Feral Cat Stories

It's really incredible to observe the bonds that the feral cats form with each other.


For some time now I've been feeding two ferals that live about a block away from the main colony. I call these two females (who both got spayed at the WHS clinic, thank you very much) Leilei and Deedee. Leilei is grey and white and Deedee is a grey, white, and brown tabby. Leilei seems to be older than Deedee and we suspect they are mother and daughter.


Leilei loves to eat. Deedee is more timid and hangs back. They live under a porch that some neighbors have in their back yard. After I was confronted over the feeding by a neighbor who lives near the porch and doesn't like cats, I've tried to move the area where I feed them closer and closer to my own house. However this means that Leilei and Deedee need to cross the street for their food.


Leilei always crosses first. She looks both ways for cars and then dashes across. Deedee makes many false starts before coming over. This means that Leilei sits by the food dish for some time before Deedee joins her. But amazingly Leilei won't start eating, but just looks back at Deedee until she sees that Deedee is safely across the street. So long as Deedee has gotten across Leilei will start eating, even if Deedee hides under a bush and waits for two minutes before venturing to the food bowl. But Leilei won't take a bit until Deedee is safely across the street.

Clearly making them cross the street is not ideal. I'd like to set up some kind of shelter for them on my side of the street, but we do live in the type of neighborhood where a cat shelter would likely get stolen. So Sean and I have been discussing ideas and design and how to tempt Leilei and Deedee to move, since they seem pretty attached to their porch.


But here is my cartoon portrait of them for new year's eve.

Walking Through Walls in the Heart of December

After all this time the thing that still amazes me the most is the power of the body, the flesh closing up on itself until all that’s left is a scar. The almost supernatural strength there that means the scar on my back is something like five times thicker than the rest of my skin. So thick it aches in really cold weather, and I can feel it, like a tight cord when I bend. Because when my body closed up that wound it said: this time it’s for good, nothing is going to cut this open again. It annoys me, but it’s kind of marvelous.

Likewise the scar on my hand and wrist are quiet and flat and tough and betray no sign of what made them. Blood pumps through my body, my lungs fill with air, and everything works more or less as it should, except of course those things that don’t. But there it is, the stories behind the scars sound ridiculous, because I’m here after all and I’m fine.

I hope this same insane healing power will show up in our bunny Jasmine. She is still sick. Sometimes her appetite returns and we feel hopeful and then the next meal she won’t eat, so we have to give her more of her “critical care” (liquid food for bunnies).

While feeding feral cats I noticed recently that Leilei, a grey and white feral, had caught the upper respiratory virus that is rampant in this colony. I tried putting some lysine in her food, but that didn’t seem to make much difference. There really isn’t much treatment available for a virus like this, but I started getting really worried. Leilei’s eyes were running a lot and she looked so sad. Then suddenly it went away. She ate last night with perfectly clear eyes and no sneezing or wheezing at all. She seemed so happy, practically bouncing across the street as soon as I stepped back from the food. Her body managed to fight off the virus. If her eye infection had gotten really bad I would have had to have trapped her and taken her to the vet, but as I said there isn’t much medication that helps and ferals can be made sicker from the stress of the trap and the vet.

I’m glad Leilei is better and seems to have no lasting ill effects from her illness.

The thing with scars is that they take root in our minds as well, not just on our skin.

Merry Christmas

I haven't been blogging much lately because real life has kept me very busy. My father in law is very ill and we've been trying to deal with that.

I bring this up because I really think that while many of my fellow bloggers are very physically active (more even than I am) there might be some who are so harried, so busy that they don't find time to work out. And I'd like to urge everyone who is in that position to make a resolution to start working out this year. This is really about setting aside some time for your own health, to take care of yourself. You don't have to be a gym star, you don't have to lift huge weights or impress people with your bulging muscles. But doing some weight training now will pay off in bone strength later, and keeping active now will pay off in mobility later. We really see the price of a sedentary life style when an older person gets ill; those who didn't exercise when they were younger often don't have the energy to fight. Their bodies are weaker and everything hits them that much harder.

So all of you, please take care of yourselves. Eat fresh veggies every day. Being vegan cuts out most of the bad stuff, but we can't survive on pasta alone, we need to add in that rainbow of fresh foods. We need to stay active now so we can be active later. We need to work our muscles and bones because it helps them grow stronger.

Please, take care of yourselves, we need you here to keep spreading the vegan word.

And now for something completely different.

