How to Continue?

The three kittens are still here. Once space opens up for them in a local PetSmart store, I'll drop them off, and they'll be housed in cages until adoption (the store doesn't profit, and the rescue agency goes deeper in the hole with every cat). On that day, I will become the man who betrayed them, and I won't even have the comfort of knowing that they will be sent to loving homes.

I expected fostering to be hard, but I also expected to have the same kittens for only a few days or, at most, a couple of weeks. They've now been here for six weeks, and while I try to enjoy them in the moment, I know what they do not, and that I could spare them. To atone to the dogs I murdered in order to help dogs, I could make this their forever home, and so what if my life contained seven cats--is seven really that many, once they become old enough that the furniture can be uncovered and the knicknacks returned? Peggy says yes, and while my head agrees, my heart doesn't care. My only comfort comes from knowing that, according to the actuarial tables, I will die when their lives are but half over, so it is better to let them go now.

Can I keep inviting this heartache? But if not I, then whom: people who care less; people who are stronger; people who are more practical?

I hate my species for what we do to other lives.

Perhaps, I would be doing better if it were summer because every winter, for me, is a struggle for survival. My pain is worse, and the virtues of the other seasons are absent, replaced by what? Cold. Gray. Drizzle. Darkness. Death. What insanity possessed me that I moved halfway to the North Pole, to a place that rarely sees the sun for life-sapping months? I can't breathe for the agony. I am lost already, and the worst is yet to come.

Peggy, who is more rational than I, points out that there are other ways to serve animals. For instance, I could volunteer to show them to potential adoptees, and the decision to allow--or disallow--those people to adopt wouldn't even be mine. But what if I didn't approve? What then? Turn a cat over and hope for the best? Tell the applicant to go fuck himself? Like a crazed father who greets his daughter's beaus with a shotgun, I favor the latter.

I so wanted this to be fun. I so wanted to be useful, but I am drowning in sadness.

Sacred Beings Entrusted to My Care

Foster Kitten Harvey Centered Among Three of Our Adults

Surrendering to Love

Peggy and I adore the longhair kittens that we’ve fostered for three weeks. In the late 1970s, I killed dogs as a volunteer for a rural humane society, but surrendering these kittens to their forever homes will be even harder because at least I didn’t know the dogs.

Our three fosters came to us through the Cat Rescue and Adoption Network (CRAN)*, a local group with over 200 volunteers, no paid staff, and a $199,000 annual budget. The group’s Medical Rehabilitation and Ringworm Treatment Facility is nearly complete, but cats who are able will continue to be lodged in seventy local homes. CRAN’s cats are also listed on PetFinder and, as space becomes available, taken to one of two local Petsmart stores where still more volunteers oversee the adoption process.

Our three lovelies came to us with a large “condo,” toys, bowls, food, blankets, a litter scoop, two litter boxes, two tubs of litter, and other odds and ends, and it was all new. CRAN’s generosity had the effect of making me, at least, feel obligated to house cats regularly instead of sporadically, which is what I wanted to do in the first place if only Peggy will allow. 

Partial Page from a CRAN Newsletter

I had wanted to foster cats for years, but Peggy worried that they might infect our cats with parasites or disease, and that I would want to keep them, so she made me agree that we would accept only such cats as a vet had screened and vaccinated, and that I wouldn’t whine about adopting them. After receiving our application, CRANs’ president, Louanne, came out in mid-October to tour our home and and conduct a screening interview. We haven’t had contact with her since, but Kim, the lady who brought first the supplies and then the kittens has stayed in frequent touch. She paid us a visit last Saturday because one of the kittens had a swollen abdomen related to having been spayed, and Kim wanted to examine her before we took her to WAG (Willamette Animal Guild) for a checkup. She later emailed: “You and Peggy are dreams for our foster organization.”

“Dreams,” us? I can accept that Kim was exceedingly pleased with how safe and happy our fosters feel, but when I consider people like Kim herself who have devoted a large part of their lives and fortunes to helping cats, we’re pikers. Yet within the confines of what we agreed to do and how well we’re doing it, we are good—very good. We’re also loving it, or at least I’m loving it, Peggy being less pleased with the necessity of putting away her knicknacks, draping sheets over the upholstery, and devoting a chunk of our den to a cat condo. In my view, nothing that we put away or covered over came even close to being as beautiful as the precious beings that took its place, and I have been glad to  observe that Peggy cheerfully takes on half of the work, which is a bit more work than we figured on because we have a bit more kittens than we figured on.

We initially agreed to take only one kitten at a time, but when Kim asked if we could take two, we reflected upon our very real desire to help and the amount of money the organization had invested in buying us supplies, and we said yes. So far so good, but ten minutes before she was to arrive, Kim phoned to say that she was en route with three kittens, and could we please take them all because they were bonded siblings. I don’t think the term “bonded” quite applies to kittens, but if we hadn’t taken them, Kim would, and she already had six fosters and fourteen resident cats. She sniffed so much while here that I asked if she had a cold, and she said no, she’s allergic to cats! I said that Louis J. Carmuti (1883-1981), the world’s first full-time cat vet was also allergic to cats.

