More on Tradition and Veganism

I had a strange conversation once upon a time, and I’m going to change the names to protect the guilty here, but, I think it illustrates how traditions can be less than helpful.

A friend of mine had gone through a bad break up and immediately her ex started dating a friend of hers. This is the kind of situation that is often upsetting. My friend said she’d get some kind of revenge and everyone who heard this tried to discourage her from that course. However, she cited her ethnic heritage and said that her ancestors fought wars, were known for their fearlessness and their revenge-taking tactics. Getting even, in her eyes, was a respected cultural imperative.

It’s one of those weird things. I’m not above citing certain cool things about the various cultures that contribute to my current soup of DNA. It’s kind of interesting actually. But the thing is, there’s always the bad along with the good. Follow the history of the human race linguistically, and you’ll find that most people today have a solid mix of raiding conqueror mixed in with the conquered. And even those who come from extremely oppressed groups often don’t embrace every single thing about their ancient ancestors. Instead they are able to love the tenacity, the creativity, the hard work they see in their culture, but reject other aspects that they feel are outdated in today’s world or even blatantly harmful.

So I don’t see being vegan as going against tradition, but instead reinforcing the traditions that emphasized compassion, conservation, reverence for the natural world, empathy for animals, and so on.

There’s another thing that popped into my head during all my fiction writing this past month. Perhaps we do our culture a disservice if we cling to the most obvious, the most written about and repeated traditions without fully understanding their role or meaning, all while ignoring the smaller traditions the ones that observers found less bizarre, less worthy of note. Perhaps it’s an insult to our ancestors as well if we believe that they couldn’t or wouldn’t change if they were alive today and had at their disposal all the information we have. Would a culture that survived primarily through fishing look at the current devastation of our oceans and decide that fishing at the level at which we practice it today is unsustainable, even immoral? These things sneak up on us, because we live them in real time. The oceans were polluted and species endangered when I was a child. I’m shocked by the prediction that the oceans will soon be empty of fish. But many people my age are able to shrug it off because they’ve never seen a healthy ocean. But I wonder at the shock a pre-colonial Native American from the Northern Pacific coast would feel if suddenly transported to our time. The difference would so incredible, so hard to believe.

Those of us who come from a mixing of cultures and heritages know that to blindly follow tradition can perpetuate evil, because we contain within ourselves the killer and the victim, the oppressor and the oppressed. We know that the slippery slope to doing harm is short and that even the most ordinary among us can slide. We know that somewhere in our ancestry is the rapist, and we know that others of our ancestors clung together with fierce love against all odds even to defy death. We know that our families contain those who denied their own and pretended to be what they were not. We know that we come from thieves and from healers and some among them were both. We know that we have to choose to do the right thing every day, because we have the capability to go either way.

Because of this I never feel that choosing to be more compassionate is ever a betrayal of our traditions. Instead it reasserts a strong tradition of trying to be better, trying to be kinder, even if entire generations in our past took a detour away from that goal.

Discouragement

I finished my 50,000+ words for nanowrimo and supposedly now have a first draft of a novel. I know it needs a lot more work and even with that it won’t really be a novel, more like a novella, I guess.

Fiction is strange compared to non-fiction. I don’t mind being completely out there and opinionated in non-fiction, but fiction is trickier. I didn’t use the word “vegan” anywhere in my novella because I felt it would take the reader out of the flow of the story.

So I’m wondering if I left my story way too ambiguous because it doesn’t come out and say “veganism is a moral imperative.” Also since the main plot focuses largely on foxes the story is limited in that fashion. And because it’s a third person limited narrator—we only see what the main character sees—the information is always limited. My main character doesn’t read a whole lot, throughout the story he’s acting on impulse. There was research involved on my part, just not on his.

On the other hand I worry that my last chapter might do just that, break the flow of the story by tying up all my loose ends with a vegan message. Because life is kind of messy and if fiction imitates life, should not fiction also be messy? Perhaps my devotion to ambiguity comes through too much in the story too, you never totally get all the answers, the wicked aren’t punished really and so on. Yet on the other hand, there are points where I’m practically wiring my reader’s jaw open so I can shovel in the sugar. Sigh.

If anyone out there is just itching to offer constructive criticism, likes fantasy type stories, and is not easily offended, drop me a line.