I grew up on fairy tales and loved them so much that in elementary school I checked out every book from the library on myths, legends, and folk tales. And for this reason I know that French folklore claimed that exactly at midnight on Christmas eve all the animals in the world knelt down to pray and could pray out loud like people, just for that moment. This came up in folktales where the farmer would accidentally observe his cows praying at the stroke of midnight. It seemed strange to me even then that people could believe animals capable of prayer but still eat them. But I guess we turn animals into all kinds of things they're not in our minds. When it suits us we believe they don't have personalities or wills of their own, to make us feel better about slaughtering them. We tell ourselves that they exist only to become our dinners. And other times when it suits us we credit them with human motives and human religion even. Strange how we try to view them as anything other than our long-oppressed victims.

I have stuff to say about animal rights as well, but I'll leave it at this for this morning. I have to go make sure a sick bunny is eating (and if not give her some liquid food) and then maybe take the doggies to the park for their Christmas gift.

Where I Am and What I Want

I've been in a bad place this week. I wasn't upset about losing in court, I didn't even really consider it losing for my part, but I was deeply hurt by the character assassination and haunted by the idea that I could have defended myself but the prosecution wouldn't let me.

I've been really sad.

So people have been telling me that I need to start thinking more positively and concentrating on what I want and trying to get it, like moving out of this county for example.

The hard part is that THAT'S NOT what I want. I'm happy in my little overflowing house; I love every inch of it because Sean and I have poured so much work and sweat into rescuing this house from decay. I love my neighborhood. Unlike some other areas people here tend to know each other and look out for each other, with some obvious exceptions of course. I love the the children beg to come visit my rabbits and the little girl who lives diagonally from me loves animals and adopted her Bichon dog from a rescue. I love that my neighbors who don't even like cats or dogs helped me to look for both Liam when some guests of ours accidentally let him out and Kyra when she escaped our fence. I love that people here feed the ferals, even if they don't always know or understand the dynamics of feral colonies. I love that when I walk my dogs past the elementary school the people working there call out "you have beautiful dogs, what kind are they?" and I answer "shelter mutts" and they nod and understand. Even though I don't go, I kind of like that my neighbors from Ghana invited me to their prayer meetings, because that's how friendly and open people often are here. I like that when I was assaulted, even though most people didn't stop, one couple did and they stayed with me until they knew I was ok. I'm sure they were going somewhere, maybe they got there late, but they were so kind anyway.

I don't want to move away, I just want to feel safe here. I don't hate this area. I see so much good in this hectic mixing of cultures, races, and classes. I love that it forces us to be more accepting of each other and more understanding. I don't like that when something bad happens people (my own family even) says "What did you expect living where you do?"

I don't want to punish anyone. I remain unconvinced that punishment helps anything. But I want to feel safe. I don't feel safe when I've called the police and they don't help me. I don't feel safe when the defense wins cases by falsely smearing the victim, and we could have refuted those claims but we were totally unprepared for it. I don't like that the authorities have more or less decided that drug dealers rule this area and don't respond to calls reporting drug selling out in the open. Sure they show up when someone gets shot, but I have to imagine there would be fewer shootings if they took other crime seriously, since there is likely much overlap between shooters and people involved in other criminal activity.

I don't want big heaps of money, I want enough to get by, to put food on the table and keep helping animals. I don't want to spend most of my money on therapy for things that weren't my fault. I also don't like that at the moment I can't even afford therapy, so instead I bleed out all my thoughts on this blog.

I don't like feeling like the worst in people is what gets rewarded.

Real Life Type Update: The Trial

I’ve been quiet for a little while now because I was going to testify in my case. I felt like I couldn’t blog about it, but it was also so much on my mind that it was hard to think of other things to talk about. Today I’m going to tell the whole stupid story from beginning to end, and hopefully it will be out of my system and I can go back to our regularly scheduled vegan program.

First of all, since I’ve talked to some people who read my blog on the phone or in person lately and this topic has come up, I want to straighten one thing out. This case was a second degree assault case stemming from an incident that happened more than a year ago where I was hit from behind (in my car) by a van. When I asked for insurance information the people fled the scene of the accident. While I was trying to write their plate number on my hand the male driver purposefully struck me with the van to prevent me from getting their information and then sped off. Despite this I managed to write down the entire plate number.

This case was not about the sexual assault I’ve referenced before which happened years ago and in which I never pressed charges, partially out of fear of this kind of hell.

As far as physical injuries go I was sore after being hit by the van, I complained of aches and pains for a week or so, but I was not seriously hurt. There were no hospital visits or medical bills. I’m ok. My decision to press charges in this matter was not about my being hurt but based on a careful consideration where I felt that if I did nothing this individual would feel hitting people with vans was the way to get out of responsibility in car accidents, that he might continue doing so, and someone else might be seriously injured or killed.

