Cowardly

F’s still a bit unsettled by it so this one has taken a long time for me to get her to take dictation.  A human abandoned two small kittens in the garden in front of our apartment.  Maybe they figured that because the garden is ‘gardened’ someone would find them in time to save their little lives.

It’s cowardly.

We know it was humans and not Mummy cat.  They were less than a week old, their little ears folded flat and their little eyes not really open.  Mummy feral cat doesn’t leave her tiny kittens in full view and wander out of earshot.  Mummy feral cat hides them if she has to go foraging, and not just hides them from humans, she take no chances that a Tom cat or a dog might find them.  If Mummy feral cat is within earshot she chatters to them – makes reassuring noises and they call back to her.

These little fellas were dead quiet – just curled up together.  They weren’t dead, but it was a really hot day and they might have been dead of dehydration soon if they hadn’t been spotted.

What makes us think they aren’t feral?  Well they were clean, clean, clean for a start.  For white cats (with a few ginger spots) in a dusty environment, that clean is kind of unlikely unless they and their Mum have been living indoors.  They were actually a really good weight and well filled out for their tiny size.  Their Mummy is getting good nutrition.  They were already accustomed to being handled by humans; it didn’t set them off mewling.

Aunty Pili knew a local girl who rescues animals – she has the special milk and droppers to feed such tiny kittens.  She came and gathered them up, along with a bed that F made for them (a basket with a pillow made out of all her patchworking off-cuts).  F gave her money for their food, and said she would pay their vet bills to get shots they needed before they could be adopted in a couple of months. 

With being at work all day F can’t hand-raise them (and I certainly can’t), but even so she feels that she made a sort of cop-out – you know that ‘pay someone else to make the problem go away’, the ‘if I can’t see it, it is no longer a problem’ thing.  It IS a problem, as we know full well from the difficulty Aunty Pili had getting her cat’s 3 kittens adopted at the end of last year.  Too many kittens and not enough willing homes. 

At least Aunty Pili made sure her cat could have no more kittens, but as a solution, sterilization didn’t come cheap.

F is not completely hopeless, she does feel sorry for the feral kittens she encounters scavenging in rotting food, gummed up eyes, hollowed out sides, but she has the sense to accept that is nature doing it’s thing; and those little street kittens get street-wise or succumb.  Household cats have their natures modified by humans.  Humans choose the ones with gentle natures (like me) and then give them a soft life, well fed, games to play, safe places to sleep, medication when we need it (even if we don’t want it).  We don’t have to fight for our existences and having done that to us, you humans have an obligation to continue to care…… of at least ‘dispose of’ humanely.

Dumping in a garden and making it someone else’s problem – or risking that a small child finds dead kittens – is just the lowest of the low. Lack of empathy for the animals we keep says a lot about our ability (or lack of it) to empathize with the humans around us.

There is a little boy (maybe 2-3 years) who comes by our place every evening with his Giagia, just to count the cats that are lined up waiting for Effie’s feline soup kitchen.  Cats fascinate him.  He’s the sort of little boy who should never find dead kittens lying beside the path he treads – not yet anyway.

Final word to Mohammed Alaa Aljaleel: The Catman of Aleppo (https://ernestosanctuary.org/story/)