While I was frantically typing my nanowrimo novel I had some assistance. Forgive the terrible picture, it was dark and late. Buddy likes to help me type. He hits the space bar. He actually hits it a lot more than is necessary. Says Buddy, “Great story, it just needs some extra spaces!”

























My other reason for discouragement is harder to write about here, but maybe I’ll get into it over the next few days, it’s the same spiel really, activism, effectiveness, honesty and how all these things tie into our efforts. I want to talk about how to identify actual problems and not get distracted by ribbons and mirrors, or something like that. But that’s where this gets a little discouraging.

Mary Martin recently wrote about opposition to giving enslaved pigs a few more inches of space or allowing them to stand up and asked for religious arguments to use when someone defends gestation crates from a Christian point of view. For me, I can’t see any way that someone who is sincerely Christian can defend a gestation crate, so this leaves me to conclude that tossing the Bible into this debate is just a big distraction. Someone who isn’t able to care for others won’t care for others, someone who isn’t able to feel compassion won’t feel compassion. That’s a tough one to swallow, but the person arguing for gestation crates and using Christianity to back it up isn’t really putting the emphasis on Christianity, their true motives lie with profit, personal interest and convenience.

People throw all kinds of flags on the field when they talk about animals, religion flags, culture flags, “what about the children” flags, but it all amounts to one thing, changing the topic so we won’t talk about the actual issue: the suffering and needless death of thousands, no millions, no billions of animals.

Don’t fall into the trap, we’re talking about what we’re talking about, not playing twenty questions. But if, at the end of the discussion, we uncover that this suffering and death mean nothing to the other person, I guess we cannot fix that. Better at that point to move on and talk to people who are able to feel compassion and empathy.

In Thanks

I’m thankful for another year with my rescued animals, some of whom had close calls this year.

I’m thankful for a wonderful husband who was with me through all of that and stayed up late trapping cats with me, and much, much more.

I’m thankful I had the chance to help so many animals and rescue quite a few this year, though I’m very sorry about the ones I reached too late.

I’m thankful for all the other people out there who care about others, other people, other animals, and the planet. I’m thankful for a steady stream of inspiration via the blogosphere where I can hear about people pouring their lives into doing good.

I’m thankful I made it through another year, and I’m thankful for the friends and loved ones who made the year pass so quickly (though I do wish it hadn’t gone quite so fast).

I am thankful for all the vegans creating beautiful food and for those writing vegan cookbooks or starting their own restaurants and bakeries because they’re spreading the good word and making my life more enjoyable all at the same time.

On Thanksgiving Let’s Ponder Vodoun and Regala de Ocha

I have a lot of Christian family members. Obviously, I probably don’t even have to tell anyone that, and I’ve written about it before. But one interesting thing about American Christians is how some of them are very sheltered from learning about other belief systems, and out of their lack of information can come a deep distrust.

When I was in college I wrote one of my professors a letter after a lecture on the spiritual belief of South African Bushmen. I felt that she had addressed their beliefs with a certain level of disrespect. I grew up with a virtual mixing bowl of religious beliefs and on top of that my family encouraged me to learn about the beliefs of others. When a Muslim family moved to our neighborhood we welcomed them and ate together and all of us kids played together and we learned about their beliefs in a welcoming and safe way. My parents encouraged me to go to Temple with my Jewish friends and Mass with my Catholic friends. Then under all of this, my mother belonged to a faith that was not well understood and often vilified. We got hate mail. People tried to convert me. So when I wrote that letter to my professor I was addressing not just intolerance but also condescension. To me it was just as bad for someone to say “isn’t it cute and quaint what these people believe” as to come right out and say “you’re going to hell.” And I got both of those reactions.

Later I had the good fortune to strike up a friendship with a woman who had recently immigrated to the US and came from a family that practiced Vodoun. This woman was also a new vegetarian, which is how we met. It was interesting to me to see how someone who came from a tradition that has a reputation for not being nice to animals found ways to live with compassion and still honor her heritage. It struck me as brave and daring, but she said her mother and aunts felt the same way. None of them could bear to hurt an innocent animal. In later years I learned that this isn’t unusual. I met people who grew up in families that followed Regala de Ocha (the correct name for Santeria) and their families never hurt animals. Their tradition was about honoring the Orisha. Their words about people who sacrifice animals were “that’s disgusting” or “they don’t understand the real point if they’re doing that, this is a faith about honoring life and worshiping in peace.”