At any time had the defendant in this case offered a sincere apology, I would have wanted the whole thing dropped. I was never after money, I just felt that what happened was very wrong and it seemed like the right thing to do was to press charges.

Immediately following the incident I was short of breath and my asthma inhaler had been knocked out of my hand and run over and destroyed. I knelt down on the pavement feeling dizzy and unable to catch my breath. Moving or walking or even talking at that point in time felt impossible to me. A very kind young couple stopped to help me. The woman seemed to know something about asthma and was able to coach me into breathing although I was still not breathing well. They got me sitting in my car and stayed with me. I was two blocks from my house when all this happened so as soon as I could speak I dialed Sean and screamed into the phone “come help me, come help me.” Sean finally got me to say where I was and rushed over. Once he was there the couple and he persuaded me to call 911, I believe Sean dialed it on my phone.

After I dialed 911 we stayed in the intersection waiting, but when the police didn’t come for about 20 minutes, we called back to say that we were in danger of being struck by traffic and we were going to go to our house and wait for the police there. The police did not come for 2 hours.

We asked the couple if they had witnessed the accident. They unfortunately had not. They just drove up in time to see me having trouble breathing, kneeling on the pavement and stopped to help. We thought that they would therefore not be witnesses and thanked them for their help and let them go on their way.

There was a lot of traffic that day, but they were the only people who stopped to help me. I’m sure many people witnessed the incident, but none of them stopped. Which is hardly unusual in this area actually, many of my friends have stories of being in trouble and nobody stopping to help.

When the police came, 2 hours later, the first thing spoken by either officer was the older of the two said “You’re not from around here are you.” I asked what he meant by that and he put his hand over his mouth, laughed, and then said “Oh nothing.” I knew perfectly well what he meant though, I just resented it greatly. I felt that he was implying that since I was white I shouldn’t live in this area or expect to be safe here. Of course many of my (non-white) neighbors have told me stories of getting no help from the police. My neighbor Anita went into a diatribe the other day about the police for example.

The police took down the information I gave them and the rookie officer said “We’ll run the plates and if there’s a match we’ll go talk to the guy.” The older officer immediately added “Yeah, if he’s home.”

At that point I felt fairly certain that the police would not investigate this at all.

That evening on our way to dinner my husband and I drove around our neighborhood and found the van that hit me. When we got home my husband pulled information on that house and found that the owner had a long criminal arrest and conviction record including drugs, weapons, domestic violence, burglary, and assault. In his record was a physical description that matched the one I’d given the police.

We still wanted to be certain, so the next day around noon my husband drove over to the house and asked me to sit in the car and watch so I could identify anyone who came to the door. He knocked on the door and a woman answered. The woman had been the female passenger in the van when it hit me. My husband asked for the guy, the woman said he wasn’t home. He said “[Name] hit my wife yesterday and drive off; I’d like the insurance information.” The woman said she would be right out. She returned with what seemed to be insurance papers in her hand, and came out to the street where we were parked. She started taking picture of the damage to the vehicle. Then she said “You know, she drifted backward.” Sean told her not to lie, that he knew that didn’t happen. She said, “Well, there was no reason for her to stop”. She then started to get really nasty and said “do you people even live around here? I live here in this neighborhood.” Then for some reason she latched onto the idea that we were lying about being married and kept saying “He isn’t your husband, he’s just some boyfriend.” Which seems entirely irrelevant, but that’s what she did. She was screaming and trying to take pictures of us, and started yelling that she was going to find out where we lived and come to our house. Sean called the police. When they arrived he explained that the person residing there had hit me and hit the car and drove off, and he wanted her insurance information. The officers started harassing Sean, asking him why we were investigating the accident, to leave it to the insurance companies. Sean said he had the right to the information, they told Sean he was harassing them by asking them for their insurance information, and said “How would you like it if someone came to your house and asked you for insurance information?” Sean said he would expect that to happen if he committed a hit and run. They said it was harassment, Sean said he was a lawyer and knew this was not harassment. They then left without assisting us.

So that was that.

Having now confirmed the identity of the driver we gave this information to the police, along with an affidavit they could use for charging, and a copy of his state arrest and conviction record. For some days we called and tried to follow up. The police played games with us, claiming that no officers by the names I had been given and wrote down existed. Then they said a detective had been assigned to my case. I insisted and got the name of the detective. I called him. He said that not only had he not been assigned to my case, but no such case existed and the police were not going to do anything.

So I went to the magistrate and filed charges on my own. I then met with a prosecutor and when he pulled the record of the driver. He felt they should prosecute him given his record.

