The Cat Update

For the cats in our neighborhood we have gotten 31 cats vetted and returned to the colony and have removed 9 tame cats/kittens for adoption. Out of the cats removed for adoption, one was extremely pregnant and gave birth to five orange kittens once in the rescue. So that’s five additional cats that were never added to the colony. Though we originally estimated 60 cats in the colony, that number has been lowered, unfortunately since some cats were killed during the poisonings, some died in other ways, and one we had to have euthanized for advanced feline leukemia. Further a neighbor took in an injured kitten and had her spayed, thus fixing her and removing her from the colony, and another sympathetic person trapped and neutered 2 other cats from the colony. At this point we believe that we have spayed all the females in the main part of the colony. There are a couple males left to get, and then however many cat have gone off in ones and twos to other parts of the neighborhood.

We are now trying to continue care for the cats who are still outside. I still visit and feed Pookie and Omar every single day. Sometimes Lilly or Terry show up, but mostly it’s just Pookie and Omar. Sean built a gorgeous shelter for Leilei and Deedee and they sleep there every night and we feed them too.

Sometimes I’m still heartbroken over the situation. Omar is more or less tame with me now, and after all this time Pookie is pretty trusting of me too. I think they could be placed in a home, but then again our efforts to re-home cats from this colony have not always been successful. These cats often have issues. Pookie and Omar are both ear-tipped as well. But I worry about them out there. Moe, a young male, has been missing for some time now and we have to assume that something bad has happened to him. There are so many dangers in a setting like this. Still I’d rather give them a chance at life than not. And had we never undertaken to neuter this colony, we’d be dealing with a far greater disaster by now.

One thing I found after embarking on this effort, for the first time just as a couple, Sean and I, on our own, was that there’s a whole strange and confusing web of feral cat help out there. Some of this help has been so generous and so crucial, and at other times we were a little stumped by what we encountered.

The story starts off with us moving to a neighborhood where we discovered an enormous sprawling colony of feral cats were in constant conflict with neighbors. Were we to have taken these cats to a regular vet the project would have been impossible. Let’s say that we were to take 40 cats to our regular vet for sterilization and vaccination. So $100 per neuter and $150 per spay, plus $25 for the rabies vaccination. That’s scary enough. But during our efforts with this colony we also incurred a great many emergency vet bills, for a cat who pulled her stitches out, for sick and injured cats. So you can imagine our vet bill would be daunting. Not to mention that we’re living in a low-income neighborhood primarily because we are actually, drum roll please, low income. Then you add the costs of feeding and caring for the cats, and building the cat shelter. Ouch. So we figured out pretty early that we couldn’t do this on our own.

We started going to the low-cost Washington Humane Clinic, but even doing that on our own got a little rough. So we found a group that generously offered to cover the surgeries for 20 ferals. We would still pay the costs for any tame cats we tried to find homes for, any emergency vet bills, and so on, but the surgeries for the ferals would be covered. That got us a really good start on the colony. But starting to manage the colony without finishing would have been a disaster, so we started trying to find some additional help.

We found that there is an intricate web of cat groups in the area. Many of these groups cooperate with each other on crisis situations, but remain apart due to differing philosophies and policies. Some groups strongly oppose killing any cats in a colony, others fear disease and so test and euthanize at times entire colonies of cats for FIV or FeLV. Some groups promote high standards of care for feral cats, something I can’t argue with. Others have elaborate systems of tracking, wanting every cat documented and monitored.

There’s not much I can say about these different policies beyond the idea that we were thrust, alone, into an intolerable situation with very limited resources to address it. Had we not started sterilizing cats, even before we’d documented all the cats in the colony, prior to getting cooperation from all the feeders, we would have shortly had double the original number of cats. In the end we never got the cooperation of all the feeders, but at least we stopped the essentially constant breeding (we had litters of kittens born early March through Christmas). Had we tested all the cats, our costs would have sky-rocketed, since we would have had to pay for the testing out of pocket. We try to feed the ferals decent food, but it appears to me that other feeders put out table scraps and in one case, giant bowls of steamed white rice. I can’t disagree with a group that wants to see feral cats fed an organic and holistic diet, but I’d be happy to see the people in my neighborhood putting out the absolute cheapest food available, so long as it’s actually cat food.

I want to care for these cats and safeguard them. I’ve advocated to neighbors and children for tolerance and kindness to the cats. We’ve taken cats to the vet when they were sick or injured. I worry about them. I’ve spent evenings in the rain looking for cats who didn’t show up at meal time.

