5:10am October 18, 2014

Cats (topic submitted by krawald)

[This is part of a thing I am doing where you can submit any word or short phrase into my ask box, and I will do my best to write about it. I might write fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, but I will do my best to write something. It might take awhile though. Also if you’re trolling me, I will either make up something utterly ridiculous to write in response, or ignore you altogether, so don’t bother.]

This is a completely true story. It happened to my cognitive doppelganger, feliscorvus. And it changed the lives of everyone involved. I was very sick back then and could not get out of bed. I wished that I could do work on feral cat colonies, but I had been on bedrest for months or years at that point, I don’t remember. The fact that my doppelganger was doing work with feral colonies filled me with joy. Because she felt like “the other me”, so it felt exactly as if I was able to experience all the joy and pain of working with feral cats on a regular basis. It didn’t matter so much that me, in my particular body, wasn’t doing it. Because she, in her particular body, was doing it, and that felt just like I was doing it. It’s hard to explain to people who don’t have doppelgangers. It’s like we’re two branches of the same person, or two people who happen to resonate so well with each other that we pick up each other’s moods and thoughts and even body sensations. We get to live our lives through each other and that is an amazing thing.

But not nearly as amazing as what happened to her this one day.

It all started with Coal. Coal is a female cat who was always getting pregnant. She is an excellent mother and good at keeping her babies away from humans who could harm them. The problem was she was also an expert at traps. No matter what kind of trap she saw, she knew it was a trap, and refused to go inside no matter what was inside it. Anne was using drop traps a lot. That’s wher you have a cardboard box propped up on a stick, and underneath the box is some food. Tied to the stick is a rope, and when the cat goes for the food, you pull the rope.

Trapping feral cats is important for several reasons. One, it’s part of a program called TNR, or Trap Neuter Release, that has been proven more effective at dealing with feral colonies, and more humane, than the alternative, which is killing them either on sight or sending them to animal shelters where they are “euthanized” as unadoptable. Anne and I are members of Alley Cat Allies, an organization that works on behalf of feral cats and promotes TNR practices. Another purpose of trapping is for immunization purposes. And the third practice of trapping is to trap young kittens so they can be adopted out of the colony into people’s homes.

Not all feral cats should be adopted into people’s homes, of course. Many are used to their feral lifestyle and would prefer to live that way. In a human household they would be in a constant state of terror, and it would create problems for both the cats and the humans. So older kittens and cats are generally returned to the colony after TNR and vaccinations. They can live out their lives among the cats they know and love, without adding to the feral population in the area and overloading their part of the ecosystem.

So Anne knew that Coal had three kittens, and the first two were easy to catch. They were little grey tabbies, and she named the girl Coraline and the boy Brodie. At first they were terrified by their new surroundings, but they rapidly got used to exploring the house, tearing around the house chasing each other, and other kitten stuff. They slept in a crate at night until Anne could be sure they were used to their new environment. They had fleas, ear mites, and worms, and Anne treated them for all of those things until they became much healthier.

But there was one more kitten. A little black one. Anne and I had been reading The Book of Night with Moon, and there is a kitten character named Arhu who had an absolutely horrific past that I won’t get into here beause I don’t want to make anyone cry or smash things. Plus it would spoil important plot points, for those interested in such things. Anyway, we kept being afraid, as time went on, that the black kitten could suffer a similar fate to Arhu. Not if his mother had any aay in the matter, but even an intelligent and wise mother cat has her limits when it comes to humans.

Anne was having a really hard time trapping the black kitten. He just wouldn’t go into the trap. Remember again that Coal knew what a trap was, and always refused to go inside them. But this time, she walked straight into the trap, and coaxed the kitten into following her in. He immediately went for the food, and once he started eating, Coal backed out of the trap carefully, to avoid distracting him.