Then this guy and his family, in an effort to find out where I lived, followed me one day when I came home from work (I lost them that time), and followed me on another occasion me when I walked my dogs. I was terrified. I called 911 but they told me they couldn’t help me. I had been getting away and hiding and then calling because I was afraid of them. We were extremely stressed that they would do something to us, the house, or the dogs (when they are let outside).

From that point on the case got continued a few times. Once he couldn’t attend his own trial because he was incarcerated in Virginia. The next time, on the day of trial, the attorney requested a jury trial so the case had to get transferred to the higher court. The next time he was sick. I finally decided my case would never go to trial and I felt ok with that because at least he’d stopped following me. I’d had a quick education in how nobody would ever help me and I was anxious just to be safe.

So I was surprised when my case was scheduled again for trial and even more surprised when it didn’t get continued yet again. I was called to court and went dutifully, but I also expected the case to settle prior to trial, that he would plea to some lesser charge, get probation and the whole thing would be over.

If we went to trial I was prepared to lose as I expected him to put his whole family on the stand to lie for him. I thought they would just say that they never hit me with the van and the jury would believe three against one and that would be the end of it.

I had not counted on an unethical defense attorney Anna Aita.

So my case did go to trial. The prosecutor was very nice, but she was new to the case. I’d met with two prosecutors previously, but none of the information I’d given them was passed on to this new prosecutor. She had little time to prepare for trial while the defense had over a year to prepare.

The proceedings during my testimony were odd.

First, nearly every single thing I said Anna Aita objected to, sometimes twice within a sentence. Her objections kept getting overruled and I sensed impatience in the jury. My husband (a lawyer) explained to me later that this was a strategy to make my testimony incomprehensible amid so many objections. Nobody could follow anything I said because the whole time I was being incessantly interrupted with “Your honor, I object” and “over-ruled.” Sometimes she asked to approach the bench and so my testimony was disrupted by five minutes of arguing in whispers up at the bench. At one point I heard the judge say to her “If you do this again I’m really going to embarrass you for it.” But still my testimony was destroyed.

Direct was fine, but on cross Anna Aita seemed to be testifying as opposed to asking questions. She would say things like “Isn’t it true you confronted my client and demanded money from him?” This was in fact false. I had not been face to face with the defendant since the day of the incident—I had only seen him since then sitting in a van that was following me, and then later in court. She also said “Isn’t it true Ms. Davis that you’re only here today because you plan on suing my client?” This was also false; we had never planned to sue him. I was sore and upset, but that’s not the kind of injury that can be easily quantified monetarily.

What made this especially insulting was that we spoke with Aita the first time we were in court, she asked us what we wanted, whether we wanted money for the car or any injuries, we explained that his insurance paid for everything and “he doesn’t owe us anything.” We explained that we were only trying to do the right thing, that what he did was both rude and dangerous, that he could kill someone doing that, and that we therefore thought it was important to bring charges. My husband also explained to her that we were not looking for any specific outcome, everything was up to the prosecutor.

When we were finally there on the last trial date as final plea negotiations were taking place, the prosecutor asked us if we were OK with a “Stet” (where the case gets suspended), community service, and restitution. It was such a weird request, we asked “Restitution for what? We don’t need restitution.” As to the rest, my husband reiterated that we were deferring entirely to them, it was their case to do whatever they wanted. On the court date before then (continued because he was allegedly sick), Sean even told a supervising prosecutor (whom he had known for years) that they could do whatever he wanted, including dropping the case. We were tired of the whole affair. The prosecutor said he understood, though he hated to see the defense win with the strategy of getting so many continuances. Sean again said it was up to them, they could drop it if they wanted, or we would continue to come to court as many times as needed.

Aita was well aware this wasn’t about money, but we later realized that false claim that we wanted money was her planned defense.

Further weirdness in the testimony. She made a big deal of the fact that my husband is a lawyer and kept sneering calling him “a personal injury” lawyer. I made clear that while my husband has done some traffic accident cases, he’s by no means “a personal injury lawyer.” He does general practice like family law, child support, criminal, traffic, writing wills, that kind of stuff.

Then she got really insistent on the idea that the car in the accident wasn’t my car but actually belonged to my mother. In reality my mother has never even sat inside that car. It’s our car, my and my husband’s car, my mother didn’t go with us to pick it out, she didn’t help us with it, she would likely not recognize the car if it passed her on the street.

Then my testimony was over and I had to leave the courtroom but was told I needed to come back the next day.

The next day I waited patiently outside the courtroom for hours. Then the prosecutor came out and said I needed to produce my car registration. I didn’t have it with me, so I had to get the plate number and rush upstairs to have someone run the plates, to prove I owned my car. The defense was still insisting it was my mother’s car. Weird. But that took up a lot of time and probably further confused the jury.

