I was part of a number of on-line vegan or vegetarian forums and I think at this point I’ve pretty much left them all. There’s too much bickering, too many insults, and I feel like I just don’t have the energy to deal with it. But there were a number of themes that came up over and over, and so I’d like to address a typical dispute that came up in these areas.
A Made Up Example
Person A: (admits to doing something not vegan, but excuses it) I bought a pure bred puppy, but only because I couldn’t find an American Bulldog puppy at the shelter/ I ride horses, but if I didn’t they’d never get any exercise and I don’t use spurs/ I still eat cheese but only when my mother cooks for me, because I don’t want to hurt her feelings.
Person B: Why are you even here? Buying puppies/riding horses/eating cheese are clearly not vegan activities. Those things contribute to animal suffering for reasons x, y, and z. You’re not vegan, you’re a selfish fraud.
Person A: Well now that you’ve insulted me, I’ll never be vegan! You can’t convert people by yelling at them or telling them they’re doing something wrong.
Person B: How else am I supposed to convince anyone of anything except by telling them something is wrong and then explaining why?
And then we all sit and ponder and wonder what it is we’re supposed to do to convince anyone of anything. Then we all share what it was that changed our minds.
The proponent of yelling and insults says “I became vegan after I was eating a bacon cheeseburger and my girlfriend shouted that I was a stupid hypocrite for loving dogs and eating other animals. I was upset, but then I read more about veganism and realized I WAS a hypocrite.”
The person in favor of non-confrontation says “You can’t tell people what to do. I became vegan after being friends with a vegan for five years. I admired her and finally on my own I asked her some questions about veganism and decided to give it a try.”
The tireless pamphleteer counters “Giving people information is best. I got a pamphlet at school one day and that spurred me to research animal issues and then I went vegan.”
The rocker says “Conversion by music is best. In high school one of my favorite bands put out a song about animals suffering and I found out the whole band was vegan, so I decided to try veganism myself.”
So we debate: what is the magic formula, the precise order of words that inspires someone to change. What we find instead is that when our hearts are open to compassion, in some unguarded moment, the right words, the right brochure, the right song arrives. We had role models and inspirations and examples. We had heavy tomes of information and graphic videos, but nobody changed us. We changed ourselves. We didn’t wait around for someone else to come replace the contents of our refrigerators with vegan alternatives. We didn’t say “that’s awful, but it’s just too hard to change.” We didn’t delay, hoping against hope that somehow we’d see or read something to convince us we didn’t have to give up our coveted bacon sandwiches.
Instead we painstakingly put one foot in front of the other, and many of us stumbled doing so, but we kept trudging toward the goal of a cruelty free life. We made that change and then we found ourselves here asking “how can I convince my Mom?” and “what’s the best brochure to give my best friend?” Because our eyes are open now and we can’t shut them. From this standpoint it’s difficult to understand the passive ones, the change-resistant ones, the ones who see the graphic video footage and shrug it off.
We need to keep putting the information out there, giving out pamphlets, blogging, releasing under cover videos, showing off beautiful vegan food, giving samples, whatever it is we do. Because we want to give everyone the tools they need to understand these issues when they suddenly find themselves open to understanding. We want to keep putting the plight of animals in front of people, so one day they might really see it.
So the question really is, how can we help those around us reach a point of openness and caring so that they can let themselves feel for the animals, so that they can receive the information which is honestly all around them? And if I knew that answer I’d be sitting on a mountain top somewhere showering my words of wisdom on receptive pilgrims.
Since we’re all the hero of our own unwritten autobiography none of us want to let in that creeping doubt that we’re in fact the villain of someone else’s story.
For a long time there was a fad for inspirational posters in offices, you know beautiful scenes of nature with inspiring quotes like “be the change you want to see in the world.” And many of us as vegans take that quote to heart. We are being the change, after all.
Around that same time my brother developed a fondness for snarky posters mocking the inspirational posters. He had one that looked pretty enough, a purple sunset over a beautiful ocean and a large ship. Then you looked closer and realized the ship was sinking. The poster read “Perhaps your only purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.”
Who wants to be the warning? We have such a motivation to cast all our actions in a noble light, to tell our story so that everything we do is benign and all our actions are rooted in love, and bad outcomes are tragedies, but never our own fault. And that in turn is motivation to lie to ourselves about animals, put on blinders and believe that they don’t have it so bad, to block out the voices that tell us we can change our habits to help animals. It’s less painful to just believe we are incapable of doing wrong or making mistakes.