Then something happened that Anne will never forget for as long as she lives. Coal saw Anne holding onto the string for the trap. She fixed Anne with that intense, wise stare of hers. And she sent a message along the lines of, “Go on now, do what you must.” Anne pulled the string and was able to trap the final kitten.

As far as we can tell, Coal was able to smell that Anne had her other two kittens, and probably able to smell that they were happy and healthy in a way they couldn’t be outdoors. Not that they couldn’t be happy as feral cats. Their colony attests to that — the denizens range from “tamed” feral cats to completely “wild” feral cats and everything in between. The “wild” ones even come into the yards of the “tame” ones in order, not to visit the huamns, but to visit their cat friends and relatives who live in the houses. Sometimes they even go into the houses, still avoiding the humans, just to hang out with the cats. The colony is lucky to have such a group of caring humans to look after it. One mother cat who had never allowed herself neare a human before, seemed to recognize the house (owned by Anne’s boyfriend’s parents) as a safe place for her to have her kittens. So there is a phenomenal level of trust between some of the mother cats, and the humans who are taking care of the colony.

But nobody — not me, not Anne, not anybody — was prepared for the sacrifice Coal made that day. It could be that she could smell how healthy her kittens were without the parasites that could have killed them. It could be that they smelled happy. It could be that if she could not stand the thought of her three littermates being separated, when she knew that they were supposed to be forming a strong bond with each other. It could be that she trusted Anne with everything important to her. I know she trusted Anne, though. This was a mother cat who would do anything for her kittens, who was perfectly suited for life in a feral colony, who commanded the respect of every other cat in the colony just with a glance and a twitch of her ears. This was a strong mother who loved her kittens unconditionally and would do anything for them. Anything.

Including entrust them to a human that she had grown to know and trust as much as she was ever going to trust a human.

But please understand: She loved her kittens no less than any good human mother loves her children. Mother cats don’t experience some kind of lesser love for their children. They love them exactly as much as we do ours. In feral colonies, as with lion prides, mother cats who are close friends or relatives will often share the duties of nursing and rearing the children. This is not just to relieve the pressure of raising kids by sharing the load, although I’m sure that factor into it. But the most important part is that, in order to make sure that their own gene pool is the one that survives, tomcats will often kill kittens from litters not their own. They tell this by the smell of the mother, and her milk, on the babies. When three or four mothers are all sharing nursing duties, and snuggling with the kittens all the time, the tomcats smell “their” queen’s scent on all the kittens, and leave them all alone, for the most part.

Anne will never forget the intense stare that Coal gave her as she basically demanded that Anne trap her little black kitten and take him away. She knows that in trapping the kitten, she had made a promise to Coal. A promise to give him the best life she possibly could. A promise to reunite him with his littermates. A promise to give him a better life than he would have living on the streets: Coal may have been exceptionally well-adapted to living feral, but that also means she knew exactly how hard it was, exactly how young kittens often died, even the shortened lifespan of the older cats. She may even have known that by getting pregnant over and over, her own projected lifespan was shrinking and shrinking.

Whatever her reasoning — and she was clearly reasoning, and planning, and doing all the things people say cats can’t do — she made the ultimate gesture of trust. She entrusted a human being with her baby. Those of you who are mothers, imagine entrusting your baby to an alien for the rest of hir life. Or even to another human being. People do it all the time, it’s called adoption, and it’s become a racist, classist, regionalist industry. But even when everything is on the level, and the mother voluntarily gives up her baby to another mother to raise, there’s often horrible loss and grief and suffering involved. Even more so if you find out that the person who you entrusted your baby to couldn’t be trusted after all.

So Anne tries to live every day in the interest of living up to the promises she made to Coal. She named the kitten Shadow. Not because of his fur coloration, but because of the way he followed everyone around like he was their shadow. Even on his first few days, he was far more cuddly and sociable than his brother and sister. Which is interesting, because his brother and sister were trapped quite early in life, and Shadow was trapped after the age when feral kittens are supposed to be “wild forever” and “unsuited for human homes”. That just goes to show you that individual personalities trump statistics. It took a little time to reintroduce them, but now the three are inseparable. I don’t remember what year they were born, just their birthdate, because it’s the same as mine. I almost want to say they’re five years old now.

