Heavy, deep, and real. 1987

I've put a battery limit on myself on this post. When the battery starts to die, I have to stop.

(First off, Knuckles is doing great!)

This post, and future diary posts I will make here, is for one of the wonderful people who helps care for my cats. She emails me tonight to ask if I had the same soft heart when I was young that she has now.

She says "I know that in order to help effectively, I have much to learn. I also know that much of what there is to learn will be painful and horrible...I wonder, were you ever like me when you were younger? Has experience helped you find that balance, or is it just your personality?"

Experience. Not personality.

I know when people meet me, they are often quietly shocked about how blunt I am about animal suffering and euthanasia. They often don't say anything, but I can see it in their eyes. Their expressions don't change so much as freeze just a little when I say that I sometimes choose to put cats down if they are suffering in my care. Or when I mention to a visitor that an obviously pregnant cat is headed to the vet to be spayed the next day.

I don't blame them. I don't blame them at all. But I don't stop talking.

Then they get to know me and they discover I'm a pushover.

I began my work with feral kittens in 1991 so that our local SPCA would not have to accept feral kittens for euthanasia. I tamed them instead, and found them homes. Later, that same SPCA leaped ahead of me and began offering trap/neuter/return. So they returned the favor by forcing me to deal with colony management (instead of just kittens). Now even the adults get a chance at life.

Nonetheless, every cat in my place is a cat that no shelter would accept. They are all "unadoptable" cats who would be killed anywhere else, or left on the street uncared for.

I will not, however, call myself no-kill, because periodically euthanasia comes knocking on my door. Or pregnant cats are spayed to prevent a birth. Or I tell someone "No" because I am full. Some cat or unborn kitten dies in every case, and while I'll glad tell people the cats I do save would otherwise die, I won't call myself no-kill, and I don't shy away from discussing euthanasia.

I am not the person I was when I was 20, or even 24. I don't think we would recognize one another if we met. I am not sure the person I was then and the person I am now would like one another. I would like to hope we would. I have a bit of an advantage over her, however.

I have her diary.

These won't be easy posts to read, so be forewarned. Every now and then I will post one on the blog. Here goes:

May 25, Memorial Day, 1987.

It's about time I began this. I was afraid I'd work and leave this job at the SPCA without ever writing down a thing that happened to me.

I've been at the job a year now. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to last in it. It seems as though every call is heartbreaking, or at the very least unpleasant. Sometimes I feel more like a murderer than a savior of animals. But I don't have a better answer to how to do the job of a humane officer

That's the euphemism, of course. The harsh title is animal control officer. The insult is "dogcatcher."

Some good things do happen, though. I know no one really knows what my job is like. God knows I have a hard enough time trying to to understand it myself. It seems a sin to call myself a writer and let this day-to-day, life and death, go on without setting down a word.

Okay. I'll try.


June 1, 1987.

One thing you can be sure of--if there's a pickup to do at Landmark Square, the animal is probably a kitten under six weeks, just on the breathing side of death.

I got an emergency call for a kitten tonight. A little black and white thing. He was so thin he looked like a little old man, and he was cold as stone. I guess someone saw him that afternoon but didn't think to call, so he sat through two thunderstorms until a girl wrapped him in a tshirt and called me at 7:00.

I took him to (vet clinic), but I can't say if he'll live or not.

I picked up another kitten earlier in Enfield. The woman found him at the side of Black Oak Road, with his eyes crusted closed. There was this infant cat, toddling down the road, blind as a bat... I cleaned his eyes at the shelter and gave him a cage in holding, but P. saw him and doomed him to ISO (Note: all the human names/initials have been changed. ISO=Isolation, for sick animals, which were almost always euthanized. This is no longer true at this same shelter. Continuing...)

That's what I hate the most. The kittens and mom cats who never get a fighting chance. There's something sacred about "the children and the women" that gets warped when humans have to decide what animals live and die.

Rastus, Bram and Spot were once fuzzballs like that Black Oak toddler. Spot and Brambles, at least, were fated to die. I keep telling myself that at least I gave them a chance, but then a new wrinkled kitten face looks at me, and that's no consolation at all.

(Note: R, B, and S were my cats at the time. I adopted Spot during my first few weeks at the SPCA, not realizing the orange circle around his name meant he was supposed to have been euthanized that evening. I picked out Bram a week later as a playmate for Spot, and chose her specifically because she was on the euth. list that day. I had adopted Rastus from the Chenango County SPCA in Norwich six years years earlier).

I keep telling muself some day I'll get out of this job and I won't have to do this any longer. But it will all stll be there, whether I am or not.