But if I waited to get the entire neighborhood on board with caring for the cats (which still hasn’t happened) that would have been additional months, maybe years of kittens, kittens, kittens. If I’d spent the money on holistic organic food for the ferals, that would have meant that many fewer sterilizations.

It breaks my heart in how imperfect it all is, how precarious their survival is, and yet I’m not sorry we just dove in and started sterilizing because the problem would have grown exponentially with each delay. The whole experience just convinces me all the more that when it comes to companion animal issues we need free and easily accessible spays and neuters. I have traps, I’m here, I could catch a lot of cats, but what I can’t do is pay for it all.

I'm ending with a picture of Ladybug. She is a tame cat that came into my care, through my work on the colony, as a starvation victim with the upper respiratory virus. She has now gone into foster care with someone who has a little more time and a little more space to take care of Ladybug. This was a situation that really upset me. She gained a lot of weight, just during the few weeks she was with me, but recovery from that kind of starvation takes a lot of time.

Should Fundraising Have a Vegan Message?

I get a lot of mail and email asking me for money. While I sometimes find the amount of paper mail I toss into the recycling to be on the wasteful side, all this fundraising is nothing new. In fact, in my younger days it had quite an impact on me.

When I was in teens and bundled up some cash from my babysitting and mailed it to PeTA to stop animal cruelty I was only beginning to consider vegetarianism (something I viewed as a temporary boycott of cruel practices) and had not even heard of veganism. PeTA then bombarded me with mailing after mailing, always asking for more donations, but always insisting that the primary way I could help animals was to become vegan. In fact the message was more or less: if you aren't vegan, you aren't helping animals. And finally that sunk in for me.

Now I get emails from PeTA all the time. I got on this email list by signing online petitions via the PeTA website. I think most of the petitions I signed were on fairly non-controversial issues, like urging prosecutors to hold the abusers of companion animals accountable. So I figure that many of the email addresses trapped through these petitions belong to people who care about animals, especially companion animals, but might not necessarily be vegetarian or vegan.

However the fundraising materials from PeTA no longer mention that we can help animals by not eating them and not eating the eggs and milk that they are forced to produce. I’ve read a lot of them and not one mentions veganism or even vegetarianism.

I recently got this email about pigs, as an example.

From: "Ingrid Newkirk"
To: "Neva"
Subject: Is there something you don't know about pigs?
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:31:26 GMT

Dear Neva,

You can help end the abuse of pigs on factory farms today with your gift to PETA.
[http://getactive.peta.org/ct/613Nb2S1dEcc/]

Do you know how pigs in the U.S. live their lives?

Fact #1: In the U.S., more than 97 percent of pigs-smart, social, interesting animals-are raised on factory farms. They spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy warehouses, where they never see the sun or breathe fresh air. Because of their hideous living conditions, more than 70 percent of the pigs have pneumonia by the time they are kicked and prodded onto trucks bound for slaughterhouses. As piglets, they are ripped away from their mothers when they are less than 1 month old and dosed with antibiotics, and they have their tails, teeth, and testicles cut off-all without any pain relief. But even that's not all that they go through.

Breeding sows are imprisoned (there's really no other word for it) in metal gestation crates so small that they can't even turn around or take a single step-many develop painful sores and bruises from being immobilized on a hard surface. Shortly after giving birth, they are forcibly impregnated again. This cycle continues for years until their bodies finally give out and the animals are sent to slaughter. After enduring these hellish conditions for years, squealing pigs are poked, kicked, and dragged onto trucks so that they can be sent to slaughter.

Fact #2: It doesn't have to be this way. PETA is taking on the world's biggest pork producers and reducing the abuse of these poor animals. Your urgent support will help PETA make major changes in this cruel industry and reduce the suffering of millions of farmed pigs.
[http://getactive.peta.org/ct/613Nb2S1dEcc/]

Your generosity today will be used to help PETA reduce the pain and suffering of myriad pigs, cows, fish, chickens, and other animals on massive factory farms-each one an individual who needs help.

Please know this: PETA's work gets results! We've already successfully pressured giants in the industry to make important changes with regard to how they breed, confine, and kill animals:

Following more than 100 PETA demonstrations across North America and negotiations with PETA, Safeway became the first Fortune 500 company to make dramatic improvements in the living and dying conditions of farmed animals, including making unannounced audits of its suppliers, establishing a purchasing preference for suppliers that don't use gestation crates, and immediately purchasing a significant portion of its pig flesh from existing farms that do not confine animals to tiny cages. Safeway credited PETA with "turn[ing] on the light of an issue we need to address."

