It's hard to believe that the junior cat Pastel was still only edging up on her third birthday. It feels as if she'd been here for a long time. Though not long enough.
The Queen Cat, Serena-Seralini, has a wide frame because she had a Manx great-grandfather. When she was growing up I thought she'd have to be spayed, to prevent any more Manx kittens being born. They're often born with birth defects that eitther cause a painful death in the first month of life, or doom them to a miserable life. Serena outsmarted me. She gave birth to four beautiful, perfect kittens, and one that wandered out into the snow and died, on a snowy night before other cats had started thinking about starting kittens.
The COVID panic was still going on. There was no reliable Internet service. I had lots of time to watch Serena rear those healthy, mannerly kittens. When they were sick and needed medicine for a day or two, they stayed in their basket for exactly four hours, then lined up and waited for their medicine. When they were bouncing around outdoors in the daytime but needed to come in at night, they waited outside the door. People couldn't believe kittens could behave so well until they'd seen it, but they did see it. There are still people who want one of Serena's kittens.
That's because the ones who were exposed to glyphosate vapors, before birth or while young, have not survived. Serena didn't show a significant glyphosate reaction. Her kittens did. That's the Seralini Effect: some female bodies, sometimes against the stated wishes of female humans, survive exposure to poison by storing the toxins in the placentas during pregnancy. That may be enough to kill a fetus at once. Or the fetus may be stillborn or deformed. Or it may live until it's exposed to the same poison again after birth, and no longer. One year Serena gave birth to one dead kitten and eight living ones all at once. (She bulged, and seemed impatient to get them out, but they were all normal-size.) The eight kittens had been fed, and shown to me, and adored, and then a blast of glyphosate vapors blew over the Cat Sanctuary, and all eight kittens died.
Serena loves kittens but she's selective. Why did that first kitten wander into the snow? While tending kittens Serena has cleaned some with licks that pushed them in to their nesst, and some with licks that pushed them aside. Smell and taste allow mother animals to perceive several things about their young that aren't apparent to the eye. Often they can recognize conditions that will make a baby animal hard or impossible to rear. Serena has a tendency to give birth to normal-sized kittens and large kittens, and reject the large ones.
In 2022 someone had the idea that it would be terribly cute to name the kittens after writing tools. Biro, Pastel, and Crayola were the large kittens born that year. There were some small ones called Bic, Sharpie, and Ticonderoga (Tyke). Pastel was the one I saw Serena pushing away from the others. She had already pushed Crayola.
"I want to keep the calico kittens," I said to Serena.
"Well I don't," Serena nonverbally said. "They're overgrown. They get it from their father. They'll grow up stupid and weak like him."
"If you want to rear kittens in the office, you have to rear the calicos," I said.
So Serena, and her older daughter Silver who had kittens later that week, reared their kittens in the office. Several kittens died in the first glyphosate spray poisoning that year. Pastel and Crayola survived; Crayola was very pretty. Pastel had a prettier, more distinctive coat, but what people noticed about her face was almost always how bleary her eyes looked, because of her glyphosate reactions.
"If you want to rear kittens in the office, you'll have to rear the two calicos," I said.
So the two cats reared their kittens together. Both cats showed the Seralini effect. Biro, Pastel, and Crayola moved outdoors. The others died and were removed from the office. Biro was adopted. I kept the calico kittens.
Crayola grew up quickly, and was a small adult cat when the neutered orange Manx tomcat I call Trumpkin led her back to his home. Pastel had sex with him, too, but stayed at home. I don't know who Trumpkin's humans are or what they call him. I started calling him Trumpkin because he was orange and annoying and refused to go home.
Pastel is about as long and tall as Serena but not quite as broad-framed. The spots of white and colored fur form what I consider a pretty face, but her beauty has been marred by her watery eyes. Her reaction to glyphosate, and no doubt to other things, involves watery eyes.
After her second birthday, last summer, Pastel had four "mixed hair" kittens, one of whom is still with me. Pastel has never seemed especially intelligent, as Serena and Silver do, but she showed that this was partly due to shyness and a wish not to offend Serena or me. She didn't do several things other cats instinctively did until Serena or I had demonstrated them, or pushed her to do them; then she did them easily, clearly having the same instincts but feeling inhibited to act on them. She was a good mother cat and, like Serena and Silver, taught her kittens to wait outside the door to be taken indoors at night. She was social; Serena and Silver, having no viable kittens of their own, shared the rearing of her kittens, and the three who lived through their first summer are big healthy fellows.
It was just after Thanksgiving when our Bad Neighbor was heard talking to a laborer he sometimes employs. The laborer is not quite a deaf-mute, but has poor hearing and a speech impediment. It is possible to have a limited sort of conversation with him. In this conversation they were discussing a coyote trap the Bad Neighbor had set. The Bad Neighbor, a sociopath who shows no obvious disabilities, had taken it into his head that "wildlife"--foxes, if not coyotes or bears--could be trapped and killed; but whenever an animal was in the trap, it was a cat. Not one of mine, but apparently, two or three times in a row, it had been Serena's preferred kitten-daddy. The laborer had chased him away, again, and volunteered, "If I catch him again I'll take him and dump him out around 600," referring to a paved two-lane road several miles away.
