Companions
I have really bonded with one of the stray cats we have been caring for over the last 6 months. It's been an interesting experience, engaging with an animal who could, if she decided we were scary and untrustworthy, just up and leave. It's different to buying/adopting a pet, where you actively constrain the animal to stay with you, or they positively depend on you for their survival because they don't know how to live on their own. I know our strays depend almost wholly on us for food now, but we have had to win them over in order to get them to the point where they will not only accept food from us, but will accept physical contact and will even continue to trust after being captured, taken to the vet and then released.
The last month or so has actually been wierdly stressful for me, around this cat situation. I've mentioned before that both of our strays got pregnanat before we could have them de-sexed. 'Gypsy', the one who has become my baby in a sense, seems to have been too young and undernourished to carry kittens to live birth, and our vet was worried that she might not go into labour if her kittens were already dead, so in the end we took her to the vet to have a termination/desexing operation. The process of catching her and taking her in involved me spending a *lot* of time wwith her, and I can't seem to detatch myself emotionally now. I care a lot about animals, but I am wary of sentimentalising the relatinoships between animals and their human carers. But getting a cat who was once too afraid to even share a verandah with humans to the point where she will sleep in my lap on a cold night feels like a real achievement to me. I feel like I've done something right.
This whole situation has got me thinking about the interaction bewtween animals and humans. I would love to live in a world where animals could exercise more choice about how and when they interact with humans. Winning over an animal is really rewarding when you know that if you made the wronng choices they could just up and leave.
I find myself wondering how I could build on this experience to do more for animals, but I wonder if I have emotional fortitude to do anything worthwhile without collapsing in a heap. It takes a very tough nut to comme face to face with how animals are treated in this world, and I suspect I might not have it in me to be that person.
The last month or so has actually been wierdly stressful for me, around this cat situation. I've mentioned before that both of our strays got pregnanat before we could have them de-sexed. 'Gypsy', the one who has become my baby in a sense, seems to have been too young and undernourished to carry kittens to live birth, and our vet was worried that she might not go into labour if her kittens were already dead, so in the end we took her to the vet to have a termination/desexing operation. The process of catching her and taking her in involved me spending a *lot* of time wwith her, and I can't seem to detatch myself emotionally now. I care a lot about animals, but I am wary of sentimentalising the relatinoships between animals and their human carers. But getting a cat who was once too afraid to even share a verandah with humans to the point where she will sleep in my lap on a cold night feels like a real achievement to me. I feel like I've done something right.
This whole situation has got me thinking about the interaction bewtween animals and humans. I would love to live in a world where animals could exercise more choice about how and when they interact with humans. Winning over an animal is really rewarding when you know that if you made the wronng choices they could just up and leave.
I find myself wondering how I could build on this experience to do more for animals, but I wonder if I have emotional fortitude to do anything worthwhile without collapsing in a heap. It takes a very tough nut to comme face to face with how animals are treated in this world, and I suspect I might not have it in me to be that person.