I’m giving this long-winded background, because I’m getting to a point. Today Animal Person brought up the abuse of animals, particularly cats in Italy stemming from superstition that goes back to the Middle Ages. Apparently cats are still being killed because some people associate black cats with evil or bad luck. There is an effort to get the Pope to condemn the practice once and for all. Understandably many people are upset that cats are being hurt for reasons of strange occult rituals or superstition.

Likewise in the US any time that animal sacrifice in Santeria comes to light there’s an outcry. People find it incredibly cruel and barbaric for people to kill chickens and other animals in religious rituals. Whenever an animal is killed in an incredibly cruel way there are often whispers of satanic cults (even though individual people have claimed Satanism as a motive for some horrible crimes, there is little evidence of organized Satanic cults).

Just for today though, I want to turn all this on its head. I’m asking if you think it’s wrong to kill a chicken in a bloody religious ritual, don’t kill a chicken (or pay someone else to kill the chicken for you) because you think chicken tastes good. If you think it’s ignorant to sacrifice an animal in some ancient poorly understood ritual, then don’t put a turkey in the middle of your table just because it’s a tradition. If you think it’s wrong to murder black cats by the hundreds in the pursuit of good luck, then speak out against killing cats in experiments to try to show that smoking isn’t bad for you. If you feel empathy for the terrified chicken dragged into the middle of a loud ritual and mercilessly slaughtered in front of a crowd, then allow yourself to feel empathy for all the millions of chickens suffering even more on egg and poultry farms across the country.

If you want to tell others to stop blindly following tradition, then ask the same of yourself.

Kyra and Feral Cats

I’ve been telling people about this face to face and everyone seems really amused by it, so maybe it belongs on the blog too.

Since taking so many cats to surgery I’ve been trying to do a little extra feeding to make sure they’re all recovering well. In addition I’m trying to use the feeding to move some of the cats that are hanging out in the yards of people who don’t like cats to more hospitable locations.

Because Pookie was the first cat we took to the clinic and also seems to live apart from the larger colony, I’ve been feeding her the longest.

My rescued shepherd-mix Nikita is unsure how she feels about stray and feral cats, but my rescued hound-mix Kyra loves all smaller animals, especially cats. Though Kyra is pretty much food obsessed (going back to her time as a starving stray) she’s very good about the concept that when we put down food for Pookie that is not food dogs are allowed to steal. However, Kyra seems pretty focused on the idea that this is food for Pookie, not anyone else. We’ve slowly worked on Kyra with this, and she’s at the point where she can accept that Omar might want some of that food too and this is acceptable. And if Rizzy the tabby wants a bite or two that’s ok, though Rizzy won’t usually come over until we start walking away—she’s intimidated by dogs. So Pookie and Omar can eat just a couple feet from Kyra and that’s fine.

However there is a huge and really beaten up old tom, whom the neighbors have dubbed “Pimp Daddy.” I’ve not been able to catch “Pimp Daddy” despite many efforts. This cat is also huge, and very jowly in the way that older male cats can get. Unfortunately his raging hormones have caused him to get into a lot of fights and his ears are practically shredded from all that fighting. So imagine the largest, most scratched up orange and white tom cat you can conjure up and there’s “Pimp Daddy.”

Kyra is really firm on the idea that “Pimp Daddy” cannot have any of Pookie’s food. And for good reason. “Pimp Daddy” doesn’t share. When Omar comes up for some food he sidles over and takes little bites while letting Pookie keep eating. When “Pimp Daddy” comes up he hits Omar and Pookie and growls at them to chase them off, and then he tries to eat all the food himself as quickly as possible. Kyra won’t stand for this, so she has started letting loose with her hound howl the moment she sees “Pimp Daddy” approaching. She really seems to be saying “this is for Pookie, so back off.”

Although I’ve started putting a little food a few feet away so “Pimp Daddy” can eat without chasing off Pookie and Omar.

Kyra is also getting used to the idea that we feed best friend ferals Leilei and Deedee in a different place, but because Deedee was the shyer cat, Kyra sometimes still looks at me and gives a little whimper like “are you sure she can have some? I thought this was for Leilei?”

