Every creeping thing

This is a departure from my previously scheduled material, because I have fresh grief and anger.

Today we have three cats and one dog, but Friday there was a fourth cat. That is why there is grief.

In the middle of the grief, I started thinking about how we only know the origins of one of our cats.

In 1996 we had just lost the last of our original clowder to old age, but there was a stray hanging around and we started putting food out. Eventually Max started letting us pet her, and coming into the house, and she slowly but surely became an indoor cat.

Once we could get close enough, we saw that she had been spayed, and there was an old flea collar on her, but there weren't any other clues to her age or history. When she died seventeen years later, we knew that she was at least eighteen, then, and that is pretty old, but she could have been older still and we had no way of knowing.

It was too hard being without a cat, so for the first time ever we officially adopted a cat from an adoption group: no ads in the paper, no friend of a coworker having kittens, just going and finding a cat. So we knew Maeve's age and that her owners had given her up when they moved, and the name she was used to, though it kind of got transformed into Mavis.

Otherwise, this spring Lilly Belle was found at the side of a very busy road when she was probably no more than four weeks old. The woman who found her looked for signs of other cats, but didn't see any.

Two years before that Ashley turned up starving in our back yard, and was probably about six months old. I think she is a little smaller than she would be if she had never had that starving period in the middle of her growth period.

And before that, when our only cat was Mavis, Maria took her class on a field trip to a cat shelter and fell in love with Cody, whom we had to take or he was unlikely to be adopted. Cody was older, maybe ten, but that is only a guess. Teeth can help you figure out age, but he had lost all of his. That and a balance problem indicated that he might have been hit by a car. He was found wandering around too; it just seems like he had a harder time getting there.

It was probably during his time on the streets that he picked up the herpes that would flare up and give him respiratory trouble, and the pododermatitis in his front paws, but he probably would have had the allergies anyway.

He did in fact have a lot of health problems even before the ataxia started that turned out to be connected to a rapidly growing tumor, but he was so good about everything anyway. If he had to move his head back and forth to balance, it did not stop him from getting where he wanted to go. He only got sick enough to quit purring once. He was still purring Friday. Three years was good but we would have wanted longer.

I don't know that his time on the streets shortened his life, because we don't know what caused the tumor, but it makes me mad that he had to go through so much.

This current system regularly gives us cats that we love, but it leaves a lot more cats that aren't so lucky. We could find another way to get cats. That's three lucky cats, but two were kittens and how often is there only one kitten? There could have been siblings and mothers out there. There are shelter cats still waiting for someone. There are cats that have had to go feral because no one stepped up. And how much did Mavis miss the people who let her go? It took her a while to love us.

If I start getting into dogs, and all of the abandonment and neglect and abuse there, we'll be here a while. Let me just say that when it seems like our animal population numbers are ridiculous, that was never planned. We just have soft hearts.

So what I really want to say is don't contribute to this. Don't take in an animal and then decide the commitment is too much. Don't be careless with them so that they get lost. Don't let cats out! Yes, it can take some getting used to for them, but we have turned four strays into indoor only cats, so I know it's possible. Doing that protects birds, and the cats live longer and are healthier. They won't get hit by cars or eaten by coyotes or tortured by future serial killers. Just don't.

And if this doesn't seem like a topic for a religious blog, remember that not a sparrow falls but that God knows it. The dominion we were given over the Earth and the beasts upon it was never a license to abuse. It is not an excuse to neglect.

I am glad that we had Cody, but if an easier and longer life for him meant that it all happened with someone else, that could be okay. We are good at finding cats, but it can be hard for them to find good homes. Don't contribute to that.