Status Update: Animal Dumping

So on Thursday morning I posted:

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2020/05/tuxie-thursday-bad-week-at-cat-sanctuary.html

It does mention that we want to help keep cats out of shelters, and that Serena, having given birth to eight kittens, seven of whom were born alive and almost certainly viable, and had them all die while glyphosate vapor was drifting past us the next morning, seemed to be trying to end the lactation cycle and move on rather than extend the lactation cycle and adopt more young kittens right away.

Cats, like humans, produce different kinds and amounts of milk to meet what will normally be the needs of the offspring it's meant to nourish. The first gush of milk that comes in after birth has a special name, colostrum, because it doesn't even look like the milk the mother starts to produce the next day. Then for a few months the mother's body can produce more and richer milk if she gets adequate rest, food, and water--humans nursing babies say they have to remind themselves to try to drink water or juice whenever they're awake. Then the supply of milk tapers off. Cats can keep themselves producing small amounts of milk for six months, and some women have extended lactation in the same way for three or four years, after birth if they want to maximize recovery time in between pregnancies. A cat who has stayed close to her half-grown kittens, the way Serena has to Silver and Swimmer, can choose to extend lactation or not.

Serena has chosen not. To whatever extent cats plan these things, she may be planning to try to have kittens later this summer. This is risky, not because warm weather doesn't last long enough in Virginia to give July or August kittens time to grow enough fur to survive the winter, but because glyphosate and other poisonous vapors are even more of a hazard later in the year. I might have preferred for Serena to try to extend lactation and adopt another litter, but even for social cats who don't mind nursing one another's kittens when they have a lactation cycle going, extending or inducing lactation just to adopt another cat's kittens is a minority behavior pattern.

Heather did it once--not twice. (She learned. Heather seemed never to produce enough milk to rear even her own kittens without help.) Ivy did it regularly. Sisawat did it, apparently for birth control during her first year as an adult cat. But even social cats are more likely to go with the natural flow of things than to try to extend or induce a lactation cycle, even when they're exposed to orphaned kittens. Since Serena was exposed to glyphosate vapors too, it's likely that her milk wouldn't be good for orphaned kittens to drink right after the poisoning episode.

So...I reported that on Thursday morning. On Thursday afternoon someone offered me a lift home in a van. It's hard to shout directions across a healthy distance in a big loud van so I didn't direct the person precisely to my home. Maybe it was just random chitchat when the person said, as I left the van on the main road, not within sight of the Cat Sanctuary, "So you live just down there?" I did not turn around and see exactly where she was pointing, but just waved cheerfully and called back, "Yes, I'm fine, thank you for the ride, have a good night..."  

Maybe it was just random chitchat. But for security reasons I don't like to give out any residential addresses in the course of random chitchat. The security reasons I mean...

I walked back up the road that is "just down there" from the main road, later. All the commuter vehicles parked by the houses "just down there" had already rolled off to work. A little car was parked in the road beside one of those houses. What was that car doing there? Was one of the commuters' cars in the shop; was someone car-pooling to work? No, only one head was visible above the seats in the Tennessee car as it moved away. The people who live in that house are tall enough that their heads show above car seats so, unless a short person from Tennessee had come out to that house to pick up one of the residents, then let that person drive back toward Tennessee, someone had just stopped in front of that house...to hang a flier on the door? To make a delivery?

Then I saw the two cats, a matched pair, not spring kittens but possibly last spring's kittens, brother and sister by the look of them, both sniffing and peering around the driveway as if they were exploring a place they hadn't been before.

I walked another half-mile and I saw a very big, rather fat looking dog, not on a leash, sniffing around the porch in front of a house that is in town where leash laws are enforced.

Attention Tennessee readers. Possibly someone overlooked this part of the post about Serena and me:

"
If anyone wants to send kittens to us, they need to tell me about it first...not just wander up here and dump kittens out of a truck!
"

Goes double for puppies 'cos they're twice the size! Yes, the two cats did look a bit like a cat the owners of the driveway had rescued when he was dumped out on them, years ago. Yes, some people in Scott County love all dogs. Yes, for a lot of people who live in the country, any reluctance to pet, feed, or bring home an unwanted dog or cat comes directly from our concerns about the well-being of our current resident dogs and/or cats. But you always need to ask. Don't just dump animals out in the general neighborhood of where you have heard an animal rescuer lives, or used to live. Talk to the human. The animal's chance of surviving will be so much better if you can deliver it directly to a place where the right kind of food, and a safe place where it can keep out of the way while showing due respect to resident animals, will be at its disposal. Dumped-out animals are apt to panic and run right into danger.

I personally don't like to accept responsibility for an animal until it's at least approached me of its own free will; I don't like to send animals to people the animals have not approached, either. Animals do have to accept and adjust to some changes that they would not have chosen. Their original humans may have rejected them, or may have moved away or died. They can accept an Emergency Backup Human if they have to but they deserve to be able to feel some sense of potential friendship with that person. Many animals who have been pets still feel terrified when they're dumped into the custody of total strangers. Far from being evidence of past abuse, I read that as evidence of common sense!

The big dog woofed at me in a lackadaisical way...not a challenge to a potential intruder on its home, not a cry for help. I walked on, having no way to help it.

