with his precious face, I would do anything to make him happy, no matter the cost.”
Oh, she loves Wyatt so much, and I can’t wait to tell you about Wyatt. First of all, that was Jen Mack, the founder and director of the Kitkat Playroom in New Jersey, and she’s talking about a tiny orange kitten named Wyatt who she’s been caring for over the past several months.
And I am so captivated by Wyatt’s story and by Jen’s devotion to the kittens and the mother cats who she rescues.
First, I’ll tell you a little bit about this guy Wyatt. He was born in February, February 18th, 2024 at a rescue in Texas, and the people there immediately noticed that he could not close his jaw, so he was unable to nurse from his mother. And of course, if he couldn’t nurse from his mother, he would have certainly died. So they had to do something, and what they did was they started to feed him with a tube.
By the way, they named him Chicken Nugget. His name wasn’t Wyatt yet, but they found the Kitkat Playroom in New Jersey, and they contacted Jen, and they had him move over to the Kitkat Playroom so he could get specialized care from her. The Kitkat Playroom is an all-volunteer nonprofit kitten rescue in New Jersey, and they have this wonderful livestream for actually two of the rooms that are there. You can watch the kittens. We watch them grow up. You watch them with their mothers, and sometimes she’ll take in pregnant mothers, and I’ve watched kittens being born. I had never seen anything like that. So I’ve actually learned a lot about cats and kittens from watching the Kitkat Playroom’s livestream and by listening to Jen talk about how she takes care of them and what she does.
She brings in kittens, sometimes with their mothers and sometimes on their own, who have been found on the streets, and she takes them in and sometimes bottle feeds them, which requires like every two hours for the littlest ones, I think, or every three hours if they’re slightly older. But she does that, so she doesn’t get any sleep. She also takes in quite a few special-needs kittens like Wyatt. They’re the most vulnerable kittens of all, so it’s a happy place. Very lucky kittens who get rescued there.
So anyway, back to Wyatt. He brings me and so many people, as you heard from Jen’s story, a ton of joy. But this guy is not just a little kitten — and most people love kittens, hopefully most people love kittens — but he’s not just an adorable little kitten. He is a kitten who has survived so much so far in his short life. He’s tiny for his age. He wasn’t able to eat on his own at first because he couldn’t close his mouth, so he had to be tube fed, and then he learned how to eat.
They had him wear these goggles. He would dig his whole face into some food so that he could eat, but he did it. He learned how to eat, and now he’s actually eating on his own without the goggles, and he’s a messy eater but he gets it done.
So he’s learned how to eat, even though he still can’t close his jaw, and they’re waiting for him to get to be a certain weight so that he can have scans and then possibly surgery to see what’s going on with his jaw and hopefully fix it, but he has been taking a long time to get to that weight because he has some other medical problems. He’s had respiration pneumonia, which I guess he hasn’t completely recovered from. He has, they believe, some sort of growth defect, which means he’s staying really small.
He’ll be in the room with other kittens, and then they’ll all grow bigger than him, and he’s still this tiny little guy, even though now he’s several months old. And maybe the worst thing that he’s had is heart disease, really, really bad heart disease. He was in a hospital, and he almost died, and then I guess Jen went to the hospital to see him one last time, and it was heartbreaking, and then by the time she got to the hospital he had made an incredible recovery and he seemed like his normal self, or almost like his normal self. And she took him back, and he had to stay in an oxygen tent for a while, but he’s doing so much better. That was, gosh, that was at least a month ago.
And he’s got other diagnoses. He can’t close his eyelids normally. They think he has partial paralysis of the face, and now he’s got this thing called megaesophagus where he can’t fully or adequately swallow his food, and dental problems. He had to go to a veterinary dentist.
So poor Wyatt, right? But the thing is, he’s a really happy little kitten, and if you see him on the livestream, you’ll see him playing with toys. You’ll see him happily snuggling with other kittens in the room, going and eating, drinking, and then every few hours, somebody called a snuggler comes in to socialize the kittens there, and Wyatt will get in their lap, and he’ll just, you can tell he’s so full of love.
So everybody loves Wyatt. He’s become, from what I can tell, quite popular. There’s this wonderful fundraising campaign where somebody designed t-shirts with Wyatt wearing his goggles.
And he’s not only happy, but he makes friends easily with people and with other kittens and the mothers. I think he’s had like four families, and sometimes there’s a mother kitten who will lick him on the head and just take him in as if he’s one of her own.
He doesn’t seem to be in pain or suffering. Obviously, when he was in the hospital he was, but then he recovered — so he’s so inspiring.
And, you know, some people might look at a story or a situation like Wyatt’s in a really rational, financial, cost-benefit sort of way, and say, “Well, you know, he’s just one kitten, and there’s so many others who need to be saved, so what’s the point, right? We can take all, we can get donations, and he’ll cover more kittens who happen to not have so many problems.”
And I just can’t look at things or kittens or anybody in that sort of rational way all the time, and how soulless the world seems if we think like that.
It’s pretty clear to me that the world would be an even sadder place than it already is if all of our decisions about who to care for were reduced to rationalism or financial considerations, because Wyatt is right here, right now, looking up at his caregivers with loving eyes. He’s so full of love and life, and how can you look at anyone so sweet and dependent and not want to help them? I feel like if an animal’s happy and has potential for a good life, it’s totally worth it. And I can tell this kitten is bringing so much joy to so many people.
As Jen said, she said, he spreads so much unity among strangers. So let’s talk about that for a minute. He’s become an ambassador, and he’s on t-shirts, and there’s this guy in Australia who put on Wyatt goggles and made himself look like Wyatt and went on Facebook, and that’s pretty cool.
And Wyatt has really become an ambassador and a role model for overcoming major obstacles and health issues in life. When we watch the livestream, we learn how to accommodate him, and we think about how to accommodate other animals and even people in our lives. So I think this can transcend animals, although animals in my view are every bit as worthy as people.
But the whole idea of being inspired by Wyatt can also remind us how inspiring people are and how deserving people are when they have special needs and special requirements in order to thrive in their lives. In my view, it’s all about love for whoever it might be. And really, don’t you think the world needs so much more love?
I have a book called Kinship with Animals, and it’s got essays about people’s personal experiences with animals. And I really appreciate what one person who’s quoted in the book says. It’s Faith Maloney. She’s one of the founders of the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah. And when she was asked by a reporter whether she thought that a sanctuary like hers could make a difference, given that so many millions of dogs and cats are being killed at shelters all over the country every year, and then hers was just a small little drop in the ocean. And she said, “It makes quite a difference if you’re one of the animals here.” So it makes quite a difference to Wyatt, doesn’t it?
And I also have to say, I find people who dedicate their lives to animals, like Jen, to be very awe-inspiring as well. Because, of course, nothing about Wyatt’s story is really possible without the people who care about him. Dacher Keltner, in his book Awe, refers to the awe of people and people’s actions as “moral beauty”. And he says that in studies in different countries, “It was other people who were most likely to bring our participants everyday awe.”
There’s so many things we can all do with our lives, and there are so many more lucrative things we can do than taking care of the most vulnerable, whether they be people or animals. I really respect and admire these people for making such a difference. And again, doesn’t the world need more of that?
So if you want to see Wyatt, eventually he’ll be adopted. But for now, he is on the Kitkat Playroom livestream. And you can go to YouTube, look up Kitkat Playroom, and you can see Wyatt and other kittens who are there. And the website is kitkatplayroom.com, so you can go check that out as well.
And I hope that you found some inspiration and wonder in Wyatt’s story.