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Next the apology. This post really ought to contain pictures of the two calico cats, Heather and Samantha. Well, I can repost the familiar picture that shows how Heather's mostly orange and black hairs are really "heatherspun" together, like the best Scottish wool yarn...
...But uploading new pictures costs money, and although the cost of an individual original picture for this blog is still only about a dollar, in order to make posting pictures even that cheap I have to buy $45 worth of phone minutes at one time. And I have property taxes to pay, not to mention food and utilities, before I can even think about buying phone minutes; at the time of posting I'm still eking out the phone minutes I received as a Christmas present, last year, by not even talking to my mother on the phone. So you'll have to make do with words. Samantha is a dark calico cat, like Heather, but with more distinct patches and less "heathering," much more black, and probably more white hairs although they're mostly clumped on her feet. Seen from above, Samantha can be described as a black-and-orange "tortoiseshell" cat. Like Heather she has a long enough tail that she has to curl the tip of her tail under if she doesn't choose to wave it high; unlike Heather's (ring-striped), Samantha's tail is almost solid black.
Although our new kitten shows no evidence of being a social cat, she may be a listening cat. She knows and responds to the name humans have given her, which is Samantha. Possibly she's failing to bond with Heather the Queen Cat because Heather doesn't know her real name in cat "language"...according to research cited by Jean George, most cats do assign specific "meows" to individual cats and humans in their families, although, just as most cats don't pay enough attention to human noises to recognize the names we give them, most humans don't pay enough attention to cat noises to recognize the names they give us.
Samantha is a Scaredycat...not without her reasons. She grew up in a house near a paved road where cars and trucks pass by fast enough to kill a kitten. Although her first human godparents were kind, they were old and poor, and Samantha soon realized that they intended to send her to a shelter rather than pay for her to be spayed. Then, as if that weren't enough, the school term started and Samantha had to train middle school boys to treat kittens with due respect...which taught her some habits that just might have caused her to be euthanized at a shelter!
Much of my weekend consisted of retraining Samantha that humans and older cats (well, Heather and Tickle at least) are kind, and defensive threat displays lead to preventive actions--placing Samantha in her Safe Place, a.k.a. Cat Jail, a roomy cage, and clipping her claws.
I've blogged before about clipping cats' claws. It is not to be confused with declawing. Clipping the ends of the cats' claws is a safe, painless procedure analogous to trimming humans' fingernails. Declawing is a horrible, painful procedure analogous to yanking out the fingernails with pliers, or maybe chopping off the ends of humans' fingers.
Should you trim your cat's claws? To find out, inspect the claws under a strong light. You should be able to see an end of dead, opaque white keratin, like the dead end of your fingernails, past the core of translucent living tissue through which you can see a pinkish vein. If not, either the claws are already as short as they need to be, or you should hire someone with clearer vision to trim the dead white ends off the cat's claws.
Cats' claws do need trimming. Outdoor cats can usually file down their own claws at the same time they mark their territories by scratching wood--trees, fences, sometimes your door frame. Indoor cats meet this natural grooming need by clawing your walls and furniture. Some cats are nice enough to humor your preference that they limit this behavior to one "scratching post." As a point of policy I trim the claws of any cat who scratches any human or anything in or on the humans' house.
Since the actual clipping process doesn't hurt the cat, and the cat gets extra attention and sometimes a treat for cooperation, cats who've stayed with me for a while learn to like having their claws trimmed--sometimes putting up their paws and just showing the claws, not actually scratching, as a hint that it's time for their next "paw-dicure."
Samantha, however, had never had her claws trimmed or watched another cat's claws being trimmed before. She wasn't even confident enough to enjoy having the fleas that rode in on her removed with the flea comb, an experience in which she'd seen and heard Heather positively revelling.
Heather solicits claw-clipping and absolutely loves flea-combing. Despite this good example, Samantha was extremely nervous about any objects approaching her, possibly as a result of having been poked and teased by children. While being flea-combed she scratched and bit. Although she inflicted a few surface wounds, even punctured a capillary--leaving the kind of wound that gushes blood just long enough to be washed, then dries up and becomes invisible--I could feel the difference between her friendly-warning nips and slaps and the serious fight a wild cat might have put up.