But all in all Kyra is very good with cats.

Below is Kyra with Buddy. Buddy is now inside with us looking for a forever home of his own.

Government Tracking Falafel Sales

Taste Better alerted us to a government initiative to monitor sales of falafel as a means of supposedly tracking terrorists. I know it sounded silly to me too.

I haven't had the time to really create good cartoons lately, but on the fly...

Various News

I have a ton of stuff to blog about but I wanted to draw everyone's attention to a couple things.

The Washington Post today did an article about investigations into hunting ranges in Virginia where tame foxes are kept so people can pay to let their dogs chase and possibly kill them. The owners of the ranges insist the foxes aren't harmed, but I think we all know being chased by a pack of dogs in a fenced area is harm just as a starting point. Secondly the officials are saying that many places do let the dogs tear the tame foxes apart while still alive.

Mary Martin of Animal Person drew our attention to the mass rescue of "spent laying hens" from a "cage free" or supposedly free range facility that demonstrates yet again that "cage-free" hens suffer more than is even imaginable, and live brief agonized lives. A very timely reminder that we should all make this holiday season egg-free.

And finally, we all knew it already, but more confirmation that Dick Cheney enjoys killing tame animals who like humans and don't even try to get away. And we wonder why we're having so many problems in this country, but look who we put in charge.

I promise I'll be back shortly with something approaching real blogging!

Dear Nanowrimo,

Thanks for beating me up so bad.

Yes, I haven't been blogging because I've been nanoing.

Anyway, here's a meme

I stole this from Everything Here is Eatable

1. Favorite non-dairy milk?
Unfortunately Silk Soymilk unsweetened.

2. What are the top 3 dishes/recipes you are planning to cook?
Calzones, stuffed shells, mujadara

3. Topping of choice for popcorn?
I despise popcorn

4. Most disastrous recipe/meal failure?
Recently, trying to make pot pie flavored calzones; they leaked in the oven.

5. Favorite pickled item?
I'm so boring, dill pickles (cucumber)

6. How do you organize your recipes?
I don't really

7. Compost, trash, or garbage disposal?
I compost some.

8. If you were stranded on an island and could only bring 3 foods...what would they be (don't worry about how you'll cook them)?
Eeek. Black plums, Romaine lettuce, and tempeh blts (notice how I worked in multiple foods on that one)

9. Fondest food memory from your childhood?
Food and I were long at war. The first time I drank black coffee (my mother always gave it to me with milk and sugar) at about 8 was wonderful. I was like "get that milk out of my coffee."

10. Favorite vegan ice cream?
Soy Delicious in Pecan Praline.

11. Most loved kitchen appliance?
Love the handheld blender

12. Spice/herb you would die without?
Fresh garlic. But I'm fairly addicted to basil, parsley, dill and rosemary too.

13. Cookbook you have owned for the longest time?
It was my ancient Flieschman's Yeast book (not vegan) but it somehow got thrown away. The Compassionate Cook was the first I bought for myself.

14. Favorite flavor of jam/jelly?
Strawberry or blackberry jam.

15. Favorite vegan recipe to serve to an omni friend?
Calzones or carrot cake.

16. Seitan, tofu, or tempeh?
I love tempeh, but I use tofu more, since I mush it into all kinds of things. I think we eat a lot of Seitan too.

17. Favorite meal to cook (or time of day to cook)?
Dinner

18. What is sitting on top of your refrigerator?
A blender, a wash cloth, tea, junk...

19. Name 3 items in your freezer without looking.
fruit juice popsicles, frozen Amy's dinner, frozen peas.

20. What's on your grocery list?
Undecided at this time.

21. Favorite grocery store?
MOMs

22. Name a recipe you'd love to veganize, but haven't yet.
I've been vegan so long I can't remember what isn't vegan...

23. Food blog you read the most (besides Isa's because I know you check it everyday). Or maybe the top 3?
I put a ton of them on reader and check them all the time.

24. Favorite vegan candy/chocolate?
Unknown. I don't buy much candy, but do eat vegan chocolate chips straight from the bag.