 

The Hard Stuff

Far from being the cruel, selfish, and unloving little shits that cat haters claim they are, cat lovers regard cats as gentle, giving, loyal and sensitive—at least I do. How sad that they must eat the bodies of other gentle, giving, loyal, and sensitive, creatures. Vegetarian that I am, I think about this a lot now that I’m feeding seven cats.  I also reflect upon other humanitarian dilemmas. For instance, here is how the latest CRAN newsletter (see second illustration) described its care of a nursing kitten named Forrest who was found living on the street with his mother and sister:

“He became very ill and fought hard for his life. From vet visit to vet visit, antibiotic treatment to antibiotic treatment, medicated nebulizer treatments to steamy showers, sub-Q fluids and bottle feedings…all of this care leading at last to a healthy and thriving kitten.”

How is an organization to decide the worth of a kitten (or a child for that matter) when funds are limited, all kittens are of inestimable value, and the money devoted to one will be denied to others? I started this post by admitting that I used to kill dogs (call it euthanasia if you will, but it just felt like killing), and the fact that my intentions were good hasn’t mitigated the anguish that I continue to feel fifty years later. The bottom-line is that year-in and year-out, millions of animals are killed (or allowed to die) most of them because human beings are too indifferent to misery to spay and neuter, and it is oftentimes the very people who love animals who must end their lives. I am too new to intimate involvement with CRAN to know how it manages to remain a no-kill organization but, generally speaking, no-kill shelters pass on their worst cases and their overload to shelters that have no choice but to kill, shelters that are tax-supported. Sadly, the term no-kill can be interpreted to mean that the people who staff kill shelters are callous, maybe even kill-happy. 

I was the only man in the organization that I killed for. When we accumulated so many dogs that they were cannibalizing one another due to the extreme stress of gross overcrowding, an emergency board-meeting was called. At that meeting, the women all pronounced themselves too soft-hearted to do what had to be done. They then crossed their arms and waited for me to speak. I wish I had walked out.


Finally, CRAN, like many rescue groups, requires that those who adopt its cats keep them indoors, and it also requires that kittens have the companionship of another animal. It does not trap feral cats, neuter them, and re-release them into the wild. Sadly, studies from the world over (including a recent mega-study by the Smithsonian Institute in conjunction with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Survey) have consistently shown that feral cats kill billions of birds a year (and three times as many other creatures), a number which exceeds the number of birds killed by cars, pollution, pesticides, wind turbines, slamming into windows, and all other “un-natural” causes combined (Felis catus is un-natural in that it was created by humans in northern Africa and introduced to the rest of the world).** 

I used to see several garter snakes a year in my yard, but five years ago a neighbor with twelve outdoor cats moved in, and three summers have passed since I last saw a single snake. I watched a cat clamber over my fence carrying a grown tree squirrel, and the cat next door has killed birds by the dozen each and every year for the eight years that he has lived here. Many cat-lovers respond to studies of cat predation—and to my own eye-witness accounts of cat predation—with flat-out denial, vulgar vituperation, and in the case of the referenced study, death threats. A major concern that I have about being affiliated with a cat rescue group is that I don’t want to associate with such fanatics, and I certainly don’t want to be numbered among them. This is why I was careful in my selection of CRAN.

*https://catrescues.org/
**https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

"My Great and Unmatched Wisdom"

 
Soon after tweeting that he was about to withdraw American support from our longtime allies in the fight against terrorism, the Kurds (who live in the part of Syria that is adjacent to Turkey's southern border), Trump wrote another tweet: "If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)." 

The next day, Turkey's president, Erdoğan, began shelling and bombing the Kurds while announcing plans to send 3.6 million Arab refugees (who now reside in Turkey) to build permanent homes in the Kurdish homeland. As Kurdish troops moved to the border to meet the coming Turkish invasion, Islamic State prisoners were left lightly guarded. When a reporter asked Trump, "What if ISIS fighters escape and pose a threat elsewhere?" Trump responded, "Well they are going to be escaping to Europe, that's where they want to go." (There has since been one escape attempt.) Erdoğan, when criticized by the nations of Europe for the Turkish invasion, said that if Europe didn't back down: "We will open our borders and send 3.6 million refugees your way."

Trump's latest action marks the first time that I remember him receiving even token criticism from high-ranking Republicans, yet it has caused the support of his base to actually increase, and his base will do all they can to defeat any candidate who isn't solidly behind Trump. During his first few months in office, I imagined that when his base realized that Trump was a dictator wannabe, they would turn against him, yet the more brazen he becomes, the more they adore him, and the less place there is in government for anyone of his party who does not at least pretend to do likewise. I interpret this to mean that while both they and I understood what kind of a man Trump is, but that they liked him that way. The only good that has come from this realization is that I have a better idea what Germany was like before Hitler killed off his opposition.

Last year, someone in Trump's administration wrote a letter to the effect that, yes, the president is deranged, but there are those of us inside the administration who will continue to work to minimize the damage.** Since then, Trump loyalists have eliminated all such foot draggers, and Trump himself has either fired or forced out eighteen cabinet members (the cabinet is the president's inner circle of department heads) who dared to disagree with him. This means that his most significant opposition now comes from Congressional Democrats but, in the short-term, there is little they can do. In the long term, the effectiveness of their criminal investigations are unknown, and their impeachment effort is unlikely to succeed simply because Republicans know they won't be re-elected if they support it. It is also feared that our already unstable president might react to the culmination of any threat to his power by calling for civil war. In fact, he has already indicated that he will do so.


* This is the same Erdoğan who frequently talks to Trump on Trump's private cell phone, and whose bodyguards have twice gotten away with beating non-violent American protestors on American soil.

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Part_of_the_Resistance_Inside_the_Trump_Administration