I watched the guy’s wife go in to testify and come back out minutes later. Then his son went in and stayed a long time. I had been expecting them to call me back for rebuttal testimony, but they never did. I had no idea what was happening in the courtroom. I wasn’t allowed in until closing arguments.

I was not at all prepared for what I saw during closing arguments. All I can say is that it was worse than the original assault. Anna Aita repeated her claims that I could not be trusted because I’m married to a lawyer. She also alleged that I was drunk at the time of the incident (I was not and I could have refuted that if I’d been given a chance and my husband and the police officers all could have testified that I was not drunk). She further told the jury that there had been no hit and run because the guy had given me his information (prior to this everyone involved, like the guy’s wife and the insurance companies all agreed there had been a hit and run and he’d been at fault—if I’d known they’d say this I could have requested records from the insurance company). She claimed that I never called the police because it didn’t happen (I did call the police; it’s not my fault they didn’t do anything, but I DID call). She claimed (amazingly) that her client and his son had no motive to lie but I did (um, staying out of jail is probably a motive). She reiterated that I was drunk (when she made these allegations the court clerks and the court reporter made faces of shock and horror). She also claimed that if I’d been hit by a van I’d be badly injured (it was at a low speed, I’m resilient, I don’t know---you’d think if I was inventing this whole thing I’d beat myself up or something to make it realistic, but I was being honest, I was sore but not badly hurt). She even had the nerve to tell the jury that *I* was the one who committed hit and run, that, as he client and his son testified, they gave me their information, but when they asked me for my information I got in the car and drove off!

After this I felt so badly beaten up that I left and did not wait for the verdict. But the verdict was not guilty. Later I learned that the prosecutor called the wife to testify but she refused (she claimed marital privilege and could not be forced to testify), which should have been a huge red flag, but oh well. My husband says that she probably couldn’t testify consistently with what her husband and son were saying because she previously gave a statement to the insurance company.

All in all it’s ok. This was a minor case and the defendant so threatening and scary that I’m just as happy if I’m off his radar, though I hate that he just terrorizes people over and over.

More than anything I’m shocked and horrified at Anna Aita. I expect a defendant to lie to save his ass. I expected a son to lie to protect his dad. But Anna Aita is a despicable person who knew the case she was presenting was bogus. I feel like she could have defended the guy without going on this all out unethical assault on my character. Really, even lawyer’s wives deserve protection. And I wasn’t drinking, at all, hadn’t consumed alcohol to the point of intoxication in about a decade, rarely have a glass of wine with dinner, and probably hadn’t had a drink in several weeks at the time of the incident; it was a Saturday afternoon, I was just going out to get groceries. But all this affected the jury and made them think I’m a bad person. I hate to think what she’d do if I’d been raped, she’d probably smirk the whole time while saying I was the one who committed rape, that my husband is a personal injury lawyer and I’m just trying to get money. My husband thinks she violated some ethical rules in what she did, in having her client and his son commit perjury, in basing her defense on something she knew was false (i.e., that we wanted money), in making groundless objections solely for the purpose of disrupting my testimony, and in disparaging an entire category of lawyers. (As for her knowing what she was doing was wrong, I overheard her tell a prosecutor before the trial started, “Promise me you’ll still speak to me after we’re done.” An advance apology of sorts, probably not given by a lawyer planning a spirited defense, but one planning to present a case full of lies and a character assassination of a victim of a crime.)

The only thing I can say about this whole experience is that I would be reluctant to ever ask the police for help again and I certainly would think twice about ever pursuing charges for anything. The whole court experience and all the delays and continuances as well were worse than the original incident. I’ll never forget the malicious sneer Aita had on her face during closing arguments when she turned and met my eyes and gestured at me while telling the jury that I had been drunk during the incident and that’s why I didn’t call the police. Aita actually knew perfectly well that I’d called the police from the accident scene. I’d testified to it, it was in all the insurance reports too. I’ll just never forget that horrible look on her evil face.

This Whole Food Chain Idea: Rant

I think the holidays make me cranky. At the very least I don’t feel I’m totally myself right now. People at my work like to say things to me like “You have the patience of Job.” Weird. But I don’t feel patient right now. I feel very, very cranky.

Part of my crankiness is having to have the same conversation over and over about this concept that there’s a food chain and people are at the top of it, and therefore it’s right for us to eat meat. First, there’s not a food chain, in a functional ecosystem there’s a complicated web of inter-dependence among species. There’s no top or bottom of the web, there’s only balance and imbalance. The lion might be the top predator, but take a certain fungus out the ecosystem and some plants disappear, then some animals and so on, until we can demonstrate that the lion needs the mushroom and is utterly at its mercy.