25. Most extravagant food item purchased lately?
Veggie sushi (could have made my own, was too lazy)

26. What was your favorite food BEFORE becoming veg*n?
Food and I have had a long war, but I used to like some very disgusting things like fried chicken. When I was vegetarian, but not vegan I liked that wine cheese spread (even though I'm allergic to it).

27. Veganaise or Nayonaise?:
Veganaise changed my life and made me gain a ton of weight.

28. What is one recipe or ingredient or cooking technique that you've become familiar with in the last year that you can't imagine you ever lived without?
I haven't learned much. I want to learn to grill. I experimented and made a tofu omelete that holds together because I put corn starch in it.

29. What is your favorite veg*n cookbook?
Several are on the wish list, but I really don't have a favorite. The couple I own from way back are in boxes still and I don't use them. I mostly use a vegetarian but not vegan cookbook my friend gave me and I veganize the recipes, not because it's my favorite but because it's not boxed up.

30. Make up another question (and answer it!)
So you seem pretty lazy, exactly how lazy are you? Um, I do use meat and dairy substitutes and I'm not ashamed of it. I like an all veggie, all home made meal too, but I spend a lot of time chasing down cats. So veggie ham, I'm ok with that.
------------------------------------
On Nanowrimo

I thought I made up a throw away plot for a throw away story, so I could just get into the exercise and write. Sadly, in recent years I've found myself unable to write creatively. I'd sum this up in this way: Bad stuff happen, Neva sad = Neva write non-fiction, mostly essays. This is not to say I was sad all the time or anything, but I guess part of me wasn't able to write the effusive flights of fancy that once came naturally to me. Well in fact for a while I could not write at all, then the non-fiction in short form came back and was working out ok.

Now that I've gotten into the nanowrimo process (and I can't say I'm writing WELL, but I'm writing) I've found myself caring more about my plot and characters than I thought I did. This has led to a battle between me and one of my characters, a rescued fox.

This is something like what the inside of my head sounds like at the moment.

Fox: This won't do at all. How can you plan to kill the foxes? Look, just let me figure out the plot, there's a way all the foxes can live.

Me: What do you expect from me? I already killed the main character's mother. Do you think that this story can be remotely realistic if some of the foxes don't die.

Fox: Realistic sucks! Parents die all the time in fairy tales, that's just a given. I'm holding my breath until you promise that the foxes get to live.

So it looks like my story is turning away from realism and becoming a fairy tale, which is maybe what I needed anyway.

November Confessions

Everyone has a great story hiding inside them, but this is not it.

I confess, I decided to try NANOWRIMO this year.

To meet the ambitious goal of writing a novel in a month I cast aside any great story I had brewing in my mind. There are those family stories that need telling. There's the epic novel that takes us from an older, more dangerous South where Hodoun Shamen hide and wander the backwoods teaching us to treasure nature and love each other, and then leads us North to my adopted home town of NYC, and eventually West to California and ends in the shining obvious truth that we must all immediately become vegan. There's the love story that takes us from revolutionary Iran to San Francisco, bridging cultural and age differences, and leaves us all weeping into our soy ice cream.

But such things cannot be speed written in a month. So instead I gave free reign to the purplest of prose, adverbs blazing, glaring plot holes left in plain sight.

There's something for everyone in my story, something to offend everyone that is. Vegans will hate the early chapters where the main characters eat every possible animal and animal product under the sun. Non-vegans will think I'm way too heavy handed with the vegan messages, and the animal rights crowd will think I send no message clearly and leave everything muddy and ambiguous. My characters and plot are just saccharine-sweet enough to piss off any realist. In fact realists will hate my use of the supernatural as a plot device and my deus ex machina resolution. Those who like saccharine plots and happy endings will be put off by my liberal tossing in of horrible suffering and death, both human and animal. Anyone with any morals will be turned off by my hints of a grown man becoming unhealthily obsessed with a female high school student. And the eventual violent and criminal acts of my anti-hero, and the fact that he gets away with them, will demonstrate the complete ethical bankruptcy of my story.

November is not shaping up that well for me so far, but at least I have this, possibly the worst story ever to keep me company.

