Alas, it is true that I was raised by people who are far more gifted with domestic cats than they are with more advanced mammals, or each other. And it is also true that I stayed in a broken relationship for some months until the cancer-ridden dog we jointly tended finally expired, though in my own defense had it been my dog and not her dog I would have done the right thing and put him to sleep. But because I was leaving, and he was dying, and he was her dog...well, he was a good dog, anyhow, and he passed on with a bite of homemade muffin and butter on his tongue.
Fast forward a dozen or more years. I have fallen in with a family more closely attuned to the rhythms of nature, and settled into a pleasant corner of Appalachia. They garden; we garden. We started with chickens last fall, and now are nourished by their eggs and their flesh, and I seem to have survived my first morning helping with that harvest with no long-term psychological damage.
We have been, today, handed several further reminders that the economic underpinnings of our society are rusting through, and that we have largely forgotten how to make steel. The reminders out here in the country have four legs and empty bellies, and if you'll follow over the imaginary fold, I'll tell you why I'm especially pissed off at my fellow humans today.
See, my inlaws live on top of what's called a mountain here, though it would be only a nameless foothill back west. It's a pretty place, connected to town by a long and winding road that is barely wide enough for two cars, which is how they build 'em out here in Kentucky. For the decade I've been a member of this family, and the four and a half years we've lived here, they have had one dog, and somebody dropped it by the side of the road a dozen or more years back. She's a nice dog, not very smart, and not much of a guard animal (she was chased around the house and bitten in the back by a deer, after all).
But even though we live in an especially poor section of Appalachia, to my knowledge that has been the only critter dumped on their 70 or 80 acres in a decade.
Until this summer.
Six weeks ago I went out to the barn to feed the chickens and found two starving puppies under one of the condo units we built. You could count their ribs, and yet they were still sweet wiggle dogs. Later I ran onto two more, who turned out to be their parents. The bitch had a bloody spot on her back, probably from going under a fence at a high rate of speed, and I saw the father only once. In the end, because our daughter has doting grandparents, they kept the little female, found some college girls to take the little male, and took the mother to the local shelter. Since I spent part of my junior high years volunteering at the PAWS shelter in Seattle, I suffer no delusions to her fate, but it was the best we could do.
The new dog has some terrier in her, and having sat through the French film Baxter long ago at the Seattle International Film Festival (sitting in the middle of a row, surrounded by people I knew, and so unable to leave), I have some misgivings about her, but she's a very sweet animal and our daughter adores her. Her brother's tail had been bobbed, and I have minor fears that the family had been raised to fight. Hopefully they were dumped by the side of the road because they were bad at it.
Sunday morning, anyhow, I went out to feed the chickens, harvest okra and peppers from the garden, and finish bushhogging; the rest of the family was at church, but I prefer to do whatever worshiping seems necessary in private. From beneath one of the chicken condos emerged one of the skinniest cats I've seen in many years. Purring. Mewling. We happen to have (courtesy of a local distributor, a friend of the family) some old bread which we keep to feed the chickens, or add to the compost pile, depending on how green it is. So I fed her a piece of bread. And then another. Slowly. Six or seven by the time I was done with my day.
She's an ordinary cat, a tabby. Nothing special. She has sharp teeth, but enough sense to nip, not bite. I've a strong hunch that her claws have been removed, for they don't show when she kneads, she'd probably have caught something to eat had she claws, and she didn't use them on me when I picked her up (though that's how I came briefly to be acquainted with her teeth).
Now, I know there are far worse things in the world, like the torture program promulgated in our name by the Cheney-Addington cabal.
It is telling, to me, however, that people are dumping animals in increasing numbers just now (ours is not the only story along these lines). And it doesn't speak well for the people doing the dumping. But what it really suggests is how desperate times are here, and how much worse they can get. The cat and the dogs dumped on us had been well-tended, and probably well-treated; you can tell when an animal's been abused or neglected, and they're dangerous to rescue. Something happened, and the furry ones had to go. Maybe it was a marriage gone south, but far more likely it was an ugly choice between feeding animals and feeding children, or maybe homes lost to the mortgage crisis and landlords unwilling to house critters. Tough luck, anyhow the story went.
Unemployment went up to, what, 6.1% today? There was a piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader over the weekend arguing that the real unemployment rate -- counting partially employed folks or those who have quit looking or run out of benefits -- is a hair over 10%. I'm in that category just now -- which is to say, I'm back to being a freelance writer, and I suck at freelancing. (The writing part...you can judge that, but it's generally turned out OK.) So I understand why people can't feed their animals.
I just wish they had the basic decency to do something more responsible with them than dump them at the side of the road.
That seems a metaphor for our whole society, just now. But it's a good thing I'm a pacifist, and it's a better thing that I'll never know who dumped those poor little animals.