(This was written offline, at home, on Saturday, while Wonder-kitten lay dying.)
First let me say that Americans keep dogs, not only for hunting and herding, but for personal security. Old costume books show that in the Arab countries people used to consider weapons part of men's clothing, as the Bible suggests the ancient Israelites did, before dogs were domesticated. "Thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon"--in those days "thou," probably even if female, got up in the morning and put on thy head scarf that could be pulled over thy face in a sand storm, thy sword or hunting knife on its belt, and last of all thy shoes, which were considered unclean and left outside. How else did humans survive in a world with wolves and bears and lions in it. But we have been blessed with many technological advances since those days. While we can now direct unmanned bombers to kill enemies miles away from us, for personal security we now have dogs. Their prompt reports of anyone approaching our homes are usually friendly greetings; they usually present no danger of anything worse than licking and drooling, but if a visitor seems to be disturbing us you never know. If they're walking or running with us, their reaction to a street criminal might be to distract him by licking his face or just to run away, but few street criminals want to find out. Pound for pound, dogs are stronger than men; a medium to large dog could kill a man in a fair fight, if it wanted to. But they hardly ever want to.
People who object to Americans' love of our pet dogs are generally known as: thieves. This is probably unfair; some of them are primarily rapists or murderers rather than thieves. People who want to be regarded as peace-loving and devout don't have to keep dogs inside their homes but they should shut up about the dogs other people keep.
In the case of immigrants from Muslim countries, especially, and especially including that idiot El Sayed, any objection to the idea that every American home probably contains a dog should be regarded as evidence of evil intentions, along with any lack of deference by a male to all females, specifically including (a) little girls and (b) streetcorner women and (c) women with dementia, and any objection to Christian religious or social customs.
Some of my good peaceable neighbors keep dogs. One family keep big tough coon hounds, and one man grew up in a Dog Sanctuary, worked for a veterinarian and is sometimes pointed out as being a veterinarian, and keeps whatever dogs and cats seem to need homes. He likes to bring them up here, not to hunt for anything in particular, but to roam around and enjoy the woods. I approve of this behavior.
Except sometimes...
Regular readers know my cats' family history, and may skip. This spring Serena had kittens. She has the Seralini trait and one whiff of glyphosate vapor left just one kitten alive. It was the sort of smoky "blue" grey that's actually a faded or "diluted" shade of black, above, and white, below, with blue eyes. Its back end was ambiguous, covered in fluff, but it looked likely to be male, and grew muscular and energetic like a male.
Being social cats, the two younger adult cats, Drudge and Silver, wanted to see it right away; but having two litter boxes in the office last winter led to some undesirable behavior, so they had to wait until the kitten was old enough to eat kibble and live mostly outdoors. I didn't want him to be totally bored and lonely all night in the large cage where litters of kittens have spent their nights since Serena started telling us to do that. I put Wonder, as I put poor Zakitty who never became able to eat solid food, in a smaller cage where the adult cats would be nearby. The adult cats were kind and sympathetic about the kittens needing to be inside at night. Often one of them would sit on top of the cage and let the kitten inside bat at a paw or tail.
Drudge was kind to Zakitty while the wretched Manx kitten was alive, too...but the Blue-Eyed Wonder looked very much like Dilbert, and seemed to throw Drudge's mind right back to happy kittenhood days when he was always bigger and stronger than Dilbert, could always beat Dilbert at every game, and played gently and let Dilbert have a game now and then, accordingly. Drudge is not a normal cat. He picked up with Wonder where he'd left off with Dilbert.
Sometimes Drudge reminds me of his many-greats-uncle Mackerel, nine generations back. Mackerel would occasionally play gently with kittens. He was a big strong mackerel tabby tomcat who spent years in the woods, foraging. When Mac came back to visit us it was to bring his young relatives (he had sons and daughters on nearby farms, but not here) food treats rather than to ask for food treats; I usually offered him a treat and he always let the junior cats have it. After a rabies vaccination I had told Mac that having the jab was just the price of living with humans, getting regular food, and being a pet--and though Mac liked me and liked being a pet, he remembered that he'd been born feral, in an alley, and decided to be feral again. Mac was a protector and defender, though, more than a baby-sitter. He once rode a big coy-dog half a mile, up a snowy hill, until he came to some men who shot it. Coyotes aren't very big but this was not a wolf or a police dog, although it was the size of one; it was a very large coy-dog. None of the kittens Mackerel was defending seemed to have been touched, though one seemed to be reenacting what had happened when the kittens were given the coy-dog's tail. And Mac came home, also unharmed. I've had people question whether that really happened. I wouldn't have believed it, either, if I hadn't seen the tracks in the snow. No matter how big you were, you left Mackerel's little nieces and nephews alone if you wanted to keep the use of your eyes.
Drudge adored Wonder. It was mutual. Wonder was still getting a little milk out of Serena, last week, and he would leave Serena, after nursing, and curl up at Drudge's feet. And Drudge would lick Wonder's face and watch over him while Wonder napped. Serena had wanted him to have siblings, had enlisted the younger cats to help her keep producing milk for foster kittens if any had been found before Wonder was weaned. (It was her idea. I've never made any of this stuff up. Serena knows, plans, and even reasons to some extent, more than a cat's brain looks able to do.) No foster kittens were found but Drudge filled in Wonder's need for siblings.