What was that beside the road? A bullfrog, almost as big as a toad. It had been knocked down by a car but why had it been on the road? Frogs and other shore-dwelling animals look for higher ground when their homes are flooded after rain. No rain fell this weekend...since the dicamba poisoning. I'd continued to feel sneezy, sleepy, grumpy, bashful, dopey, and also blocked, but actually been less sick than the previous weekend. Someone else had been less lucky because another sprue spew in a plastic take-out box was also lying beside the road. If you didn't look closely you might have thought it was melted chocolate ice cream, but it wasn't. I see this type of mess on the same stretch of road regularly enough to suspect it's all coming from one person, who probably commutes through the neighborhood rather than living there, and if so, that person should move further away from the railroad.

What was that complaining noise coming out of a house along the road? It was somebody's grandfather. "I've been sick all weekend. I think I've got the coronavirus." People like him often say "sick," which I would not use to describe the reported effects of coronavirus, when they mean "ill," which is what people with coronavirus describe themselves being. I didn't ask him where the pain was, exactly, but if he'd had coronavirus all weekend I would not have expected a patient of his age and condition to be standing behind his storm door and complaining. I suspect Friday's dicamba and last week's glyphosate were what was bothering him.

But he might really have it. I might really have been exposed. He was talking through a storm door; I was standing on the porch step, taking an object I had for sale out of a bag to show him, not giving any gossips any ideas about my being with a divorced man in his home, but the door did swing partly open as the man leaned on it. I have been looking forward to getting that behind me for a couple of months now. If the rain that's starting to sprinkle down now, washing the poison out of the air, does not wash away all the urges to sneeze I've been having all weekend, or if I feel the least bit feverish, I will go home and quarantine myself. Most of the people I know are older than I am, and the others are close to their parents, who are older than I am. I would hate to cough coronavirus on them.

(It would be a pity to lose your sense of smell at this time of year. My hedge is just a cascade of roses this week, with privet not far behind. I paused to sniff my roses and iris almost every time I passed them--no, that wasn't when the urge to sneeze struck me. I enjoyed the tall brown-freckled yellow iris, which I hardly had to bend over to sniff, on Jackson Street this morning too.)

What was that fretful noise coming out of a business? "But some people will get closer than six feet when they hand us a card," fretted a worker. The worker was fretting about losing virus-phobic customers and thus losing work time; the worker was nowhere near old enough to have anything to fear for perself. "Masks or bandanas, I can order us some cute ones," the owner cheerfully replied.

I'm not keen on tying strings or stretching elastic bands around my head, or ears. In theory a veil draped over a straw hat ought to be the coolest face covering in steamy weather; in practice I tend to lose straw hats. When that Michaels giftcard arrives I plan to buy some cotton yarn and knit some of what some clients have been requesting, "open-topped hats" that can be pulled over the face if we have to talk to people, around long hair while we work, or around the neck for warmth in winter. The traditional word for such a garment was "cowl."

Some readers might want to think about colors. Black and dark blue might suit some people's taste, but cotton yarn does tend to shed dye when it's new and faded as it gets older. In Morocco the desert-dwelling Tuareg people used to be nicknamed "Blue Men" because they were always pulling indigo-blue scarves and veils over their faces to keep off the sand, and the dyed fabric would react with sweat and stain their skin blue. Some people who don't normally wear white might want white cowls.

Still so much panic about something that's actually not life-threatening for most of us, and so much denial about things that are life-threatening for many.

For animals, too. The incidence of Tennessee animal dumping in Scott County suggests that people in Tennessee like our belief that animals shouldn't have to be sentenced to life in solitary confinement, with sterilization and perhaps other surgical mutilations, just for the crime of being animals. We don't think being other than human is a crime! We don't think a non-human birth is a disaster! But that doesn't mean it's safe--or sane!--just to dump animals randomly out on our streets. Many of us drive motor vehicles just as people in Tennessee do.

My choice would be to move animals only when there's a reasonable expectation that they're not going to bolt or hide. When I've taken Cat Sanctuary "graduates" to their Purrmanent Homes I usually hang out with the humans for an hour or so, watch the cat eat from a new dish and find a new litter box, make sure any encounters with resident animals (or children) don't seem life-threatening. Some cats choose their own Purrmanent Homes, some gladly accept the ones humans have chosen for them, and some have been blessed to move in with friends who've visited them at the Cat Sanctuary and begun to bond with them there, so everything goes smoothly. Other cats, I'm told, have sulked or hidden, cried, or clung to things they recognized from the Cat Sanctuary for a few days before accepting that another place might be their new home. Sometimes this kind of thing seems to be hammed up for the benefit of resident animals, a sort of "I certainly don't want to be in your home," and sometimes social cats then proceed to bond with normal resident cats, after which they'll nonverbally tell us they do not want to go home with me any more! It's possible to move animals in a sufficiently tactful way that the move might as well have been the animals' own idea.

"I don't have time to do that. I'm a busy working parent with a geriatric busybody of a mother and a seriously disabled grandmother to worry about! I don't even have time to hang out with the school friend I swore would be my Best Friend Forever, much less make new friends. I need to move this animal out of the house my mother and grandmother have to vacate, right now!" What a regrettable, even deplorable, way to live...I do understand that, through no fault of their own, some people's lives do become crowded, and pets are likely to be among the first things they want to shove away as they struggle for breathing room. So you feel a need to make the cat be somewhere else right now and at least you don't want to put it in a shelter. That can happen. But you can take the time to confirm that someone, however partial to that kind of animal the person may be, can get the poor, scared, grieving animal into a pen or cage where it won't run out in front of a truck.