May 3, 2006
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Sickness and death in My Cat Family
Note: As the title implies, this blog is gonna get a tad grim. It has redeeming social and philosophical value, though, but sensitive children and immature adults may be best off avoiding it.
I have been agonizing for days over how best to put this, how to soften it or something. But like the AA cultists say, “we thought we could find an easier, softer way, but we could not.” So here goes.
I killed two of CC’s kittens. All six were smallish, but two were downright runty and sickly looking. One was bleeding from the nose and mouth, one had an eye glazed over with mucus and cried constantly, both had pipestem legs and were way behind their sibs in terms of development. So now they are in kitten heaven. I will spare us all the details of how this was accomplished–suffice it to say it was quick and quiet, and much more humane than carting them off to a vet, to have a highly-trained professional torture and kill them.
Rich soft city folks might take old sick Fido to the vet and have the dog “put to sleep.” I contend that practice is weak, cowardly, and inhumane. If you love pet, you should have the heart to put it down yourself. This is one area where Kathy (aka SuSu) and I are in accord. Granted, it is a hard thing. For years, I cried every time I thought about the dark day I put down our old huskie/wolf hybrid, Handout. Nearly twenty years old, he was going deaf and blind, failed to grow a new winter coat, and cried all the time. The last thing he did after I put a bullet in his brain was lick my hand, as if to thank me for putting him out of his misery. Rats, I’m crying again. But I digress.
Anyway, the kitten population at my place is down to eight. Both Frankie and CC have gotten more attentive towards all the rest of the kittens. The older ones are romping and stomping and generally having a ball. Two of them have managed to climb up the bed, so soon I will be waking up to having kitten running up and down on my back. Two of CC’s remaining kittens still seem a tad sickly. I hope they get better and start romping and stomping and being a nuisance themselvessoon.
What’s more, I am concerned about CC. Two of her mammaries are swollen and inflamed–sometimes she cries while nursing, sometimes she pushes away a kitten that wants to nurse. I hope she recovers. But as I told her as I was petting her “I’m sorry I can’t make you feel better. All I can do is feed you and love you and kill you if the pain seems too much to bear.”
Taking CC to a vet is totally out of the question. Even if I could afford it–which I can’t–she was born and raised feral. Her mother and sibs have long since been trapped and caged and exterminated at the local animal shelter, which is grossly overcrowded and underfunded. I forget this sometimes and try to pick her up–she freaks and claws me–just like any other wild animal would do if you tried to handle it. She does tolerate being petted, but she eyes me warily and with lightly-veiled hostility. I doubt if she would let anyone else touch her at all.
By the way, the proper term for what I did to the kittens is culling. Every musher who has any amount of dogs culls a certain amount of puppies each year, putting down the weakest and sickest. I understand they usually use a small club. This has got to be the worst part of being a musher. Then again, God does the same thing–it’s called natural selection.
It is sad and unevolved that sometimes we in our arrogance and fear think we know better than God, and go to great lengths to preserve a soul that is housed in an obviously defective body. A local boy–a cute rich white kid, of course–was born with half a heart. Literally. In any reasonable society, he would have been left alone so his spirit could return to God. But his parents have subjected him to a total of twenty-six operations, with a heart transplant to come–I don’t even want to think about the cost, both in terms of money and the boy’s own pain.
Meanwhile, there are literally millions of homeless children in this country who get no health care at all. Not even enough food. Somehow, there is no money to feed or house them. Too bad some of the estimated ONE TRILLION dollars that will be going down the drain in Iraq could not be spared to save some of our own.
Too bad sometimes kittens must be killed.
Comments (4)
I feel the same way about trying to save some people. Diseases and deformities exist. Natural selection needs to be allowed to happen. That’s not to say that we should not have compassion for them, but at the same time, let them go! But then I guess the question is where would one draw the line for people that cannot speak for themselves………hmm.?
Those sick kittens may have been the reason that Frankie and CC wanted to separate the litters. If it’s a virus, such as FLV (the one that wiped out so many kittens over at our old place), their instinct might have been to isolate the sick ones. Who knows?
You did what needed to be done. I hope CC gets better.
I quietly applaud you for ending the misery of these two babies. Their mother may be next, bless her heart, but I too cannot as you cannot allow something I love have nothing to look forward to but more pain. It’s hard, yes. But the alternative is to watch the decline. And I can’t do that either. So you did a good thing.
I completely agree with your point here. A lot of ignorent folks would say people like us have no heart, but they are too caught up in modern society. I saw something on the learning channel the other day where a baby needed a heart transplant and he was so sad looking, weak and sickly, couldnt play or do anything and was hooked up to all kinds of machines. I thought to myself that if I had a child like that, I would just bring him/her home and try and keep them comfortable untill they went on their own. Besides, there are tons of healthy kids who need adopting if someone wanted a child that bad. I cant stand the ritualized torture in the name of “modern medicine.”