Ignorance is bliss, as they say. How many horrors am I ignorant of that people would call more important---starving children rather than kittens. Impoverished mothers rather than mom-cats.

But just because there is greater agony in the world than what exists in our little animal shelter, doesn't make the abuse animals endure any less a sin, less a moral crime against them.


June 2, 1987

Another mom-cat dilemma today. Last night around 10 I got a call from C. Trailer Park (a rural Landmark Square with five times the area and twenty times the population). The woman's cat had been HBC the night before, and had a broken paw, internal injuries. She was the mother of one small kitten. Three others had died

This morning I went to get them, since the woman said she would surrender them to the SPCA. She had no money, so if we didn't come, she had no plans to take him to the vet.

The mother was beautiful, a soft gray with wonderful green eyes that could almost speak. Cats don't usually cry out in pain--they'll scream if attacked or stepped on, but I've never heard that soft quick cry of pain and protest this cat gave as they passed her to me. One hind leg was swollen twice its usual size, and I know sure as hell we wouldn't spend the money to send her to the vet, but would euethanize this beautiful cat whose only crime was belonging to a family who didn't know how to care.

The trailer they lived in was cramped and filthy. The door was a piece of wood, and dirty sheet covered the windows. It stank of dampness and trash.

There is poverty. Then there is another thing called poverty too. One is a lack of money. The other is the mistaken belief that the answer to all your sins and shortcomings is that you are poor.

They then told me they had decided to keep the kitten.

The kitten was only one week old.

I can never understand how a person can say to me "Take care of my animal, I haven't the money," then with scarcely a heartbeat between one breath and the next they say "Can you tell me where I can get another?"

There was a boy, about 20. His black lab was hit on Dryden Road in the morning. He took it to the backroom of his house and left with friends. The dog could not walk and was in shock, lying on a cold linoleum floor without a blanket, for almost 12 hours.

At 6:30 I was just typing out a search warrant, preparing to seize the dog and meet with State Police to arrest the kid, when I got a message he would sign the dog over.

Why did he leave the dog alone? "I didn't have any money." (with an open, honest face, as if this was certain answer enough). What was he going to do with dog when he got home? "We were going to fix him up."

As he helped me carry the dog on a stretcher to the van he asked if we had any doberman puppies at the shelter, because his doberman had been killed in the road the week before. He'd taken it into the woods and dumped it. Was he too poor to dig a hole, I wonder?

So this kitten. One week old. Mother to be euthanized, so obviously the kit would die with its mother at the shelter. What to do? Doom it to certain death by taking it? Or leave it to these people, who did not care to clean themselves or their children, let alone a tiny kitten. I saw it in my mind's eye six weeks later, if it lived so long, thin and dirty, fed only on milk or water (because that's all kittens eat, right?) eyes thick and watery because they could not afford vaccinations, to bear countless kittens because they could not afford to spay her, and die at last, like her mother, by the wheels of a car because they could not afford to save her?

What is the moral thing to do? Not humane, but right? Give the kitten its only chance by leaving it with these people? I was 90% sure it would die in their care, but still, 10% was more than I could offer it.

I took the kitten. And, as I expected, both mom and kit died within a half hour of their arrival at the SPCA.

We only have 2 cat cages left. Two tigers and their mother came in. We kept the kittens because we have no others of that color. Mom will die tomorrow night, because there is no more room.

I love winter. In the winter all the cats are adults and we keep them for months until they all find homes.

Then spring comes, and the chance that a female cat over 4 months will find a home is less than slim.

It's easy to forget, over the winter, that I am a murderer. Now I am forced to remember.


June 9, 1987

The first horrible thing that happened today was that the people who surrendered the HBC mom cat and kit called. They thought they were going to get the cats back. Thought we'd fix them up and return them. I was sure I had made it clear that they had given the cats the to SPCA, but apparently the man hadn't realized. Over the phone he kept saying "I can't get my cat back? I can't adopt her back? Why not?"

Because, I had to think, but not say, you cats are dead. We killed them without giving them a chance. Because there was no room.

And God forbid the SPCA should have to a pay to save an animal!

I can't help how bitter I sound, but you know, its true. If the cat is stray and the university will do the vet work for free because the law says we have to keep the animals alive 5 days, then we feel so good about the animals we rescue. But when the animal is surrendered and therefore belongs to the SPCA, we immediately euthanize it.

What would we do if there were no university? If we had to pay to help our strays? Would we?

If I were the director, I'd probably bankrupt the place. The there'd be no SPCA and no one at all to help. Sometimes I understand why we are as frugal as we are. But that doesn't help when the animals is looking at you."


Battery dying. Good night.