"I'll drive up and throw out some meat," said the Bad Neighbor. "Then there'll be no more cats."
They laughed, but the laborer stopped to warn me. I warned him that killing other people's pets was a crime. The laborer said, "If you catch him."
One night during the week before last I caught the Bad Neighbor sneaking around the neighborhood at night. He stopped short of my property line. I watched, but did not see him trespassing on residential property. A disturbance seemed to come from small wild animals, possibly released from another trap in another neighbor's woodlot. The Bad Neighbor's evil errand might have been spraying New Roundup along the road.
Last week all of my cats were sniffly. Trumpkin had been running around the neighborhood, day and night, wailing loudly that he was lonely; apparently Crayola had died. Silver had gone off with him and spent days and nights away from home. I had thought Silver's being "petnapped" by another cat, who had obviously prevailed on his owners to bring her into their home and overfeed her, was at least amusing, though after most of a week at Trumpkin's house Silver came home so overstuffed she wheezed when she walked.
Actually, last week, all of the cats seemed to have "cold" symptoms. And on one cold night she spent indoors, Serena demonstrated that a meal of human food she had tolerated before was hard for her to keep down.
Then Pastel stepped away from the house--oddly, before a meal--and came back, hours later, looking very ill, gushing watery bubbles from eyes, nose, and mouth. I brought her in, dried her off, and gave her a charcoal solution for food poisoning.
It was not as quick a cure as it had been for natural food poisoning in the past. Still, Pastel had some natural food poisoning, from which she seemed to recover; the first night she stank, the second night she smelled like a damp cat; and she seemed to be feeling better, and to want to go out and enjoy the February thaw. I had some misgivings. She hadn't even started to eliminate whatever she'd eaten. In view of her past, though, I thought it was possible that she might be holding in toxins because she felt inhibited about vomiting or defecating indoors, even in a box full of newspapers.
It occurred to me that the meat might have been deliberately poisoned, but I wasn't sure how to proceed with that. Would a local vet have a way to identify and treat chemical poisoning? Would the police? I sent out e-mails. They weren't answered. Nobody was prepared to deal with that possibility. And meanwhile I was hoping not to have to be among people while I was an immune carrier of Pastel's germs. On Saturday I thought the load of bacteria I was likely to be carrying would be conspicuous and dangerous. By Tuesday, however, a day out in the sun seemed to have burned off the bacteria; Pastel's breath smelled clean to me and nobody seemed especially revulsed by my breath, either, when I ventured into town in the evening.
But if Pastel had been recovering, at least from the strep infection, she'd overburdened her strength. I found her beside the road. Rigor mortis had not set in; it was hard to tell whether she was dead or in a coma. She had been thirsty. She had gone down toward the branch creek, and suddenly everything had just gone black. In the bright sun her eyes looked completely black, pupils fully dilated. She had yellow-green eyes, but nobody will ever see their color again. She had had cramps, but not been able to move any toxins up or down. She had suffered before she died.
She had not died of a strep infection. The odor and fever were gone. She had not had symptoms of distemper or feline leukemia. She had been fighting something off before she had gone out, away from food, as if she thought she were going to eat a better meal.
While Pastel had been ill Serena had first seemed to be trying to help, snuggling up beside her. Then she seemed to give up hope and resent the attention Pastel was getting. I could only hope that emotional resentment was all Serena was feeling. She never was a cuddly cat. Growling when touched might have meant she was feeling physical discomfort, or meant she was feeling emotional dissatisfaction. I backed off and said "It's only because Pastel's been sick," though, strictly speaking in my native dialect, Pastel never was sick; she was ill, and died, because she was unable to be sick.
Now at least I had some idea what we were dealing with, something to tell a vet if one of them wanted to try to help Serena and Silver...because, yes, they'd ingested some of the same stuff. Their eyes and noses were watery. Serena seemed unusually thirsty. Silver was unusually distrustful of me. She's never been cuddly, either, but that's because Serena scolds her for indulging me in soppy behavior unbecoming to adult cats; when Serena's not looking Silver is "the Secret Snugglebunny." But she refused to come into the office and share a meal with Serena. Normally any suggestion of a meal being served in the office would have brought Silver running inside.
Today, Wednesday, I watched for e-mail from a veterinarian or at least another animal rescuer whose e-mail I had in the computer. If any of them answered my e-mails, the reply didn't get through. The Internet was up and down all day with at least four "down" periods lasting over an hour each, so it's possible that a reply was lost. It's also possible that nobody else in our small, mostly peaceful town had any experience with deliberately poisoned animals. When local people want to get rid of animals they don't blather about reverence for all life; most seem to believe that humans have a right to kill animals whenever we feel like it, unless the animals are someone else's property--but they do use either guns or knives, and kill animals quickly. Pastel was a portrait of misery for four days and nights.