Indignant Adopters and Rescue Dilemmas

I guess I might as well start this off by saying that Buddy is up for adoption again. We thought he had a home but it was not a good fit. The woman, who is fostering him for the time being, had older cats and Buddy was too assertive and the older cats too intimidated and it didn’t work out. Buddy was incredibly good with other cats during the time we had him, and there were no violent fights reported, so I still think it’s best for Buddy to go to a home with another cat, just the cat should probably be young and playful and more willing to engage with Buddy.

We did get one adoption offer on Buddy, last Friday. It presented a terrible dilemma for Sean and me though. The potential adopter seemed excellent in many ways, she didn’t believe in declawing, she provided vet care to her current cat. However, in the email the fosterer sent to us, the potential adopter went on for several sentences about how she believed it’s best to allow cats outside and she even thinks it’s cruel to confine them in a house, but that if we insisted she would try to keep Buddy in.

We considered the possibility of talking to this woman about the many dangers outdoor cats face, even the most car-savvy cats can be startled into a road, they might not even hear a hybrid approaching, plus people sometimes hurt tame, friendly cats on purpose. But my father in law had to have emergency surgery and we went ahead with the feral cat trapping too. Getting back to this potential adopter, knowing the conversation was going to take up time, just didn’t happen.
Yesterday she told the fosterer that she no longer wanted Buddy because we hadn’t called her immediately. There was some element of outrage there, as if we were somehow slighting her or not doing the proper work for the cats. Sean and I both work long hours at other jobs, we were concerned about her statement on outdoor cats, we were spending most of our free time on a massive rescue effort, and we had a medical emergency in the family. If ever a little patience was in order.

Maybe it’s for the best anyway, though she said she’d be willing to keep Buddy in if we insisted, I don’t see someone who sincerely believes it’s cruel to keep a cat indoors really keeping that promise.

Anyway, there’s a lot of anger toward rescues lately, more than enough to go around. There’s the Ellen situation which spawned angry letters all over the US from people saying they’d been treated poorly by rescue groups. I can’t really comment on the Ellen conflict with the rescue because I know very little about it, but it did seem to tap some nerve with a segment of the population on the sense of entitlement they feel when it comes to animals. They think they should be able to do whatever they like, regardless of what they promise or sign, and they see anyone who objects to that as somehow deeply flawed.

I encountered similar anger at my work. My boss’s daughter wanted to adopt a puppy from a rescue group. She was fresh out of college and living at her father’s house, a place without a fence, and she wanted to adopt. The rescue group visited and said that for her home to be considered safe for the puppy they needed a fence. Her father said a fence was too expensive, so the adoption fell through. My boss was outraged: how dare this group say that HER daughter was not good enough to take in a “throw away” puppy. She said “I guess they’d rather kill the dog than let my daughter have her.” I tried to explain to her that while rescued animals often came from terrible backgrounds, they are often fostered in loving home. Animals in rescue are not facing immediate execution. When I’ve fostered a few animals at a time, and spent nights with them while they’re sick, and medicated and groomed them, and grown to love them, then I don’t want to just give them to any home, I want to find a good home for them.

The daughter immediately went out and bought a puppy from a pet store since she was turned down for adoption. Every morning she let the puppy out in the yard while she got ready for work. Only two weeks later the puppy was hit by a car and killed. And that’s why the rescue didn’t want to adopt to her without the fence. But my boss still speaks indignantly of snobby rescue organizations that ask for the impossible, like fences.

This story really characterizes how I feel about Buddy too. I nursed him through his URI. I took him in from outside. So I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I gave him to this woman and then a few days later he was hit by a car and killed. There would be so much regret there. But the potential adopter would no doubt see me as the villain, a snob who insists on indoor cats, and thus denies her a “throw away animal.”

In her long explanation of how outside is better she said a previous cat she’d allowed outside had lived to be 15. I know this happens, and I know some indoor cats die very young. But my neighborhood is full of cats that were born on the street and are used to cars, but they still get hit and killed right in front of my house and I’m left to scrape up their broken bodies. People speed. Dogs get loose and chase cats into the street. Construction projects can disorient cats and make them less careful. And as I said, cats can’t always hear hybrids coming or they don’t sound like cars to them, so they’re less careful around them.

I’m tired and cranky and sad today. If anyone has any leads on a placement for Buddy, please, please let me know.