Cat Sanctuary policy is that no cat is ever allowed to "win" a physical fight with any human, so although Samantha had made it clear that she was not a wild animal that needed to be zipped into a heavy sack for clipping, she had all her claws clipped. After defending the first fifteen claws with play-fighting, she gave in and let me clip the last three with no further ado. She was tired, and snuggled wearily against my hands. I stroked her, admired the precision with which she'd inflicted at least nineteen totally harmless surface wounds, and took her back to her Safe Place for an hour or two.
Cat Sanctuary policy is that no cat has to stay there. In fact I'd had some hesitation about fostering Samantha. She seemed to me to be paying attention during the preliminary conversation with her humans, and to be opposed to the ideas of being sold, adopted, or "taken to the pound."
I've never seen a cat act as if it objected to the idea of being "sold" by humans, although most cats make it absolutely clear that they do not like being kept in shelters. Well, there's a first time for everything. Samantha's first human godparents had spent the day hoping their children would take them and a load of things they were willing to sell--mostly old clothes, and I suspect they'd bought the clothes secondhand in spring--to the Friday Market in Gate City, which is technically open from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., but slows down around midday as the most serious vendors pack up and drive to Nickelsville. Then when that didn't happen, they'd hoped their children would take them to the Friday Market in Nickelsville. Then when that didn't happen, they'd hoped spreading out their old clothes in the front yard, and sitting out there with the kittens, would prompt people to stop on the way between markets. (It's no longer legal to sell cats in flea markets, but still legal to sell them to visitors at yard sales.) Mostly that didn't happen either. So when I admired the kittens, I was talking to two very discouraged, hot'n'tired senior citizens who had spent the whole day trying to raise a little honest money and not succeeding. I felt their pain. Samantha went right up to me and cuddled in my arms as long as I was admiring her and talking about what a discouraging day it had been for other people, too, in Gate City. Then she heard her human godmother mention selling kittens, and she stiffened up, jumped down, and went to skulk behind a hedge.
I said I'd better be moving along, but if they had a good cat carrier for sale for up to five dollars, and could prove that it would hold a kitten, or kittens, I'd take it...and if my cat wasn't pleased with the kitten, or kittens, I'd bring them back for no extra charge.
So I did a couple of other errands, went back, saw a cat carrier on the porch and Samantha watching me from the flower border beside the porch, walked up and sat down on the porch, and invited Samantha to come and be scratched behind the ears. She did. I had a five-dollar bill in my hand. She sniffed it. I don't know whether she knew what it was, or even smelled a trace of cocaine (some claim that most of the paper money in some parts of the U.S. has picked up traces of cocaine), but Samantha unmistakably rubbed up against me in a possessive way, then cuddled up on my lap...while the other kitten was nowhere in sight.
It had already been established that Samantha knew I belonged to a very friendly, possessive Queen Cat and her now friendly-feral son. Cats recognize each other's scent from the loose hairs they leave on their humans' clothes; if Samantha had not come home with me, Heather would have known I'd petted a young female cat, and Tickle might even have been able to pick up that information by sniffing the air around Heather. So, from the fact that she approached me, I knew that Samantha was either willing to be friends with Heather and Tickle or willing to challenge them for ownership of me.
So there was no reason not to save Samantha from the schoolboys and the horrors of animal shelter life, and I shelled out $5 for an excellent, fully waterproof carrier bag, and Samantha was duly loaded into it. She then rode home in her carrier with me. Heather sniffed her over and nonverbally said "Poor little thing," to which Samantha nonverbally said, "Touch me and I'll bite!", so Samantha spent the night in her Safe Place.
In the morning it would have been funny if it had seemed less life-and-death serious to Samantha, as Heather and I watched Samantha vacillate between bravado and panic. I stood in the yard several times, holding Heather in one arm, close enough that she could rub her face against mine, and stooping over to stroke Samantha, who rubbed against my hand and ankles and nonverbally asserted, "You're my human whether you're holding another cat up above me or not." Then nervousness took over and Samantha slunk around the yard warily looking for a patch of sand or bare soil nobody else had scent-marked recently. A few times she went back to her Safe Place, all by herself, without being sent there.