PETA's influence over its customers, including fast-food chains like McDonald's and Burger King, convinced Smithfield Foods-the largest pig-flesh supplier in the world-to agree to phase out all gestation crates on its company-owned factory farms within a decade. Currently, at any given minute, more than 1 million mother pigs are confined by Smithfield to these hideous crates.

Just a few days later, Maple Leaf Foods, the largest pig flesh-producer in Canada, announced that it would follow suit. Then, almost immediately afterward, another massive pig-flesh supplier-Cargill Foods-agreed to stop using gestation crates on
half its farms immediately.

These decisions significantly reduce the suffering of pigs and have sent shockwaves through the entire meat industry. But we have much more to do, which is why we very much need your help.

PETA's high-profile protests and media outreach, consumer boycotts, and undercover investigations are doing what no one thought was possible: getting the world's worst abusers of animals to clean up their acts. And none of this would be possible without your caring support.

Please make a generous donation to PETA online right now. [http://getactive.peta.org/ct/613Nb2S1dEcc/] Your gift will help sustain our relentless defense of pigs and other animals who are, even as I write this, being abused, exploited, and killed.

Thank you for showing, once again, that all animals deserve our compassion.

Kind regards,

Ingrid E. Newkirk
President

P.S. Pigs are exceptionally intelligent, sensitive animals and are often compared to dogs for being smart, friendly, loyal, and playful. They're also naturally very clean and go out of their way to avoid soiling their living areas, which is impossible in factory-farm conditions. Pigs love to spend hours socializing and exploring their surroundings. Few will ever get the chance to do so. With your support, [http://getactive.peta.org/ct/613Nb2S1dEcc/] we can help stop the very worst abuses of these animals. Thank you for all you do.

This message was sent to “Neva”. To modify your e-mail communication preferences or update your personal profile, visit your subscription management page at:

http://getactive.peta.org/PETA/smp.tcl?nkey=8ekdb6w407w763i3&

To stop ALL e-mail from PETA's Online Community, reply via e-mail with "remove" in the subject line, or use the following link:

http://getactive.peta.org/PETA/remove-domain-direct.tcl?ctx=center&nkey=8ekdb6w407w763i3&

This e-mail was sent by:

PETA
501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510
United States

I’m including the entire email here because I think that many of you, on reading this whole long message, will be as perplexed as I am, as to why PeTA could not manage even one sentence in there urging the reader to stop eating pigs, or to go vegetarian, or even a link to vegan information. But when I clicked on the links that used to be here (copying and pasting seems to have messed them up) they only took me to an on-line donation form urging me support their efforts to fight the worst abuses of factory farming. Further on the donation page I saw no further links that might take me to specifically vegan information. There was a link that took me to the main PeTA webpage and from there I could presumably seek out vegan information. But there wasn’t even a tricky little “click here to learn more about how to help pigs” that linked to vegan BBQ recipes.

I understand the need to raise money, I’m not taking issue with that. However, I think that we always need to keep as on message as possible. A lot of people get these messages, hopefully at least some of those people read them. Since the emails will go out asking for money anyway, shouldn’t there also be a vegan message put in there, somewhere?

Feeling Unheard

After the trial last December I ended up becoming really depressed. The trial felt like an example in miniature of the issues that ran through the rest of my life. I felt like I had been punished for trying to protect myself. I felt like I’d been accused of horrible things and never given a chance to tell my side of the story. I felt like I’d tried to do the right thing and ended up being dismissed, not listened to, not believed. And if the trial were my only concern I guess I could have gotten past that more quickly, but I felt these same themes kept cropping up elsewhere.

Around this same time I’d been engaged in the seemingly endless and largely pointless debate over the viewpoint dubbed “animal welfare” and the one we call “abolition.” If you read this blog, then you kind of know how I am. I make mistakes, I sometimes say stuff that I realize later was stupid, but most of the time I just bleed emotions all over the page and I’m more or less the same way when I say something to someone face to face. I strive toward honesty, both in terms of factual honesty and honesty about how I’m feeling and why.

And just to note: while some find the overly emotional approach a little self-indulgent, it’s not something I do without thought. I feel like I’d rather say to someone “I’m upset and this, this and this are why I’m upset” instead of pretending that I’m totally emotionless and impartial, all the while still having those same emotions color my understanding of events and arguments. A lot of the time I’m admitting to myself how I feel so I can do that little sanity check “Am I angry over the situation itself or how it’s being handled?” “Am I over-reacting because this reminds me of past situations where I was angry?” “Am I letting other stuff in my life come too much into this situation?” Because I don’t think pretending to be impartial works, but I do sometimes think that those who believe themselves impartial can cut themselves off from understanding their own viewpoint, and so are also cut off from understanding the viewpoint of others.