So come visit my neighborhood and look at all the concrete and the liquor stores, fast food joints, and the people just hanging out in parked cars with tinted windows and talk to me about a “food chain” here.

Better yet, read Jared Diamond’s books, including The Third Chimpanzee and Guns, Germs, and Steel. We’ve been out of balance for a while now because extinctions followed every human expansion. We’ve just gotten a lot better at driving some species into extinction and messing with others genetically, and packing them so closely they can’t move to meet our appetite for animal flesh.

It might be totally natural to eat other animals, but there’s not much that’s natural about how we live. In a working ecosystem we wouldn’t flush our waste away in water, polluting the oceans with sewage. Instead our wastes would be consumed by insects, microbes, and fungus and so the waste would be taken back up into the ecosystem. But that only works when you aren’t insanely densely populated. That only works when the rest of the ecosystem is working.

In a working ecosystem we wouldn’t be obese because we’d have to work for every calorie we consumed, even fruit would have to be picked and roots would need to be dug from the ground. If we want to talk about our “natural order” we might reflect on the consensus among archeologists that early hominids were likely herbivores that gradually became omnivores as they added insects and the scavenged the bodies of dead animals. Only after the invention of tools were our claw-less, relatively slow, relatively fragile forbearers able to hunt animals and kill them. However, following our ability to build lethal tools and our expansion into areas previously unknown to hominids other species started disappearing. Our ancestors weren’t conservationists, they were walking appetites. Understanding of our situation came much later.

This is all relatively natural. My dog Kyra would in fact probably eat herself to death given the opportunity, and many people care-taking non-human animals have observed the same thing. Kyra doesn’t save something for later, she eats whatever is edible as soon as it is found and she eats it all. We still have these same instincts, instincts that drove us to stockpile calories in the form of fat for leaner times ahead. But the sad truth is that left to do what comes naturally, many of us are in fact eating ourselves to death, just the slower version with heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and all the related illnesses of over-consumption. I feel for people struggling with these diseases because I know that I struggle with the same instincts; there is an animal part of my brain that screams at me to eat as much of the most calorie rich foods I can find. We are an animal that has become too successful for our own good as we destroy every ecosystem on the planet for the sake of raising certain species we prefer to eat, species we’ve altered to be as fat and helpless as possible. We are an animal that is so successful at the basic instinct of reproducing and protecting our young that our numbers would be unsustainable under our “natural” condition of hunting and gathering. We are an animal that has become so successful that we have time to sit back and justify our actions by saying we’re the top of the food chain. We’re an animal that has become so successful that we leave the less fortunate of our own species to slowly die of starvation and disease, in lands we ourselves stripped of natural resources.

I know many people who say that they have no issue with eating animals, since that is the natural order of the world, but they don’t like factory farms. Wake up and look at our population. If you oppose factory farming, then you oppose eating animals or animal products for the majority of the world’s populations. There aren’t enough grasslands for everyone to eat grass-fed beef for dinner. There aren’t enough quaint country farm yards for everyone to eat the eggs of happy well-treated hens.

When someone says that they are at the top of the food chain, what they’re really doing is deferring thinking with a happy, self-congratulatory lie. What they’re saying is they’re better than the other animals and so they should be able to eat them, but refusing to further investigate that concept. It’s not my place to decide better or worse really, but I do know that self-congratulatory lies have terrible histories. There were missionaries forcing “modest” clothing on indigenous women, clothing so confining that it prevented them from doing the things they’d done previously like climbing trees to pick fruit, squatting down to pound starchy roots into meal, and dancing. There were slave owners saying that they were different and better from the human beings they enslaved and raped and beat. I know that I’ve been mistreated by people who felt they had a right to be cruel to me because they judged me as less attractive or less intelligent than themselves. I’ve told myself self-congratulatory lies in the past because I wanted to hide from my responsibilities toward the planet, toward non-human animals, and from my obligations to other human beings.

I will end with a not terribly pleasant story that illustrates the collapse of the self-congratulatory lie. For years I lived with a very special rabbit named Ivan. Bunnies are not stupid creatures, as their caretakers well know, but among bunnies Ivan was an evil genius. One holiday my brother complained that there were too many animals around with my Ivan, my mother’s two rabbits, two dogs, and a cat. He suggested setting up a pen in the back yard and putting all the companion animals in there then returning a couple hours later and retrieving the survivor. Without hesitation my father answered that even though at 4.5 pounds Ivan was the smallest animal he would be the last standing because “he’s the smartest and the meanest of all of them.” Nobody argued that point.

