4:06pm June 15, 2012

Something awful I just remembered.

I never made a lost cat poster when I was a kid. Never. Despite cats going missing right and left, some of them coming back, some of them not. My parents’ attitude to cats going missing was basically to give them up for dead and be happy if they showed up again.

(Unless, like my dad’s favorite of our cats, they came back with their entire back end mangled and crawling with maggots from being dragged under a car. That’s one of the few circumstances I don’t have even a minor qualm about cat euthanasia, and the cat didn’t seem to have any qualms about it either. I mean I miss her, but that would have been an utterly terrible death and there was no possible way to save her or treat her pain and let her die naturally.)

To give one of the worst examples. We moved from Campbell to just over the San Jose border in a place where we still had a Campbell mailing address but voted in San Jose. (On Google Maps it turns up saying San Jose with a Campbell zip code. Weird border places are weird.) It was easy biking distance so it was easy catting distance too.

All of our cats tried several times to go back to our old house. I don’t blame them, the new house was terrible and they didn’t quite grasp this “moving” thing.

My parents made no effort to look for them.

They made no effort to contact the new tenants in our old house and give them a heads up about all the cats appearing in their yard.

They made no effort to plaster the neighborhood with lost cat posters. They made no effort to put up even one lost cat poster.

They made no effort to tell anyone anywhere in any form that any of our cats were missing.

Some of the cats came back. Some didn’t. One of the ones who never came back was the mother of two of our other cats (my parents only barely believed in neutering, sometimes). She had been with us since the redwoods. I have pictures of me sitting with her hunched down by me when I was a baby, me toddling along behind her when I could barely walk. She’s probably one of the ones who slept in my crib and half convinced me I was a cat. I was devastated. My parents were fatalistic and indifferent.

For people who claim to like cats, their level of neglect reached astounding, fatal heights on many occasions and I still get angry. I know they know how to care for animals because they took dogs to the vet for the slightest thing. They only took their cats in for shots and things like that. One cat slowly wasted away and died without any vet care. Another lived with a severe chronic cough for years. I can’t even count the number who died without a vet visit first, or who were taken to the vet only to be euthanized. (This kind of thing is why I think euthanasia is vastly overused.) And then there’s the mildly disabled kitten they took away from my brother’s girlfriend and dumped somewhere. They didn’t know why she cried until she vomited.

One time our cat Jenny disappeared. After awhile my parents gave him up for dead. Then they saw him through the window of our neighbor’s house and took him back, enraged at the neighbor. I think he would have fared better with the neighbor. He was euthanized for a mild illness.

It’s no wonder my mom thinks Fey will drop dead any minute. (She keeps telling me “Fey is trying to tell you she doesn’t have much time left, she wants you to give her permission to leave you so she won’t linger after her time.” And other cheery stuff like that. Thing is, Fey hasn’t told me that, ever, and she knows perfectly well she doesn’t need to hold onto life on my account if she wants to go.) Very few of our cats passed the seven year mark before they died, and only two lived past ten. And we made no effort, that I remember, to save even one. That’s beyond “letting go”, it’s animal abuse.

I know I’ve written about some of this before but I forgot the thing of not even making a cursory effort to locate lost cats. It astounds me that I ever grew to respect cats in that environment.

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