Pootie Pics in the New York Times!

With apologies to Phillygal...

It ain't the front page, but Pootie made the lead story in today's Week in Review section!

Pootie supports the troops, but wants them to come home now... and wants to come home with them! Follow me over the jump for more...

I lived in New York City for 4 years, right after I graduated from college. It was a wonderful experience that left its mark on me in many ways, one of the more conspicuous of which is my longtime subscription to the Sunday print edition of the New York Times, which has followed me to 3 different cities since I left New York.

The Week in Review is my favorite section of the Sunday Times. (Actually, that's not quite true; what I really live for is the crossword puzzle in the back of the Magazine section, but we don't need to discuss my obsessive-compulsive habits here.) I look over the front page first, but the WiR is usually the first thing I read closely. So as a hard-core cat lover, I was delighted this morning when I pulled out the section and saw this picture!

The article is What Cats Know About War, and in it the Baghdad bureau chief, John F. Burns, describes the cat population that makes its home in around the Times' Baghdad compound. He recounts what moved him to adopt one of them as his own:

That is when I heard it: the cry of an abandoned kitten, somewhere out in the darkness... By an animal lover's anthropomorphic logic, those desperate calls, three nights running, had come to seem more than the appeal of a tiny creature doomed to a cold and lonely death. Deep in the winter night, they seemed like a dismal tocsin for all who suffer in a time of war.

Burns relates that the American military command forbids the troops to take in and/or feed stray animals, but that the ban is routinely ignored. There are good reasons for the ban -- part of the logic behind it is that "animal lovers among the troops do more harm than good when they accustom cats and dogs to a regular supply of food and affection — only to abandon them when they rotate home, leaving the animals depleted in their instinct to fend for themselves." The availability of food causes the population to increase as well, of course, and there aren't any veterinarians around to do spay/neuter duty in this war zone.

Still, common sense and military rules of conduct notwithstanding, it's not surprising that troops and journalists alike would seek to bond with animals given the ugly daily realities they face. Burns explains why he kept count of how many cats attended the daily feeding time:

In a place where we could do little else to relieve the war’s miseries, the tally became a measure of one small thing we could do to favor life over death.

I know some users here might think it's silly that many of us come to this site and post pictures of pets, kids, flowers, sunsets, etc., when there are weighty political issues to discuss. I don't see it as an either/or proposition, though, and that last quote explains why far better than I ever could.