Reporter's Notebook: Answer to a meow for help proves teens have heart

Far too often, teen-agers are lumped into an abyss labeled “trouble makers.” Last week, one young lady certainly proved that wrong. A Kittitinny High School honors graduate, Amanda Jones recently finished her freshman year at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. Home for the summer, she took on two jobs: one at Applebees and the other as a babysitter. While she was babysitting she made a startling discovery and saved the life of an animal. Jones was playing with her 2-year-old charge in the yard when an emaciated cat wandered by. Startled by her terrible condition, Jones followed her only to make an even more shocking discovery: the cat was a mother. It led her to a handful of five-week- old kittens, cloistered in a shed. Malnourished to begin with, the mother cat was giving everything she had to her babies…and she was dying in the process. Jones couldn’t let this go, so she investigated. It turned out, the mother was a stray and the people who owned the shed were letting her and the kittens stay there. Another neighbor had found the cat and her kittens in his yard, and though he had opened up his garage to her, she had decided to move the kittens… one by one….to the other neighbors’ property. The family who owned the shed had decided to adopt one of the kittens, but as for Momma Cat and the others, they planned to find a shelter for them in a week or so. That was great, but Jones knew wouldn’t be fast enough to save Momma Cat’s life, and subsequently the lives of her kittens. Jones took it upon herself to contact BARKS, then she and her mother took the kittens on Saturday morning to a temporary BARKS home. When Jones left, the cats were all eating, and Momma Cat, she knew, would now be okay. BARKS had even found a family that was looking for a Momma Cat and kittens to raise.