My dilemma always comes down to this—if I pick a cat up off the street and bring him inside, I need to actually feel like I’m making things better for him. Things happen obviously that are beyond my control, freak accidents, illnesses. I can’t plan for or prevent everything. I would like to see Buddy not killed by a car though, so that’s where I’m coming from.

Short and Sweet (cause I gotta run)

You ever have those weird encounters. You know, you’re sitting in a cage and someone throws a dirty Kleenex at you?

So back when I lived in NYC and I did whatever PeTA asked whenever they called I ended up doing a number of cage demos out on the street in Manhattan. The idea of the cage demo was to put a donated and possibly “bloody” (with red paint) fur coat on me and then stuff me into a cage so small I couldn’t turn around. This was to show the inhumane conditions animals on fur farms face. Then I was to crouch all scrunched up in the cage and look sad. If you know me, you know I excel at little so well as looking sad. So there I was.

Frequently such demos were ample opportunity for people to take pot shots, physical or verbal. People threw dirty Kleenexes at me and other trash. Men would walk by and say the strangest things like “If I gave you a fur coat you’d wear it and like it.” Or “you wouldn’t be out here if you were my wife.” Um yeah.

But there was another type of frequent heckler, the middle aged women who would say things like “I used to be vegetarian, but when you get older you’ll realize how stupid it is.” Or "One day you’ll learn you can’t change anything so then you’ll grow up and stop doing stuff like this.”

But I wonder what it is with the ex-vegetarian phenomenon that makes certain people so bitter and virulent against the still-vegetarian, still-vegan contingent. Is it guilt? Is it that the bitter can’t stand to see anyone else not bitter? I don’t know.

At time like that, when someone is trying to sweep in on me with their bitterness I have to pull up the knowledge of Beatrice Wood, to show me the antidote to bitter, wronged people who toss aside their convictions as unrealistic.

Beatrice Wood lived from 1893 to 1998 and she had been vegetarian most of her life, I think she made that decision either in her teens or early twenties. She had failed love affairs with some of the biggest names in modern art, and was influential in the Dada period. What she relished was the love, the opportunities, the beauty and the silliness, rather than dwelling on the bad endings. She was still creating art until the end of her life. I saw a documentary made when she was 102 and she walked around her studio barefoot in flowing skirts and silver jewelry and sculpted “naughty figurines” of nudes from clay.

Aging doesn’t have to mean giving up on vegetarianism, aging doesn’t have to mean becoming sharp and grumpy and snapping at people. So when people tell me I’ll give all this up when I get older I think about Beatrice Wood and say “not if I can help it.”

A Comedy of Errors (or something like that)

Sometimes I’m torn on this blog between talking about my life as it is, blemishes and all, or playing up the good aspects. I want people to think that it’s easy to love and care for animals, and that it’s easy to be vegan. And it is, mostly, and then there are the times where the season lines up to kick you one last time before the weather gets really cold or something like that. If nothing else, talking about the bad will show that you can still make a difference even if you aren’t perfect.

First of all I will paint a picture for you of how utterly ridiculous I am. I don’t really like to buy clothing, but of course I do from time to time since I must, but I tend to wear things way past the point where they need to be retired, and I keep telling myself I can get away with it one last time. Sadly my favorite t-shirt is full of holes and I just can’t give it up. The holes started from medicating sick cats. I’d grab them and they’d kick and rip up my shirt, and sometimes my stomach in the process. Then the holes grew. I can’t let it go, it’s my softest most comfy shirt, but it’s maybe getting on the obscene side. Sigh. Then I have a half slip that I wear with my longer skirts to work. Well it’s only about a decade old, it should have plenty of life left right? No, the elastic had been going for a while, but it decided to finally all let go with a final hurrah and fall off me and around my ankles, right by my front door as several male road re-pavers stood not twenty feet away. I quickly just stepped out of it and balled it up and tried to retain some shred of dignity, but it was not a good moment for me. Luckily the skirt itself doesn’t have elastic, but buttons, which happily decided to stay on for the time being. But I find myself slipless and it’s a sad state of affairs.

Next up is illness in the family which is pretty serious and requiring some time spent on the road lately and other time spent sad and trying to find the least awful solution, knowing that all solutions have drawbacks. General stress and everything else adds to the heap.