But in a very real sense I am the warning. I want you to try yummy vegan foods, but there’s no need for you to go through all the painful steps I went through to convince you to try them. I’ve made every single mistake there is along the way. Take the easy, high road of veganism—do it now out of nobleness and love. Don’t wait for the universe to punch you in the face to convince you you’re headed in the wrong direction. Although I guess anyone going vegan today in response to global warming and the environmental destruction caused by animal agriculture has every right to claim bragging rights to change via cosmic right hook.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
I Ain’t Mad Wit’cha Morgan Spurlock
So there’s all kinds of hoopla surrounding the recent 30 Days episode from Morgan Spurlock where a hunter George goes to live for 30 days with a PeTA staffer Melissa and her vegan family.
Many people loved the episode, some hated and more still felt ambiguous about it.
I thought I’d try to cover here what I liked about the episode, what I didn’t like, and why I still think it’s important.
But first I’d like to get a couple things out of the way. Morgan Spurlock isn’t vegan. He’s apparently married to a vegan chef. We might assume he has some familiarity with the issues, but he still isn’t vegan. I find myself at times perplexed by this, because if anyone knows the ins and outs of all the disgusting viciousness behind the average American dinner plate, it’s Spurlock.
So this wasn’t a tv show about vegans made by a vegan. Still of all reality tv shows I’ve seen, and for that matter fictional shows, that have depicted vegans, this was one of the kindest treatments of vegans themselves I’ve ever seen. There seems to be a lot of mocking of vegan ideals and lifestyle out there, and this seemed really fair. The point of 30 Days is to move past stereotypes of course, and that was accomplished nicely. So often we’re depicted as silly, deluded even, but in this show vegans came off as kind, sane, and really pretty normal. You know, how I like to consider myself on a good day.
Some people have been less than thrilled by Spurlock’s intro to the show where he grouped the right to vote and right to bear arms in with a basic right to not be killed for another’s taste buds. Eh, it’s silly, but I’ve been vegan long enough to see a lot of silliness, and this does seem to be a widespread stereotype, one the show refuted, that when we talk about animal rights we are somehow talking about trying to turn animals into human beings.
But people get confused about stuff like this. A good friend of mine said she thought the idea of getting therapy for traumatized companion animals was ridiculous. When I asked why, she said that animals wouldn’t be able to sit on a couch and discuss their feelings with psychotherapists. It seems many people are so trapped in human definitions of terms that they can’t wrap their minds around what those terms mean to non-human animals. So Spurlock reached out to an audience where they might actually be and then showed them the reality of what animal rights mean to the handful of people featured on the show.
Incidentally, since we’re all confused, voting and carrying arms are privileges, not rights, and we revoke this privileges from certain people, like felons and residents of Washington, DC. But I’m drifting off topic.
The show has George, the avid hunter, who claims to not be bothered at all by killing, eating and using animals, going to live with the enemy, Peta staffer Melissa and her vegan family and also volunteering at a sanctuary and a shelter. George transforms over the course o the show, growing to admire the people he’s been thrown in with and bonding with non-human animals, and being exposed for the first time to the incredible cruelty behind many of our accepted, taken for granted even uses of animals. George grows to love the veal calf he helped to rescue, he is shocked by the horror of shelter “euthanasia,” he is repulsed by the cruelty and neglect he witnesses.
Am I surprised? No, a hunter, and keep in mind I grew up around hunters, are sometimes different from other animal exploiters in that they create a myth of an idealized world. In this world, we are noble hunters who love and admire the animals we kill. We kill without pain or suffering and bring the kill home to sustain our tribe (now consisting of a couple of people in a vinyl house or trailer watching TV instead of gathering roots and herbs to cure our sick). I’m just sayin…
And because of this it’s fairly easy for a hunter to lament cruelty, claim to be for animal welfare, and keep right on hunting.
Melissa tried to address his hunting by trying to argue from cruelty. She asked if all kills were clean and immediate, without pain. George insisted they were. What about children, they might not be such good shots, Mellisa asked. George said the weapons themselves were so deadly that death was always immediate. In this George shuts the book on the cruelty of his favorite hobby.