Tickle has been at the Cat Sanctuary, off and on, since approximately his second birthday. He has not reported for meals. When his great-great-granduncle Mackerel chose to go feral, Mac was sufficiently fond of me to tolerate being held and stroked--briefly--during visits to the home of his kittenhood, but he never ate the food treats I set out for him and never stayed longer than half an hour. Tickle and I never really bonded and now he doesn't come to the porch even for food. I suspect Heather still feeds him; I know the father of her kittens was a different cat, closer to Heather's age and not as close a relative. However, feral tomcats have valid reasons to avoid being close to humans: domestic cats have been deliberately bred to be smaller and less dangerous than their wild ancestors, so when they choose to live on what they kill, they need every hunting advantage they can get--and traces of human scent on their fur are not a hunting advantage. If Tickle lets himself be tickled or petted, again, he'll be admitting that he's old enough to need to be neutered and kept mostly indoors as a pet. And he's several years away from being willing to admit that.
The Humane Cat Genocide Society has of course extended tentacles toward my home town. Recently another animal rescuer waxed holier-than-thou about the fact that Cat Sanctuary cats have a choice whether to be porch-and-sometimes-indoor pets, barn cats, or totally feral males, and that they're not automatically sterilized. "They'd get bred to death! Inbred! All kinds of things would happen to them...and if they're not 'fixed' you'd have more cats than you could feed!"
It always amazes me when people swallow the animal haters' propaganda so completely that they can actually parrot this entire line without, apparently, noticing that they're contradicting themselves. Cats allowed to lead a natural life don't thrive and multiply, or they do thrive and multiply too well? Which? Can these people stop conforming and think about what they do and say, or must they blindly follow their leaders right over the next cliff like horses stampeding out of a burning barn?
I'll say this much about Samantha's prospects:
1. Mortality is part of life for all of us. I don't know how long anybody's going to live, including myself. I have always had an updated Plan B for the animals if they happen to outlive me.
2. The fact that Humane Cat Genocide Society shelters aren't able to demand whatever price they want for every prospective pet that becomes available does not indicate that we have a local cat population problem. Some establishments that still maintain dumpsters may have a local cat population congestion problem, but the high rodent population indicates that, if anything, we don't have enough of the species at the top of the food chain--and yes, we do need to make sure that that species is cats or dogs rather than wolves, bears, cougars, or coyotes. Rat infestations and plagues are developing in neighborhoods where HSUS workers have succeeded in getting all the cats "adopted" from shelters that demand that the cats be sterilized and confined. In much of North America that may still be blessedly hard to imagine, but in Hyattsville, Maryland, I give you my word it is real. (And Hyattsville is a very "nice," clean, pretty, peaceful town: racially integrated, majority-minority, middle-class, and proud. And rat-infested.)
3. Even if some neighborhoods have an adequate supply of normal cats, that's a different population from social cats. I believe the world still needs more social cats. That doesn't mean Samantha, who seems very intelligent but not social, needs to have kittens; it does mean that I don't want to interfere with either Heather or Tickle (separately) producing kittens. The proportion of social cat DNA in the local gene pool could stand to be higher than it is. Social cats have a natural survival advantage in the wild, over normal cats, as well as being much more interesting pets.
4. Unaltered female cats do not "get bred to death." (Nursing mother cats do become thin and hungry; they can become malnourished, but, while acutely malnourished, they're unlikely to have more kittens.) Social cats protect themselves from the physical stress of having too many kittens by staying close to their kittens as the kittens mature. All the females in the family have consistently nursed all the kittens for as long as the cats were able to sustain lactation, which can be six months or a bit longer if the cat so chooses. Thus, unless a social cat's been separated from her kittens, as Patchnose had been when she came here, or has given up trying to nurse them, as Heather did with her first litter this spring, she has only one litter per year.
Some of the cats in this extended family have apparently chosen not to have kittens at all. Ivy did this by bonding and mating exclusively with a tomcat for whom I recommended neutering, which he evidently got, and which did not affect his "romance" with Ivy in any way. Grayzel had a lot of sex with a lot of different males, after the first year (when she did produce two non-viable litters by mating with her own father), and once or twice every year it would look as if pregnancy were about to damp her style, and then Grayzel would come in reeking of pennyroyal and definitely not pregnant. I don't know whether she ate the phytoestrogen-rich herb or only wallowed in it, but Grayzel most definitely had worked out a feline equivalent to what women my age used to call a swinging, liberated, or cosmopolitan lifestyle.
(Some women, not all who've tried it, have successfully used pennyroyal to "regulate their hormone cycles," meaning prevent pregnancy, just as Grayzel did. Even eating it doesn't always induce menstruation, but merely smelling it can have that effect, depending on the woman and any potential fetus involved. Other plants in the mint family are also rich in phytoestrogens...and holy basil, as discussed in a previous post, is so loaded with them it's been shown to reduce the fertility of male mice. That's why the sweet, clean, minty scents of pennyroyal, basil, and catnip have not become popular for perfumes and candies.)