So, to sum up, I bleed emotions all over the page…

When someone accuses me of something I have to take a step back and consider: 1) what is the other person really saying? And 2) is this possibly true? So it messed with me a tad to be accused at various times during this debate of being “anti-animal,” of being a “dogmatic extremist” and so on. Emotions are high and I know to take these comments with a grain of salt. But still, it all felt a little unfair for me to be accused of such terrible motives or such defects of character, when from my viewpoint I was pouring my heart out trying to explain why I find myself taking this stance. And I do—I’ve poured my heart out on this blog, on message boards, in private email exchanges, and on list serves. I try very hard not to ever say “you’re wrong….” Or “you’re not thinking…” or “you’re being dogmatic….” Or whatever. I try to say “when I was up to my elbows in blood and pus, trying to save these animals, it struck me that I’d be doing triage like this the rest of my life, and others will do it after I’m gone, unless we could start trying to change the basic relationship we have with animals, and the more I read about this, the more convinced I became that concentrating on teaching veganism, as a philosophy, as a way of life, should be our primary focus.”

I’m over simplifying, but that’s more or less it. I’ve tried a lot of different types of activism, and I’m totally willing to admit that a lot of those efforts were dismal failures on my part. I don’t want to insult anyone else or take away from the very good work they put in for animals, but I also think that I’m saying what I’m saying out of some hard-fought experience and lessons learned from mistakes. But I found that most of the responses I got accused me of being some animal-industry plant, of secretly hating animals and wanting them to suffer, of not being intelligent enough to form my own thoughts, of not having even one valid point.

I think this is when I started not wanting to blog anymore. When I saw so plainly how other people might twist my words around, when I saw that for many it didn’t matter what I said because they were already determined not to read or listen, from their foregone conclusion I could have nothing worth saying… Well, then why bother?

So I trapped and rescued cats. The winter was spent on sick family members, various emergencies, and cats. And that has some good news. Sean and I managed to trap most of the cats in our neighborhood and rescue some more of the tame ones, and we’re starting to feel, for the first time in years, like there is actually some hope for this really terrible cat situation. But I didn’t blog and I didn’t talk to other activists, because I felt on some level that if nobody was going to even listen, then why I should put the effort in?

Listening, by the way, doesn’t automatically mean agreeing. And agreeing doesn’t automatically mean agreeing on all points. But as general rule, if I can’t paraphrase what the other person said, and have the speaker more or less agree “yeah, that’s what I said,” if I can’t do that, I haven’t really listened. The email and online debates convinced me that most people weren’t listening, maybe didn’t even want to listen. When it kept deteriorating to me saying “that’s not at all what I said” and the other person more or less repeating “did too” then there’s no communication of any kind going on there.

That, on top of living day in and out with the real possibility of the death of someone close hanging over us. Thinking about death while needing to give a peaceful death to a sick animal. Thinking about death while force-feeding an animal so starved that she wouldn’t eat on her own. That was the kind of winter I had. I know these are common experiences. I know we all confront death and living in our own lives in our own ways. I know everyone eventually faces those questions of when is it time to give up and welcome death and when is it right to fight with all we have toward life. I know we all fall down and then get back up and lick our wounds and move on. But even knowing the universal nature of these issues, I still felt powerless to speak of them.

I skipped the United Poultry Concerns Conference that was supposed to help us sort out once and for all the Welfare Vs. Abolition debate. I kind of figured that I had heard most of the same arguments before, and I was still haunted by that idea that nobody was listening. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe some people do listen. But I just had this feeling that no matter what people were saying, in private they said and thought that the other side had nothing valid to say at all. I know that’s unfair, each person speaking there is an individual and I am not a mind reader so I have no idea what they thought privately. It’s just that discouragement in me speaking up, urging me to assume that nobody is willing to consider any point of view but their own.

Anyway, I’m trying to stay a little more positive than I’ve been lately. I’ve had a number of activists tell me that my actual problem isn’t that nobody listens, but that DC is a mean town. They’ll tell me how much better they feel not living in city that encourages lies, interpersonal politics, and character assassination as a way of life. Well, I’m not moving any time soon. I’m still looking for my own ways to feel effective. A few people had asked why I haven’t been posting, so this is sort of where I’ve been for some time now.