So I quibble. No, no, and no. My father always said this too—no shot unless he was assured his victim would die instantly. Yet, he has also told me stories of his friends, out hunting with him, chasing animals for miles while they screamed in agony and slowly bled to death. And these aren’t children, these are Vietnam veterans with sharpshooter ratings. Killing is often messy, horrible, and more difficult in practice than in theory. And hunters are notorious for hunting drunk on top of it all.
But let’s say for a moment we take George at his word. He, himself is the perfect hunter and there’s no cruelty in what he does. And let’s then back up from hunting and look at it as a whole. Most Americans don’t hunt. Many burger-munching Americans are bothered by hunting on some level. Yet, truthfully there is probably more suffering in their burger, more concentrated agony, than in the flesh of a hunted animal, who at least saw daylight and got to run and socialize with others of her kind.
Is cruelty the argument against hunting? It’s part of it. And a basic rights argument is part of it too. Since I don’t live in a cave and I can cover my body with other materials instead of animal skins, and because I live in a world where human survival is more threatened by our over-population than a tenuous hold on survival, I don’t think caveman ethics apply to me. I think that I have no need to hunt and kill animals, and since I can easily forgo this infliction of death, it would be wrong for me to kill animals and eat them at all. Even if I did have a totally perfect clean shot.
Would George, our hunter be convinced by this? I doubt it. He’s so deep in the trenches of hunting that I’m not sure he can step back from it and question the practice as a whole.
So what’s another issue with hunting? For one thing, it simply isn’t sustainable. As we’ve developed more and more land to build McMansions and office buildings the habitat for wild animals has decreased exponentially. Our population has exploded. There would be no way for everyone in the US to eat animals at the current levels if the flesh were obtained only through hunting. Our current lifestyle requires factory farms, since intensive, crowded, mechanized animal agriculture is the only way we can answer our seemingly bottomless greed for animal flesh. George can idealize hunting all he likes, but if all his neighbors took it up he’d quickly find his forests empty of wildlife.
Are there other arguments against hunting? Yes, it decreases the health of the surviving hunted animals. Hunters argue the opposite that herd animals need to be thinned by hunting. But as humans we created a problem. Natural predators take weak animals. This is sad, but it’s a truth of the natural world. The sick, the old, the injured and the very young are killed by predatory animals. People however hunt with guns and have no need to run down their prey and kill them with their teeth. So they take the absolute healthiest and biggest animals, in fact we have an aversion to eating sick, weak, or injured animals. But human hunters leave those weak, sick animals, perhaps ones with dangerous genetic anomalies to breed, and take out the healthiest animals.
Hunting is no benign or noble pastime, and yet if we’re ranking cruelties it’s easier to argue against veal than hunting. Which is the moral quagmire that George finds himself in a the end, saying he’s a changed person, he’s been touched, affected more than he ever felt possible and yet he intends to keep hunting.
But this doesn’t ruin the value of the program for me, because I’m a lot less concerned with what George himself takes away from this than what the average viewer takes away, and I hope the normal, non-hunting viewer is horrified by the dairy industry, disgusted by the treatment of animals, and inspired by Melissa and her family. If nothing else, I hope viewers decide they want to learn more. I hope they want to do better, and ultimately reach their own conclusions about what actions from them will best help animals. I hope it pushes them to reconsider many of their decisions from an ethical standpoint.
This is getting long, I apologize. I’m still not done. Other quips and quibbles regarding the show. Lori of Animal Acres I think lost some really good opportunities to communicate effectively with George. I’m not sure exactly what the right place is to use a holocaust analogy would be. I’ll go out on a limb and say that it was astounding when I saw a speech from a survivor of Auschwitz who was now vegan and to hear him personally compare what he went through, as a twin at Auschwitz who was vivisected himself by Mengele, and apply that to the situation of animals in current times. Amazing. A bad place to use a holocaust analogy would be on my blog… A worse place to use a holocaust analogy is with someone who is pretty much getting their first ever exposure to animal rights concepts. And the points decrease even more in Lori’s situation because she used a holocaust analogy to shut George up and deter him from talking to her or asking questions. If there is a dialogue on these issues, it must be an intelligent conversation I think, questions are not answered in sound bites and slogans.
Many people loved the episode, some hated and more still felt ambiguous about it.
I thought I’d try to cover here what I liked about the episode, what I didn’t like, and why I still think it’s important.
But first I’d like to get a couple things out of the way. Morgan Spurlock isn’t vegan. He’s apparently married to a vegan chef. We might assume he has some familiarity with the issues, but he still isn’t vegan. I find myself at times perplexed by this, because if anyone knows the ins and outs of all the disgusting viciousness behind the average American dinner plate, it’s Spurlock.