5. I suspect that the alley cat Patchnose and/or her mate were already a bit inbred, because members of this cat family have not produced viable kittens without noticeable resemblances to males outside the family. They may try to inbreed; if so they don't succeed. But they do produce healthy, attractive-looking, and mostly highly social kittens.
6. There has never been an overpopulation problem for these cats, even when three females produced kittens in one year. Natural selection operates...and social cats are more valuable pets than normal cats, so there's been no trouble finding homes for Patchnose's descendants. They know when and where they're ready to move, and how to make themselves welcome.
7. Cats' normal life expectancy is about ten years; they can be considered "old," expected to spend increasing amounts of each day in increasingly long and deep naps, after six or seven years--about the age Heather is, and yes, she is starting to take long deep afternoon naps and being encouraged to take them indoors. Heather, Irene, and Ivy reached middle age as healthy cats. So did Grayzel. So--as an indoor cat, away from the Cat Sanctuary--has Mogwai. So did Minnie and Pepper. Dusty may well have reached middle age before she came to the Cat Sanctuary; she had a long active life afterward. Magic was murdered; the Cat Sanctuary has been so dedicated in her memory. Mac died relatively young, four years old, because he chose (as did Irene and Ivy) to stray down around paved roads where motor vehicles go fast. I know Graybelle moved out, suspect Candice was stolen, know Imp was stolen, and know Polly chose to move in with people who then chose to move away; for all I know they may be alive still. All of them have been healthy adult cats, despite a few kittenhood illnesses. Magic, Polly, Ivy, Elmo, and Sisawat were small, slim cats; Pepper, Mac, Mogwai, Bisquit, Candice, Heather, and Tickle were/are long, lean, muscular cats; Minnie and Irene were big, wide-framed cats who gained weight all too easily. None of them, except as nursing mothers, was ever skinny, and apart from a few surface wounds treated with Neosporin and food poisonings treated with charcoal, none of my resident adult cats has missed a meal or a day's "work."
We've lost kittens, and this person specifically mentioned whether this has been due to the Manx gene, inbreeding, or worms. Well...in the cases of Grayzel's and Graymina's kittens, this was due to inbreeding, although worms also happen. In the case of the kittens sired by Ivy's chosen mate (born to Ivy, Irene, and Heather) before he was neutered, it was due to the Manx gene and possibly additional paternal-line genes he shared with Irene. Basically Heather and Irene brought up all their kittens together; after that first disastrous year, Heather's kittens were healthy and Irene's died young, and Irene earned her right to claim to be the mother of the viable kittens by being a devoted nurturer. Worms are a chronic problem for all cats and dogs, and yes, for their humans as well...but once they learn to think of pumpkinseed meal as a taste treat, cats have much less trouble with worms.
8. Are they pleased with the amount and kind of food and attention they get? Different cats want and need different things. The Cat Sanctuary has "re-homed" animals who needed closer supervision...I'm willing to let Heather grow old as a mostly indoor cat, willing to let other cats become indoor pets in other homes. Male cats seem in my experience to choose to subject themselves to natural selection. Female social cats really do seem to thrive, as I doubt that Heather consciously intended to type, but who knows, "by sixes." Wild felines do form packs or "prides," in which one dominant male struts around contributing little to a family group of females, so for social cats this female-dominant extended family arrangement seems as if it would be natural and optimal.
9. And, as a bonus...so many of the cat problems other cat blogs discuss just don't exist at the Cat Sanctuary, never have, never will. Most urban pet cats are what was described, in the 1980s, as "neurotic" pets. You'd be "neurotic," too, if you were subjected to lifelong solitary confinement with aliens who couldn't even hear most of what you said back when you still tried talking to them. Hence furniture-clawing, dawn raids on the humans' feet, hissing and retreating when petted, rejecting food and becoming skinny or stuffing themselves into stupors and becoming obese, wool-sucking and fabric-eating, fouling the humans' chairs or beds or food supply, "attacking" the humans when they are or are not being petted or played with, and that whole repertoire of Things Cat Sanctuary Cats Just Don't Do. Only a very few "neurotic" reactions have been noticeable in Cat Sanctuary cats, and both Magic's nonviolent hostility toward all males of every species, and Minnie's hiding when called, were immediate, direct reactions to having been spayed.