In any case I moved to Brooklyn and I really had no issues with pests until I got some new next door neighbors who were pretty sloppy. There was some kind of gap in our common wall and some roaches got into my apartment. I knew roaches were getting in because I’d get up in the morning and pick up Ivan’s bowl to give him his breakfast and there would be a dead smashed roach underneath it. Then one evening I actually caught him the act. He’d wait by the stove with his bowl and a roach would come out. He’d grab the rim of the bowl in his teeth and tip it up. Then the roach would come closer and he’d slam the bowl down, using his paws for extra force and kill the roach. This was somewhat disturbing to discover actually. Ivan was incredibly sweet and loving toward me but hostile to other animals, and often to other people, and apparently he felt roaches didn’t belong in our space.

When I related this story to my family, some of them marveled that this showed Ivan was actually a “tool user” a title that used to be uniquely human, but has been expanded to a couple of other species recently. My brother objected. He said that Ivan didn’t make his own tools and therefore we were overestimating his intelligence. He was merely making use of an object a human had crafted.

In this moment, maybe to defend Ivan, I objected that most humans don’t make their own tools. They go to the store and buy and use tools others have made. My brother hung his head for a moment and said “You’re right, but that’s incredibly depressing. Most people aren’t tool builders either.

So I have to say that most of us, if you strip us naked and take away all the stuff we’ve bought and toss us out into the woods without help, we’re not going to do so well. Food chain or no food chain.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. We live in houses, we drive cars, we use medications to extend our lives. We study nutrition (Kyra operates on the if it smells good or if it smells really bad, eat it and see what happens theory), we know more and understand more than our hominid ancestors did. Choosing a vegan diet that is kind to animals, kind to the planet, and kind to our own bodies is one huge advantage we have over our ancient ancestors.

The Sum Of Compassion

I’ve had this idea come up in odd places lately, even among vegans, that there is only so much compassion our hearts can hold. Non-vegans sometimes ask how I can give so much compassion to animals when so many people are suffering. The underlying assumption here is that any love or caring we give to one being steals it from another. I find this concept completely false, in fact, much like the cliché “if you want to see something done ask a busy person to do it” I think that people who care tend to expand their caring. Our hearts can actually hold a great deal.

This is not to say that I expect someone working in the trenches to care for orphans in Africa to also start campaigning for animal rights. What I mean is that caring for the plight of children doesn’t preclude them from having concern for animals as well. In fact many animal advocates have told me that they first learned about animal issues through “a back door.” By this I mean they didn’t consider animal issues, but through working on human issues they found that animal issues and human issues intersected. This is the case when women’s advocates find that abused women are sometimes reluctant to leave and go into shelters because they would have to leave their companion animals behind at the mercy of a violent and unstable person. This happens when people helping abused children find that the family’s dog was the first to bear the brunt of the abuse, and if someone had intervened then the child might not have been hurt. This happens when crime victims’ advocates discover that violent criminals often have histories of animal abuse. The connection is made when people fighting human hunger realize that we feed most of our grain and soy to farmed animals so the wealthy can eat steak every night while third world children starve. People attuned to the suffering in the eyes of a child may have a moment of realization when they see the same fear and pain in the eyes of an animal.

Caring is hard. To some extent we all have to build walls to protect ourselves. If I went to the store and really felt the type of agony that goes into each neatly plastic wrapped tray of chicken parts it would be unbearable. So I find ways to not see. It’s hard to figure out what our limits are. I try to continue to advocate for the enslaved birds who are slaughtered by the billions for human consumption, but there’s this ledge where if I absorb too much I’ll be left useless and silenced. Others build their walls at thinking of animals at all, because they want to continue eating them or because they fear knowing and feeling too much.

Some people insulate themselves completely and find little compassion even for other people. We all know these people. They’re probably the first ones to ask “how can you waste time being vegan? Why aren’t you helping children?” But when we look at them we don’t see much in the way of caring. Rather than somehow conserving their compassion by writing off animals, they’ve stunted their compassion. I don’t know many people who are overflowing with compassion and empathy in one area, but feel nothing in regard to other issues. I do know people who will say of another issue “Oooh, that’s terrible, that’s so sad, but I’m really working full time on this other issue.” But at least that’s an indication that it matters, that all suffering, all injustice matters.
My opinion on this is that love feeds love, empathy feeds empathy, caring leads to caring. Opening up our hearts helps those hearts to grow larger and hold more. Of course we must take care to avoid despair, to avoid burnout, and to extend the same empathy to ourselves that we give to others. But the flip side is that ignoring suffering in one place makes it easier to walk past it in another place. Bitterness breeds more bitterness. If people believe themselves to be limited in the amount of love they can feel, then they become limited.