So this wasn’t a tv show about vegans made by a vegan. Still of all reality tv shows I’ve seen, and for that matter fictional shows, that have depicted vegans, this was one of the kindest treatments of vegans themselves I’ve ever seen. There seems to be a lot of mocking of vegan ideals and lifestyle out there, and this seemed really fair. The point of 30 Days is to move past stereotypes of course, and that was accomplished nicely. So often we’re depicted as silly, deluded even, but in this show vegans came off as kind, sane, and really pretty normal. You know, how I like to consider myself on a good day.
Some people have been less than thrilled by Spurlock’s intro to the show where he grouped the right to vote and right to bear arms in with a basic right to not be killed for another’s taste buds. Eh, it’s silly, but I’ve been vegan long enough to see a lot of silliness, and this does seem to be a widespread stereotype, one the show refuted, that when we talk about animal rights we are somehow talking about trying to turn animals into human beings.
But people get confused about stuff like this. A good friend of mine said she thought the idea of getting therapy for traumatized companion animals was ridiculous. When I asked why, she said that animals wouldn’t be able to sit on a couch and discuss their feelings with psychotherapists. It seems many people are so trapped in human definitions of terms that they can’t wrap their minds around what those terms mean to non-human animals. So Spurlock reached out to an audience where they might actually be and then showed them the reality of what animal rights mean to the handful of people featured on the show.
Incidentally, since we’re all confused, voting and carrying arms are privileges, not rights, and we revoke this privileges from certain people, like felons and residents of Washington, DC. But I’m drifting off topic.
The show has George, the avid hunter, who claims to not be bothered at all by killing, eating and using animals, going to live with the enemy, Peta staffer Melissa and her vegan family and also volunteering at a sanctuary and a shelter. George transforms over the course o the show, growing to admire the people he’s been thrown in with and bonding with non-human animals, and being exposed for the first time to the incredible cruelty behind many of our accepted, taken for granted even uses of animals. George grows to love the veal calf he helped to rescue, he is shocked by the horror of shelter “euthanasia,” he is repulsed by the cruelty and neglect he witnesses.
Am I surprised? No, a hunter, and keep in mind I grew up around hunters, are sometimes different from other animal exploiters in that they create a myth of an idealized world. In this world, we are noble hunters who love and admire the animals we kill. We kill without pain or suffering and bring the kill home to sustain our tribe (now consisting of a couple of people in a vinyl house or trailer watching TV instead of gathering roots and herbs to cure our sick). I’m just sayin…
And because of this it’s fairly easy for a hunter to lament cruelty, claim to be for animal welfare, and keep right on hunting.
Melissa tried to address his hunting by trying to argue from cruelty. She asked if all kills were clean and immediate, without pain. George insisted they were. What about children, they might not be such good shots, Mellisa asked. George said the weapons themselves were so deadly that death was always immediate. In this George shuts the book on the cruelty of his favorite hobby.
So I quibble. No, no, and no. My father always said this too—no shot unless he was assured his victim would die instantly. Yet, he has also told me stories of his friends, out hunting with him, chasing animals for miles while they screamed in agony and slowly bled to death. And these aren’t children, these are Vietnam veterans with sharpshooter ratings. Killing is often messy, horrible, and more difficult in practice than in theory. And hunters are notorious for hunting drunk on top of it all.
But let’s say for a moment we take George at his word. He, himself is the perfect hunter and there’s no cruelty in what he does. And let’s then back up from hunting and look at it as a whole. Most Americans don’t hunt. Many burger-munching Americans are bothered by hunting on some level. Yet, truthfully there is probably more suffering in their burger, more concentrated agony, than in the flesh of a hunted animal, who at least saw daylight and got to run and socialize with others of her kind.
Is cruelty the argument against hunting? It’s part of it. And a basic rights argument is part of it too. Since I don’t live in a cave and I can cover my body with other materials instead of animal skins, and because I live in a world where human survival is more threatened by our over-population than a tenuous hold on survival, I don’t think caveman ethics apply to me. I think that I have no need to hunt and kill animals, and since I can easily forgo this infliction of death, it would be wrong for me to kill animals and eat them at all. Even if I did have a totally perfect clean shot.
Would George, our hunter be convinced by this? I doubt it. He’s so deep in the trenches of hunting that I’m not sure he can step back from it and question the practice as a whole.