Well, this Saturday morning Drudge did not remind me of Mackerel at all.
Saturday morning, I was enjoying the Interlinear Hebrew Bible I found online. I know very little Hebrew; an Interlinear Bible seemed a good way to learn more. You have to download one chapter at a time. I had downloaded as far as the story of King David and was browsing over that when I heard animals sniffing around in the not-a-lawn. Were the cats chasing something? No--a cat was objecting loudly to something. "What's going on?" I shouted. The cat objected loudly to something else. Was it little Wonder?
I ran out on the porch. Serena, who had been hiding, ran out beside me. I saw three dogs running single-file through the not-a-lawn. The leader might have weighed forty pounds; looked like a mix of Golden Retriever and hound, maybe some collie or Australian Shepherd--a handsome dog, a dog someone should have been proud to run beside. The other two were much smaller. I could see that one was gray and white--I thought it might be my cat Silver, then saw that it wasn't. The other one was just a small disturbance moving through tall flowers. One dog barked. Drudge came out of hiding and joined Serena and me. Little Wonder objected loudly to something else--from where the big yellow dog was, by now out on the road.
"Drop that kitten!" I yelled. The dog's long hair looked smooth and well groomed, and he dropped the kitten on command. Obviously he was someone's pet. Probably the neighbor who is not a fully certified veterinarian but rescues injured dogs. Obviously he wasn't hungry enough to eat a cat, which other animals need to be quite hungry to consider doing. In what a golden retriever has for a brain, which is mostly instincts and reflexes, very little thought, likely he meant to take Wonder home for a pet.
But he was a lot bigger than Wonder--twelve or fifteen times Wonder's weight--and Wonder did not run back from the road, up which the dogs were running away, to be comforted by Serena or Drudge or me. He lay in the road as if stunned or dead.
Well, he couldn't lie there or he'd soon be dead--squashed under a truck. I scooped him up. It is possible that being scooped up was what actually killed him, though at the moment of writing he seems comatose rather than dead. Retrievers are famous for being able to carry birds and small game without messing up their coats. Nothing worse than dog drool showed on Wonder's coat, and no bones seemed to be broken. I brought him in for safekeeping and combed the drool out of his fur. He didn't rouse. There was a horrible crackling, crumpling feel, though, about the skin over his ribs, as if a broken rib had punctured a lung.
Serena gave us an anguished look as I carried her baby in. How exactly a cat looks anguished I can't explain, but she did. Drudge got close enough to sniff Wonder and consent to my taking him in. Silver stayed on the roof till we were indoors, then came out and rattled her breakfast dish around the yard, as if to make sure I knew she was safe. Silver had acted all summer as if she would have liked to nurse Wonder and felt rejected that he was losing interest in milk by the time he met her.
Probably the dog never meant to hurt Wonder.
Probably Wonder is dying, slowly and painfully but mercifully unconscious, of internal wounds a vet couldn't treat even if there were an animal surgery in town that was open on Saturdays. I did once take a kitten whose only chance at life was surgery to the animal surgery in Kingsport. They didn't save her.
He was so loved. During a normal day at home, the cats do their thing and I do my thing; they don't scratch at the door and meow just for attention. They've been scratching and meowing, today, wanting to know about Wonder. All adult cats in a social cat family show some sense of responsibility for all kittens. All three adult cats were involved in encouraging Wonder to run and climb in safe, age-appropriate places, all day, every day. All three miss him and probably even feel guilty about having felt unable to defend him, now.
Wonder was something we'd not seen before: Serena's kitten, having the physical advantages of all the milk and all the attention for a whole litter, as Serena had--only more muscular than Serena was as a kitten, and more aggressive, presumably from the Y chromosome. Every evening before I put him to bed he wanted to show off the new moves he'd learned to do. He'd grown strong enough to be climbing on roofs. After he'd exercised he would stand still on the ground and let himself be picked up and locked up for safekeeping all night. Like Serena he'd had all the cuddling he needed. Never in his life did he snuggle up into my hand. Why waste a good opportunity to start a game? He could sleep any old time. He wanted to run and jump and climb. He would have been a good barn cat, and had been claimed as one. His "dead weight" surprised me; yes, he did weigh more than three pounds, and stretch out to more than a foot long. At bedtime I was still scooping him up in one hand.
What come around the house in the daytime aren't predators. What killed him wasn't a predator. Just a much bigger animal, who just wanted to have fun--whose way of having fun was more than even a tough, adventurous little buckaroo of a kitten could stand.
Retrievers and/or hounds and/or collies and/or Aussies need to run, and deserve a good run, every day the weather permits...with their humans by their sides, to keep them from inadvertently destroying gardens, or killing kittens, or chickens, or rabbits, or breaking lawn furniture, or polluting pools, or worrying cattle who are not theirs to "herd." These are beautiful dogs. I love them too. I like to run with them too. They can run you off your feet, especially when you want to be quiet and contemplate other things in Nature...but that's why they need leashes.
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