I know I tell bad people stories here a lot, but maybe one more time this has relevance. Years ago I went to a fancy party. I lived in Mt. Pleasant at the time and got around by public transportation, and I loved that eclectic inner city mix I found there. This party was in a wealthy suburb and almost everyone attending was well off and lived in huge houses on wooded lots in an exclusive neighborhood. I was so out of place, in fact I no sooner had walked in the door than I got snarky comments on my clothes. “Did you wear a prom dress?” one woman asked with a smirk.

Anyway, during this party I ended up in conversation with a young woman about my age. Her complaint that she kept repeating was that her commute to work was awful; something a lot of people can sympathize with. But then she said that part of the problem with her commute was that she cut through a residential area and always wound up behind a special school bus that picked up disabled students. She described with annoyance how the school bus would stop, and then all traffic had to stop too, no passing a school bus. She said that the bus then slowly lowered a ramp, then the driver got out of the bus to slowly push a student in a wheel chair onto the ramp. The driver would slowly make sure the wheel chair was in the correct position and secure before going back into the bus. Then he would slowly raise the ramp back up, at a leisurely pace he’d help the student to a spot in the bus, and then finally let traffic past. A couple blocks later the whole process would repeat. This young woman commuter felt that the school bus should be required to wait until after rush hour to pick up the disabled students.

Now aside from the obvious solution to this problem: leave the house twenty minutes earlier, there’s another issue here. It’s about not thinking what it must be like to be a student who wants to go to school, but faces so many obstacles in doing so. I’m sure that student would love to take the regular bus, to dash up the step in a few seconds and grab a seat among all the other students. That’s not the hand he was dealt, and all it takes is trying to step into his shoes for a moment or two to lose the impatience. Just like all it takes is trying to step into the world of a chicken who never sees sunlight, who never moves freely, who never lives except packed so tight with other chickens that she can’t run or stretch her wings to know that our treatment of these birds is deeply wrong.

Maybe it’s just too easy to put on the blinders. If all we just think about ourselves then we don’t need to take on the emotional burden of caring. But once we open ourselves up to caring it can snowball, we find more empathy in ourselves than we thought possible.

Revisiting Moral Superiority Again

As I continue in a world that wants to reject veganism because they think I’m being somehow conceited in how I present it, I recognize a quandary ahead. People who “preach” against smoking might come off as suffering from a superiority complex, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong about smoking. On the other hand, just being vegan doesn’t make someone a good person or solve all the problems in his or her life.

So I have to back up a little and take another look. I think I’m a better person now, as a vegan, than I used to be before I became vegan. I don’t think I was a bad or malicious person before going vegan, but I was uninformed and unaware, and I did hurt animals. I have hurt people as well in all kinds of avoidable and unavoidable ways. And just being vegan doesn’t mean I won’t ever hurt anyone again. But I hope I’m becoming more aware and more thoughtful in many areas of my life and I hope that leads me to be a better person in many ways.

But I can’t set a vegan and a regular every day meat-eating American next to each other and with no further information declare the vegan a better person. I can pretty much say the vegan is most likely far better to animals, and I would hope that someone with a dedication to veganism is good to the environment in many ways. But in the land of hypothetical it’s possible to have a vegan (in terms of diet, buying habits, and lifestyle) who really isn’t very good to people.

To clarify here, most vegans I know are very caring people, which is what lead them to become vegan in the first place. Most of the vegans I know care deeply about other people as well as animals. Most volunteer in all kinds of ways and are the first to help another person, whether it’s dashing in to help them pick up dropped groceries or donating to help disaster victims rebuild. So I do think that most vegans care deeply about the world and about others. But in theory it’s possible to have a mean spirited vegan and a very compassionate omnivore who just isn’t educated on animal issues.

So, do I think everyone who eats animals is a bad person? No. Do I think I’m better than they are? I can’t say. If you compare me to a serial killer, then yes. Compare me to Mother Theresa, I’m going to say no. In between lie all kinds of gradations that would be impossible to sort out. But I think that the difference between Joe Bloe as he is now, caring and working and helping, but still eating animals and animal products, and the Joe Bloe that might be, a vegan Joe Bloe who still helps his community as before… I think that going vegan makes someone a better version of themselves.

I say that with full recognition that there are many things I still can and probably should do to make me a better version of myself. Is it ok for me to talk about veganism even while I know I’m not perfect, even admitting I could be better. My take is yes, it’s still valid to talk about veganism. Our treatment of animals, and the large scale use of animals in agriculture, is such a huge area that it affects everything from how we treat each other, to global warming, to ethical debates, to the very nature of empathy. I’ll work on becoming a little more polite, but let’s all of us work on the animal issues too.