So what’s another issue with hunting? For one thing, it simply isn’t sustainable. As we’ve developed more and more land to build McMansions and office buildings the habitat for wild animals has decreased exponentially. Our population has exploded. There would be no way for everyone in the US to eat animals at the current levels if the flesh were obtained only through hunting. Our current lifestyle requires factory farms, since intensive, crowded, mechanized animal agriculture is the only way we can answer our seemingly bottomless greed for animal flesh. George can idealize hunting all he likes, but if all his neighbors took it up he’d quickly find his forests empty of wildlife.
Are there other arguments against hunting? Yes, it decreases the health of the surviving hunted animals. Hunters argue the opposite that herd animals need to be thinned by hunting. But as humans we created a problem. Natural predators take weak animals. This is sad, but it’s a truth of the natural world. The sick, the old, the injured and the very young are killed by predatory animals. People however hunt with guns and have no need to run down their prey and kill them with their teeth. So they take the absolute healthiest and biggest animals, in fact we have an aversion to eating sick, weak, or injured animals. But human hunters leave those weak, sick animals, perhaps ones with dangerous genetic anomalies to breed, and take out the healthiest animals.
Hunting is no benign or noble pastime, and yet if we’re ranking cruelties it’s easier to argue against veal than hunting. Which is the moral quagmire that George finds himself in a the end, saying he’s a changed person, he’s been touched, affected more than he ever felt possible and yet he intends to keep hunting.
But this doesn’t ruin the value of the program for me, because I’m a lot less concerned with what George himself takes away from this than what the average viewer takes away, and I hope the normal, non-hunting viewer is horrified by the dairy industry, disgusted by the treatment of animals, and inspired by Melissa and her family. If nothing else, I hope viewers decide they want to learn more. I hope they want to do better, and ultimately reach their own conclusions about what actions from them will best help animals. I hope it pushes them to reconsider many of their decisions from an ethical standpoint.
This is getting long, I apologize. I’m still not done. Other quips and quibbles regarding the show. Lori of Animal Acres I think lost some really good opportunities to communicate effectively with George. I’m not sure exactly what the right place is to use a holocaust analogy would be. I’ll go out on a limb and say that it was astounding when I saw a speech from a survivor of Auschwitz who was now vegan and to hear him personally compare what he went through, as a twin at Auschwitz who was vivisected himself by Mengele, and apply that to the situation of animals in current times. Amazing. A bad place to use a holocaust analogy would be on my blog… A worse place to use a holocaust analogy is with someone who is pretty much getting their first ever exposure to animal rights concepts. And the points decrease even more in Lori’s situation because she used a holocaust analogy to shut George up and deter him from talking to her or asking questions. If there is a dialogue on these issues, it must be an intelligent conversation I think, questions are not answered in sound bites and slogans.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Swiping a Meme
I'm stealing this one from the mighty Vegan Noodle.
The idea was to create a mosaic of other people's pictures from the first results page of flickr in response to certain questions.
This was actually hard for me since my actual user name produced zero results.
But here is my mosaic, more or less.
The questions were:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name. I don't have a flickr name, so that one is something different.
Monday, June 16, 2008
The Psychology of Cats and Dogs
So I haven’t been posting much lately and maybe you’ve been wondering where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. Or more likely you haven’t wondered, but oh well, I’ll tell you anyway.
First I lost my dog. I was helping my husband move furniture back into our house after a repair to the floor (you know it’s time to repair the floor when you pass notes back and forth to the basement). And long story short I rushed to steady a falling piece of furniture and failed to close the gate properly. Shortly thereafter our part hound dog, Kyra escaped and we looked and looked for her. People kept saying she was just ahead of us, rushing off to the park, and then she was spotted running across the soccer field. But after hours and hours of searching, mostly on foot, but some by car, we could not find her.
We went home and contacted a pet detective to help us look for her and then we made lost dog signs and went around at about midnight hanging the signs. Returning home after putting up the signs, after our dog had been missing for about seven hours, we miraculously found her, sitting on our front porch waiting for us to come home.
I felt so stupid and terrible, but I’m definitely not going to neglect the gate again. I check it several times a day now.
The Apollo, a cat, turned the knob on our stove top nearly killing us all by filling the house with gas. Yeah, we need a stove with safety knobs, but our house pretty much has the worst and cheapest of everything (installed by the previous residents). It was one of the scariest times of my whole life. We have now disabled the stove until we can get one with safety features.