One of the amazing things about kittens is watching them grow into their adult personalities. They always retain some part of their kittenhood peronality, but they deepen and become more interesting, more complex.

Me and Anne see the same things when we look at Shadow. We see sunlight turned into liquid. We see glowing hot lava. And we see a large piece of glowing orange amber, seemingly lit from within. He’s a fiery cat, and an earthy fire at that. But fiery doesn’t mean he has an anger problem, far from it. That’s what happens when fire gets blocked somewhere along the way. A fiery person whose relationship to their own fire is healthiest, is a deeply passionate person. I know this because I have a strong fiery side myself, and once I got rid of my anger problem I was still afraid of fire. But when someone told me fire is passion, everything clicked. I realized that the intensity of my emotions was about fire. I realized that my burning drive to create, which someties literally feels like it’s burning through my body until I do something creative, is fiery too. My passion for jusitce and fairness comes from fire. And Shadow has a lot of these same qualities.

Shadow has also worked out how Skype works. I meow at him and he rubs his face on the screen near the webcam. He has been known to notice Anne Skyping with other people, only to come up to the screen, recognize the voice is not mine, and run off a little perturbed. Every night that Anne and I chat (we have a regular schedule that we seldom deviate from, Shadow comes to the computer right away. And if she isn’t willing or able to chat that night, he tries to persuade her. So I feel like I have this bond with a cat i’ve never met yet. Just like I’ve never met Anne, yet we have the most intimate friendship I can possibly imagine. (Even more intimate than romantic and sexual relationships I’ve had.) Although, actually, Anne and I probably have met, at college. We at least know we were in the same rooms a lot of the time, and that at one point we were in the same tiny hallway area within a few minutes of each other, and might have met each other then without realizing it.

Anyway, back to Shadow. He and his littermates are the perfect complements to each other. There’s Coraline, who’s a Ravenclaw and loves to work out how things work. She works puzzles Anne sets up, for fun. Brodie is the Hufflepuff, and boy is he a Hufflepuff. He’s quiet and shy and communicates largely using complex ear movements. He has amazing feline social skills, great boundaries, and is as polite as a cat can possibly be to another cat. When Nikki, an older curmudgeonly Siamese (and Slytherin, she would believe it to her advantage to be sorted into that House, as far as we ca tell), came to live with them, it was no surprise that Brodie was the first one to win her over and snuggle with her. He did this by following her around some of the time, but always at a more-than-respectful distance. He always asks, he doesn’t ever assume that he is welcome, and if she swats at him for getting too close he goes away. But mostly by now they’re prettty good friends. And Brodie is the social glue that holds the entire rest of the clowder together. I find it really funny that she has four cats and they each fit so neatly into a house. (Shadow is a Gryffindor.) It’s also really funny to me that the only difference I can find between Fey and Nikki (they even have the same body language FFS) is that Nikki is Slytherin and Fey is Gryffindor. But then Gryffindor and Slytherin have both seemed to me to be the two most closely related Houses, with more in common than not, so maybe it’s not so weird.

Anyway, Brodie, Shadow, and Coraline are like pieces of a puzzle that fit together perfectly. They clearly love each other very much. When Coraline got spayed, she was clearly in a lot of pain, even with painkillers and a shirt Anne made to support her incision and keep her from biting on it. (Her reponse to wearing a cone was to tear around the house in a frenzy bashing her head into walls until it came off.) Anyway, there’s this amazing picture of Coraline sitting there clearly in pain, and Brodie lying right next to her just as clearly lending as much emotional support as he could.