In the evening I brought Serena inside, although the air was warm, for observation. Her nose was starting to run enough to bubble. I gave her charcoal. If it's still getting into her digestive system, if her insides aren't paralyzed by the poison, charcoal can adsorb and remove most kinds of poison. If it's not, the question on my mind tonight is when and whether I could kill Serena to spare her from what Pastel went through. I don't think I could bear to watch Serena go through that. I don't think I could kill Serena. I know I couldn't pay a vet to kill her.
Most cats will leave the house if their human is unable to feed them. I remember Serena sitting beside me, purring as if to say "Take your time, friend," when I suddenly found it so hard to walk across the floor and put out some kibble during the salmonella episode. When I'd forced myself to do that by telling myself they'd not been fed for two days and nights.
Many, not all, female cats will feed kittens whose own mothers can't feed them, if they find it convenient. Only Serena sat down with the mother cat and the kittens and got the other mother cat's milk going.
Most cats find little dens in which to keep kittens away from light and strangers while the kittens develop to the point of being able to go out and explore the world. Serena built a den. In winter. With layers of doorways that didn't overlap, to create a snug little vestibule around a warm cozy shelter for the babies.
She is, of course, a bit of fur whose color pattern happens to please my eyes, a pet...but she's also a dear friend, in the same way a human housemate might become a dear friend. Sometimes I laugh at Serena, and sometimes I admire her. Shelters are full of beautiful bits of fur occupied by dumb animals who have learned to enjoy being around humans, but there'll never be another Serena.
And Silver? Silver is avoiding Serena and me. She could be less sick than Serena; she could be sicker. I've never been close to Silver, as I've always been with Serena, but I don't think I could watch Silver die the way Pastel did, either.
I think, on the other hand, watching the Bad Neighbor die that way would be great fun; especially the point where he'd feel thirsty and try to drink any available liquid, and not be able to take any fresh water in because so much polluted liquid was gushing out.
None of my cats ever was in the Bad Neighbor's stupid traps. I know because all of them reported for every meal I offered them, all winter. They are technically barn cats but they spend most of their days on the porch, in the yard, or following me around the place. Unlike normal cats, who like to be alone most of the time, social cats like to be together and even sleep in heaps, like baby kittens, for security.
I'm well aware of a number of people, some even well-intentioned, who think it's good for cats to be kept indoors. I'm also aware that it's not good for cats to be kept indoors. It's not good for the doors; if kept indoors on days when they preferred to be outdoors I have reason to believe that either Serena or Silver would systematically claw away enough of a door, or a wall, to reclaim their right to come and go at will, and they'd take encouragement from working as a team. It's not good for the neighborhoods where, if cats don't stay at the top of the food chain, rats will. It's not good for humans to tolerate conditions that make it dangerous for cats to be outdoors where they belong, protecting humans from rat infestations and rat-borne diseases. If one cat has to spend one warm day indoors because a neighborhood is infested with a cat killer, the humans in the neighborhood should be spending that day working to remove the cat killer.
This can often be accomplished without violence, by a simple agreement that nobody wants to encourage a cat killer to live another minute, and so nobody trades with him, nobody speaks to him, nobody stays in a church if he comes into one, and so on...until the cat killer gets down on his knees and begs the owners of the cats to take his property, from which he walks away, never to return, with the clothes on his back if the injured parties are charitable, and starts another life in another place, far away.
But this Bad Neighbor is not only a cat killer. The presence of a cat killer is a valid reason not to buy a house in a neighborhood, and people advertise nice livable neighborhoods by mentioning the cats visible on the street, because cat killers usually start with small animals and work their way up to murdering human beings. Our Bad Neighbor, however, may have started with small animals while living in his original neighborhood, but before moving into our neighborhood he had already worked his way up to at least accidentally killing his parents, one brother, one sister, his original wife, and their one documented child. And it would be hard to prove, but I believe he deliberately killed our old beekeeper and came very close to crippling Grandma Bonnie Peters. And he's certainly and openly displayed willingness to injure or kill me. He is not known for physical courage; he's spoken when spoken to a few times, but the way I've seen him most often, and will remember him best, is trying to run out of my sight. He worked, before retirement, at a chemical company and has consistently used chemicals to harm human beings, along with the petty property damage intended to help him cheat people out of land.
I don't know. I think he deserves to suffer much more than this, but for a start he could be tied behind whatever oldfashioned horse-drawn vehicle anybody still has and paraded through the county, up every back road and to every house door, having his crimes read out to people who are then invited to take their feelings out on him with whatever kind of parting kick they feel that his crimes deserve. Then let him go and try to get into a mental hospital, or just be a homeless beggar, a thousand miles away.
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