So there you have it, my absent-mindedness combined with animals paired up to give me several heart attacks in a row and nearly kill all of us. The reason I’m giving for my absent-mindedness is that my one week and two weekends vacation, combined with house repair has exhausted me. It certainly hurt my feet and I still can’t shove the stupid swollen things back into regular shoes.
I had a birthday and we celebrated our eight year wedding anniversary. I made a cake. If you’re still reading this and you know of cakes, I have a question for you—how can you spread frosting thinly on a cake? I made a gorgeous vegan carrot cake and I made vegan cream tease frosting. Then I went to frost my cake—when I tried to spread a thin layer of frosting it just peeled back up taking some crumbs off the top of the cake with it. Then I started glopping on frosting and it looked beautiful. Unfortunately that was just too much frosting so while Sean and I ate our cake we had to scrape off bits of frosting and throw them out. I guess this is not a problem if you love frosting beyond reason, but I have only a medium love of frosting—I like it but enough is enough.
But anyway, I have cat and dog psychology to talk about.
Kyra, our hound mix dog is exceptionally gentle with smaller animals, which makes her an ideal canine resident of a rescuing home. Nikita is a little less sure and affectionate around smaller animals, and has been known to need to be told to play less rough with the cats (though no injuries have ever happened) but she’s also pretty good with rescuing.
The dogs and I on our walks have been trying to look after the feral cats we got sterilized at the clinic. The dogs seemed more successful at first with making friends with the cats than I was. Right now various neighbors feed the cats and the main ones I look after are Pookie and Omar who live at the school and Leelee and Deedee who live near our house. I’m having some difficulty with feral and stray cat psychology I think.
Now Omar was made famous when his picture was featured front and center on the Washington Humane blog and since that time he has grown to be a quite large, very striking cat. After caring for him for about a year I began to feel that Omar simply wasn’t feral. Every single day I walked the dogs out to the school where I fed Pookie and Omar together. One afternoon some children whizzed by on motorbikes and the noise frightened Omar so badly that he leapt into my lap, meanwhile Pookie ran away and hid under a shed. Not such feral behavior.
After this Sean and I started talking about the possibility of looking for a home for Omar, but we were concerned. Buddy who was completely tame and much more socialized than Omar bounced back to us and is now called Apollo (of the gas leak fame). The cats from this colony tend to have hard landings when going into adoptive homes. They are used to roaming at will, even if they like people they are poorly socialized, and they are used to scrapping for food in a colony setting and so have been known to get food or toy aggressive with other animals.
Then Omar got hurt. It was one of the deathly hot days last week and Omar didn’t come to dinner. Finally as I was picking up trash and on my way out Omar limped up, his mouth hung open, he was panting and heavily favoring one of his front legs. My dogs were about to fall over from the heat so I put down some food for Omar and rushed home. I got the dogs inside and then I got some ice water for Omar and set out to see how badly hurt he was. When I got to the school Omar took off. I called him in my normal voice but he was having none of it. It was like without the dogs with me Omar couldn’t recognize me. I searched and searched for him, but he’d hidden too well. Later Sean and I both went to look for him but couldn’t find him.
The next day the dogs and I arrived at the school to find both Pookie and Omar waiting for dinner. Omar rushed up and began rubbing against the dogs. I petted him and then gingerly checked his leg. He had two long cuts, one on the outside of the leg and one on the inside. Both were healing up, nicely scabbed with no sign of infection. So I gave him his dinner and went home to discuss the situation with Sean. Knowing that the only way to get Omar to the vet was to trap him we took a wait and see approach. So far so good, he has been healing very well and still shows no infection. This weekend he was walking without a limp.
I wonder what is in his brain that he can’t trust me unless the dogs are there. In fact as long as the dogs are with him, he’ll eat his food while people walk by. Children can get within 10 feet of him if the dogs are there. But everyone tells me that when the dogs aren’t there nobody can get close to Omar at all.
I’d still love to find a home for both him and Pookie, but that would be a hard landing indeed. Not many people have the patience to go through the fear and freaking out that would inevitably follow bringing cats like these inside.