All the same I decided to go ahead with plans to take more feral cats to the feral cat clinic this Sunday. Now given the givens I could have thought of many things I’d rather do with my Saturday night than stumble around in the dark and cold with a growing cough trapping feral cats, but then it’s not about me, so there we were, Sean and I.

Now Saturday morning we went around to talk to people, to tell them we were trapping and ask for permission to put traps in their yards. We went to one house that’s near the school where they feed every day on their front porch. There are always kittens at this house. We knocked on the door and a man answered. A teenaged boy who I’ve spoken with before hovered behind him. We gave our spiel and the man said “Not my cats, take them, go take all.” So we backed up and said “The cats are coming back, but they’ll be fixed and vaccinated.” He shrugged and seemed to be saying “do whatever you want.” The teenager speaks English perfectly in my experience, so while we might have doubted the man fully understood us, I felt like if there was an issue the boy would have spoken up.

So at dusk we arrived and set ten traps in their yard. Then they came home, the man, a woman, and the teenaged boy. Right away the woman started yelling at us. I told her the man had given us permission and that we weren’t hurting the cats, but she just kept screaming “Not in MY house! Not in MY house!” I tried to explain while Sean raced around retrieving traps, but she just kept screaming in my face, and then shouted “You put traps anywhere, over there, over there, their yard! But not in MY house! I don’t want do like that! Not in MY house!” So that was it. But we never would have put the traps there if we didn’t think we had permission and I was hurt that she couldn’t even try to be nice and not scream in my face. A simple “I don’t want you here” would have sufficed. Or better yet “There’s a misunderstanding, but I don’t want you trapping here.”

And it’s also incredibly frustrating because her years of feeding without altering any of the cats has given rise to a huge problem in our neighborhood. I gather she puts down the same amount of dry kibble every day. Many of the cats she feeds appear emaciated, but they hang around anyway. The cats in and around her porch are crowded there and nearly all show signs of active URI infections. The dominant cats chase the kittens out as soon as they’re weaned, and this has given rise the many satellite colonies we encounter. Though thin, the satellite cats appear healthier as the URI seems absent from those locations. So the less dominant cats move out a block or two and subsist on trash, but are also more likely to be hit by cars or have serious conflicts with human residents who don’t want them there.

Also when someone was poisoning the cats with rat poison and Sean took them to the emergency vet, he went and tried to talk to people. He went to that house, knowing they feed, to nicely try to warn them about what was going on. He thought they would be worried about the cats and maybe put down extra food or try to keep them close to home until the danger was over. However their response was “Not my cats. Don’t care.” And they slammed the door in his face.

So they don’t care if the cats are poisoned, they don’t care when they get hit by cars. They don’t care enough to get them vaccinated or altered. They don’t care that sometimes the kittens are very sick and just wander out into the street in obvious distress. But they DO care if we try to put some traps in their yard for an hour or two.

But it really messed up our trapping efforts. We hadn’t asked their next door neighbors if we could put traps in their yards, because we thought we had a place to trap. Plus all the commotion scared off many of the cats. In the end we only trapped eight cats after a full and exhausting night of trapping. I got a few hours of sleep and then took the cats to the clinic.

Then in case my day wasn’t bad enough one of the cats died in surgery. This almost never happens. It has never happened to me before actually, but it did this time. They say that the cat had a pre-existing condition that made his heart give out. But I was just devastated.

I also think the feeders don’t like that we’re ear-tipping the cats, but with sixty cats who are mostly black and white and almost identical, I can’t not ear-tip. We actually trapped four cats we’d gotten previously and the ear-tips allowed us to know instantly they were already fixed and let them back out.

Sometimes I feel like this whole thing is breaking my heart. I only got into this because Sean and I couldn’t stand coming across dead and dying cats or obviously sick cats while walking the dogs. I’m only trying to do my best to help a really messed up situation. But I could have spent my Saturday night many other ways than getting screamed at for my efforts by a person largely responsible for the problem.

The bottom line though is that we’ve fixed 18 cats, most of them female and returned them to the colony. That’s a serious reduction in the kittens born. We’ve removed 5 tame cats, and thus eliminated all the kittens they would have produced. Sadly though the cat I named Gerry on his form passed away yesterday. I’m sorry Gerry, I would have fed you if I’d had the chance. I meant to make things better for you, not worse.