We’ve found in this group of cats anyway, that (at least having been neutered), the male cats are the ones who are just these big giant hearts full of love for anyone they’re willing to bestow it on. The female cats are more complicated and generally a little more independent, sometime even prickly in disposition. Nikki has taken it upon herself to guard the house like a security guard. Cora is always exploring and experimenting with the physical world around her. They both can be cuddly when they want to, but you don’t get the same sense from them as you get from the guys, who are just like this giant furry heart that fills you with love just to watch them or be around them.

I am so glad that Coal led Shadow into that trap. And i am so glad she trusted Anne enough to give her child to her. And again, if you think that means anything less to a cat than to a human, you haven’t met enough feline mothers. Coal took a gamble and made the ultimate mother’s sacrifice and it paid off for Shadow (and for Anne) in amazing ways.

Later on, Anne found a video of the kittens eating with their older brother, while Coal walked around the corner all of a sudden. Even though the video is only seconds long, I can see all three of Coal’s children inside Coal’s personality. She talks with her ears like Brodie, she’s mechanically inclined like Cora, and she’s fierly like Shadow. All three of those kittens, taken together, seem to make up one of Coal. My dad calls things like that being ‘a chip off the old blockhead’ — sometimes he calls me Chip and signs his letters, The Old Blockhead. It’s like that with Coal and her kittens.

Here are the kittens before they were adopted. Coal is the black cat who walks in and steals the show partway through:

http://youtu.be/6qdHlcpBBX8

Here is Shadow just after being adopted:

http://youtu.be/h06e7wmdnWU

Here is Shadow grown up a bit more, talking a lot:

http://youtu.be/-_8E5aDUqas

One thing about Shadow that I’ve noticed is that he talks an awful lot, and some of the sounds seem to be attempts to mimic English sounds. The kittens have chattered to each other since they were babies and have never stopped. But Shadow likes to have long involved conversations with humans, and the above is one of them.

Anyway, that is Shadow’s story, and it’s bound up in Coal’s story as well. Without Coal, it would have just been a matter of trapping Shadow one day. With Coal, there’s a whole new layer of added responsibility, because Coal clearly said, “I am placing my kitten under your care, and I expect you to do everything possible to keep him healthy and happy, just like I would.” Which is a tall order from one of the best feline mothers Anne and I have ever seen.

By the way, Anne has informed me that it’s fine to call her Anne, or AnneC, or feliscorvus, or any other Internet handles she’s picked out, but to try not to use her full name online. I have already altered as any references as I could, but I doubt I got them all. It’s not that her name isn’t out there, including on her other blogs, but like me, she feels raw and exposed when people use her full name in public a lot. I respect that completely. Please do so yourelf if you reference her work, or at leest ask her first.

She has a wonderful cat blog called Felines Are Wonderful:

http://felinesarewonderful.blogspot.com/

‘Which includes the post about Nikki as a security guard:

http://felinesarewonderful.blogspot.com/2010/04/nikki-guarding-cat.html

TL;DR: A mother cat named Coal, who had two of her three kittens trapped by a friend of mine so they would not grow up feral (or die of their parasites in infancy, as seemed likely)… this mother cat actually led her third kitten into the trap, stepped out of the trap, and let Anne trap her kitten. While doing this, she gave Anne a Look that made Anne promise she would live up to the expectations of her new role in taking care of this kitten. As far as I can tell, Anne is doing a great job. But it never ceases to amaze me the sacrifices mothers will make for their children at times. Cats are no different, they love their children just as much and don’t let them go lightly. Coal probably smelled that the two other kittens were both happy and parasite-free (they’d had fleas, mites, and worms) and took a gamble that the same would be true of her third kitten if she allowed Anne to trap her. This was a cat who never voluntarily entered a trap in her life, so she must have known it was intended for Shadow, not for herself. Me and Anne continue to be amazed by her sacrifice, and awed by the trust she put in Anne that day. Also Coal is just amazing in every possible way, and even in a few seconds of watching her you can see the personality of every single one of her kittens, showing inside her. You can tell where they got it from.