Meanwhile our dogs have become very protective of Pookie and Omar and will nuzzle and lick them, but they chase away all other cats who try to come over for food. The dogs seem to be saying “Back off, this food is for our friends.” Kyra in particular seems to get mad when other cats want to eat the food, she has howled at them. I for one would be happy to have the other cats come over, so long as they aren’t mean to Pookie and Omar. I got them all fixed so it wouldn’t hurt them to eat a little food from me, even if they then go down to Alberta’s house and get another meal.
So then my next problems are Leelee and Deedee, the other, more feral cats. I cannot touch them, but Sean built a shelter for them and we slowly moved them into our yard. We did this because neighbors were complaining about them and if you remember a while back we had a spate of violence against the neighborhood cats. Someone poisoned a number of the cats and one young cat, now named Shorty, had her tail burned.
Anyway, we moved Leelee and Deedee to our yard, but this has not stopped them from doing the one thing the neighbors complain about most, tearing up the trash on trash days.
I might note that nobody ever tears up our trash as we went and purchased a trash can with a good lid. But many of our neighbors just put bags of trash on the curb. Leelee and Deedee then tear open the bags and eat the trash food contained within.
You would think that an easy solution to this would be for us just to feed Leelee and Deedee enough that they would no longer be hungry for trash, but this hasn’t worked out according to plan. They prefer trash to cat food and will leave the food we put out for them untouched to go forage trash. After a while I started to wonder if this was somehow related to the poisonings. Did they learn by watching the terrible deaths of their friends that nice bowls of cat food are deadly but trash never is? Or is trash just more appealing to them? Whatever the case, it has been frustrating for me since I would like to keep the cats safe and minimize conflicts with neighbors.
If this whole thing has any animal rights message attached it is only that all animals have their own personalities and quirks and that trauma affects them all. We should do better for them. I'm always amazed when people say that animals don't have personalities or souls. How could anyone spend time with animals and deny it?
First I lost my dog. I was helping my husband move furniture back into our house after a repair to the floor (you know it’s time to repair the floor when you pass notes back and forth to the basement). And long story short I rushed to steady a falling piece of furniture and failed to close the gate properly. Shortly thereafter our part hound dog, Kyra escaped and we looked and looked for her. People kept saying she was just ahead of us, rushing off to the park, and then she was spotted running across the soccer field. But after hours and hours of searching, mostly on foot, but some by car, we could not find her.
We went home and contacted a pet detective to help us look for her and then we made lost dog signs and went around at about midnight hanging the signs. Returning home after putting up the signs, after our dog had been missing for about seven hours, we miraculously found her, sitting on our front porch waiting for us to come home.
I felt so stupid and terrible, but I’m definitely not going to neglect the gate again. I check it several times a day now.
The Apollo, a cat, turned the knob on our stove top nearly killing us all by filling the house with gas. Yeah, we need a stove with safety knobs, but our house pretty much has the worst and cheapest of everything (installed by the previous residents). It was one of the scariest times of my whole life. We have now disabled the stove until we can get one with safety features.
So there you have it, my absent-mindedness combined with animals paired up to give me several heart attacks in a row and nearly kill all of us. The reason I’m giving for my absent-mindedness is that my one week and two weekends vacation, combined with house repair has exhausted me. It certainly hurt my feet and I still can’t shove the stupid swollen things back into regular shoes.
I had a birthday and we celebrated our eight year wedding anniversary. I made a cake. If you’re still reading this and you know of cakes, I have a question for you—how can you spread frosting thinly on a cake? I made a gorgeous vegan carrot cake and I made vegan cream tease frosting. Then I went to frost my cake—when I tried to spread a thin layer of frosting it just peeled back up taking some crumbs off the top of the cake with it. Then I started glopping on frosting and it looked beautiful. Unfortunately that was just too much frosting so while Sean and I ate our cake we had to scrape off bits of frosting and throw them out. I guess this is not a problem if you love frosting beyond reason, but I have only a medium love of frosting—I like it but enough is enough.
But anyway, I have cat and dog psychology to talk about.
Kyra, our hound mix dog is exceptionally gentle with smaller animals, which makes her an ideal canine resident of a rescuing home. Nikita is a little less sure and affectionate around smaller animals, and has been known to need to be told to play less rough with the cats (though no injuries have ever happened) but she’s also pretty good with rescuing.
The dogs and I on our walks have been trying to look after the feral cats we got sterilized at the clinic. The dogs seemed more successful at first with making friends with the cats than I was. Right now various neighbors feed the cats and the main ones I look after are Pookie and Omar who live at the school and Leelee and Deedee who live near our house. I’m having some difficulty with feral and stray cat psychology I think.
