Goodbye, cats.
Years ago I climbed up to San Miniato al Monte to see a favorite painting. Along the way I ran into a woman who takes care of the feral cats at the church down the mountain a bit. I tried to give her money and she thought it was for her and declined. In my “restaurant Italian” I told her it was for the cats, the gatti. She accepted it and since then I always left money there for “dei gatti.”
In shelters I’ve taken care of numerous cats, but more so when I started to help spay and neuter feral cats. One hundred to 200 cats came in to a clinic every month for spay/neuter. Caretakers trapped them in humane traps and we took care of their diseases, vaccinated for diseases, checked them out for fleas and looked after them in their individual crates until their caretakers could take them back to their colony.
It’s not their fault they’re out there, it’s ours. Two reproducing cats can produce up to 620,000 cats in seven years, left to their own devices. Cats are strewn along roadways or dumped at community centers or behind fast food restaurants and become feral.
For over 20 years I’ve campaigned for responsible pet ownership and I don’t talk the talk, I walk the walk. We have one animal, a dog, who we got from a shelter at six weeks and she’d been spayed two days before that. That’s abuse in my book. Two months later she started flopping around and couldn’t do stairs and she had the worst hip dysplasia her surgeon had ever seen. Two hip excisions at 6 and 8 months allowed her to grow her own hips and be a nearly normal dog. I only worry when an exuberant pup twice her size jumps on her. Otherwise she can run short stints and can catch and kill a mouse in an instant, and drop it on command.
I’ve created volunteer projects and supervised team leaders for Cares organizations, and worked with several organizations personally. I took on this assignment because someone else had dropped the ball, and I wanted to fill in. The only thing the volunteer organization wanted from me was to sign a liability waiver.
Over many months there has been no contact, and when I resigned and offered to train a new person there was no contact. I’m done. Sorry, kitties. Let’s hope the organization takes more care of the animals that have been surrendered to their care, than it does of their volunteers.
As for me, this was an anomaly, I always used to be at least knee-deep in some animal cause. Right now I’m happy with Zoe and Fish, who is growing a new fin even though at age two, he’s near fin (the end).
And yes, I’ll always leave now euros for the lady with the ferals who eat spaghetti. A domani, Dee
Cooking with Dee 