10. So then why do so many people tell us that all cats should be confined and sterilized and constantly bombarded with toys, treats, and even medications to discourage their inevitably "neurotic" reactions to solitary confinement in an unnatural environment? Because networking with various animal rescue groups out there inevitably sucks people into contact with large, well funded groups, like, well, HSUS. And these days those groups get a lot of their funding from rich old-school Socialists, like George Soros. And the old-school Socialists' party line was "Eliminate domestic animals and herd humans into stack-and-pack urban 'housing' where they'll be easier to control."
As a general rule, although old-school Socialists were sometimes telling the truth about existing problems and sincerely offering solutions...all the members of this web site have lived long enough to see that very few small-scale Socialist solutions work for anybody, most Socialist ideas are unmitigated disasters, and large-scale Socialism of every school has failed every country that's tried it. So we don't hate Socialists. We empathize with Socialists. We want to enlighten Socialists. We understand that cognitive dissonance is painful, in a way, and it's been painful for Socialists to watch a Marxist-Leninist economy crash and burn, a Marxist-Maoist economy pull back just short of destruction, a Marxist-Fabian economy fragmentate...but even that pain constitutes less harm to fewer people than the disaster of allowing any further "progress" toward Socialism in these United States. We need to be moving away from Socialism on every front and, although whether people live with pets or not may have nothing to do with their politics, a #WarOnPets is yet another dysfunctional part of the dysfunctional Socialist agenda that we need to repudiate in all its forms.
(What possessed the old Socialists even to think of abolishing the whole custom of domesticating animals? I seriously think "possessed" may have been the right word. I don't claim to know whether there is a personal "Devil," but I think a lot of things can only be explained by conceding the existence of an Evil Principle--and it now appears that, sincere though many of the old Socialists were, Socialism was always guided by it.)
So, where does that leave Samantha? Who knows? Life is uncertain. Currently Heather is still reassuring her, she's still a shy half-grown kitten with no natural social instincts...I left her perched on the storage bins on the porch, from which she has to bow her head to accept my greeting-caress. Heather could, very easily, shove her down, or just scare her down by hopping back to where she was roosting, last week, and looking down at Samantha and exuding more of the individual odor Samantha undoubtedly still smells on the bins. Heather is choosing to allow Samantha to absorb the feeling that Heather likes and trusts her enough to let her play queen-of-the-castle. For cats one of whom is merely normal, this is quite rapid progress in the direction of bonding, and suggests that Samantha may become a beloved permanent resident.
(Yes, she's met Tickle--no timidity there! By autumn female spring kittens are positively interested in adult male cats. Yes, he recognized her as a female too young to mate. Yes, he likes her, which I think is a good thing--meaning she's less likely to stray off with some other tomcat. Yes, if she does have kittens, although Samantha has mostly black fur with some bright orange and white spots, her kittens are likely to have pale-colored coats, patches of color on their noses, and extra toes.)
On the other hand, unless Heather and Tickle are able to draw out social-cat behavior tendencies Samantha has not yet displayed, Samantha's genes won't be especially valuable, so she's likely to be spayed. And, spayed or not, around age two she's likely to decide--as Sisawat did--that although she'll always be fond of her mother and human godmother, she really prefers having her very own home, or sharing it with a male friend (Sisawat and Elmo pair-bonded and chose their Purrmanent Home as a pair). So I am willing to consider prospective adopters for Samantha.
Will we be going back to see whether the other kitten can be zipped into the carrier? It was much smaller and thinner than Samantha...sometimes that's a genetic effect (Iris seemed much bigger and stronger than Heather until they were eight months old), sometimes an effect of an asocial mother cat allowing asocial kittens to bully the runt of the litter, and sometimes an indication of health issues. I plan to stay in touch with the humans and the smaller, more timid kitten.
But Samantha isn't looking for a new home in the immediate future, neither are Heather and Tickle, and therefore neither am I. After all, Heather can now be considered an Old Cat, and haven't I always preached that any human living with an Old Cat should adopt a Junior Cat before the Old Cat starts showing its age? Only if Samantha quarrels with Heather (as Inky eventually did) or Heather gives birth to, and accepts, a natural heir of her own, will finding a new home for Samantha become a priority for me.
In other words, I think she's adorable.
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