Now Omar was made famous when his picture was featured front and center on the Washington Humane blog and since that time he has grown to be a quite large, very striking cat. After caring for him for about a year I began to feel that Omar simply wasn’t feral. Every single day I walked the dogs out to the school where I fed Pookie and Omar together. One afternoon some children whizzed by on motorbikes and the noise frightened Omar so badly that he leapt into my lap, meanwhile Pookie ran away and hid under a shed. Not such feral behavior.
After this Sean and I started talking about the possibility of looking for a home for Omar, but we were concerned. Buddy who was completely tame and much more socialized than Omar bounced back to us and is now called Apollo (of the gas leak fame). The cats from this colony tend to have hard landings when going into adoptive homes. They are used to roaming at will, even if they like people they are poorly socialized, and they are used to scrapping for food in a colony setting and so have been known to get food or toy aggressive with other animals.
Then Omar got hurt. It was one of the deathly hot days last week and Omar didn’t come to dinner. Finally as I was picking up trash and on my way out Omar limped up, his mouth hung open, he was panting and heavily favoring one of his front legs. My dogs were about to fall over from the heat so I put down some food for Omar and rushed home. I got the dogs inside and then I got some ice water for Omar and set out to see how badly hurt he was. When I got to the school Omar took off. I called him in my normal voice but he was having none of it. It was like without the dogs with me Omar couldn’t recognize me. I searched and searched for him, but he’d hidden too well. Later Sean and I both went to look for him but couldn’t find him.
The next day the dogs and I arrived at the school to find both Pookie and Omar waiting for dinner. Omar rushed up and began rubbing against the dogs. I petted him and then gingerly checked his leg. He had two long cuts, one on the outside of the leg and one on the inside. Both were healing up, nicely scabbed with no sign of infection. So I gave him his dinner and went home to discuss the situation with Sean. Knowing that the only way to get Omar to the vet was to trap him we took a wait and see approach. So far so good, he has been healing very well and still shows no infection. This weekend he was walking without a limp.
I wonder what is in his brain that he can’t trust me unless the dogs are there. In fact as long as the dogs are with him, he’ll eat his food while people walk by. Children can get within 10 feet of him if the dogs are there. But everyone tells me that when the dogs aren’t there nobody can get close to Omar at all.
I’d still love to find a home for both him and Pookie, but that would be a hard landing indeed. Not many people have the patience to go through the fear and freaking out that would inevitably follow bringing cats like these inside.
Meanwhile our dogs have become very protective of Pookie and Omar and will nuzzle and lick them, but they chase away all other cats who try to come over for food. The dogs seem to be saying “Back off, this food is for our friends.” Kyra in particular seems to get mad when other cats want to eat the food, she has howled at them. I for one would be happy to have the other cats come over, so long as they aren’t mean to Pookie and Omar. I got them all fixed so it wouldn’t hurt them to eat a little food from me, even if they then go down to Alberta’s house and get another meal.
So then my next problems are Leelee and Deedee, the other, more feral cats. I cannot touch them, but Sean built a shelter for them and we slowly moved them into our yard. We did this because neighbors were complaining about them and if you remember a while back we had a spate of violence against the neighborhood cats. Someone poisoned a number of the cats and one young cat, now named Shorty, had her tail burned.
Anyway, we moved Leelee and Deedee to our yard, but this has not stopped them from doing the one thing the neighbors complain about most, tearing up the trash on trash days.
I might note that nobody ever tears up our trash as we went and purchased a trash can with a good lid. But many of our neighbors just put bags of trash on the curb. Leelee and Deedee then tear open the bags and eat the trash food contained within.
You would think that an easy solution to this would be for us just to feed Leelee and Deedee enough that they would no longer be hungry for trash, but this hasn’t worked out according to plan. They prefer trash to cat food and will leave the food we put out for them untouched to go forage trash. After a while I started to wonder if this was somehow related to the poisonings. Did they learn by watching the terrible deaths of their friends that nice bowls of cat food are deadly but trash never is? Or is trash just more appealing to them? Whatever the case, it has been frustrating for me since I would like to keep the cats safe and minimize conflicts with neighbors.
If this whole thing has any animal rights message attached it is only that all animals have their own personalities and quirks and that trauma affects them all. We should do better for them. I'm always amazed when people say that animals don't have personalities or souls. How could anyone spend time with animals and deny it?
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