God Only Threw the Humans Out of Paradise

The rest we insisted upon banishing with our own hands.

Well, now it's one million o'clock here in Dhaka or wherever my time-zone stamp says I am. It would be earlier, or, more accurately, I wouldn't know it was later, were it not for the three-hour middle-of-the-night drive to the wildlife shelter with a wounded house sparrow on a sweater in a box by the floor heater.

And I am spent with this. It is not my cat. I don't own a cat, the proof being a) I never went somewhere looking to get one and b) the fact that the cat who comes here also goes outside. If I had a cat, I would have had to get one, and if I had a cat, he would live with me. Clear, my friends, as an unmuddied lake.

Despite the stark reality of my owning no cats, in the last week alone I have had to try to rescue three or four animals brought into my house by a cat. And the reason the cat is here is the same reason I try to save the other animals: I care about them, and I don't want any to suffer needlessly. Hence, when the people who adopted the cat locked him outside in the summer heat and the winter snow, when I saw him huddled under cars for shade and hunched up on warm hoods for heat, I wanted to give him shelter. Sanctuary. I wanted to prevent his suffering. When one day I came home to find him outside my window on the balcony, I slashed the screen to rescue him then, but left it slashed to allow him constant access to shade, heat, caring, food, and water.

Now, I know of course that animals die in the wild all the time. But the reality is that indoor-outdoor cats wreak havoc on already-precarious urban wildlife - and all of that killing is unnecessary and directly attributable to human choice, which is not the case with robins and earthworms, or raccoons and salmon smelt. And yet I have no standing with this cat. I don't own him by law, so I would be stealing if I were to confine him. And I would likely be condemning him to death by lethal injection, since he is adult, if I were to lie about his provenance and commit him to a shelter.

--And I know from shelters! I have to live with myself for the rest of my life knowing I killed many, many discarded animals - sometimes with no greater justification than that we simply had no more room left for more unwanted pets. Sometimes we had completely run out of foster homes (meaning that all the employees and volunteers, as well, had more than we could take care of), so we had to kill animals because they had the canine or feline equivalent of head colds: it made them 'less adoptable,' and we could only afford to keep the most adoptable...

Any 'progressive' shelter will tell you they don't 'kill for space.' Some shelters will claim to be fully 'no-kill' shelters. But imagine what that means: if every 2.2 seconds a companion animal in this country is being euthanized, it is not happening all in one place. Given that people throw away their pets and their unneutered pets' offspring at a shocking rate, in order to be in any way accurate about being 'no-kill,' a shelter must never accept a discarded animal who is less than 100% ideal in temperament, age, species, breed, and health, and thus brilliantly, stunningly, immediately adoptable -- or Fido or Caesar or Bijou with his limp, or his greying muzzle, or that trace of kennel cough, is taking up valuable kennel space that could be turned over quickly by some eight-week-old smush-face Cavalier King Charles, thus boosting adoption statistics and 'proving' no-kill claims.

What this means in reality is that a no-kill shelter is in reality one of two things: a 'refer-kill' shelter, or a shelter so hideously selective that almost nobody gets in. In the first case, if predictions about your marketability prove untrue, you get shipped off to somewhere else more accustomed to difficult choices and unpleasant ends. You'll get killed in the end, perhaps, just not at the same place your story of rejection began. In the second case, God help you if you look a bit too much like last year's 'Beethoven' just as this year's '1001 Dalmatians' comes out.

So it was that I started out as a volunteer at a humane shelter, cleaning cages and cuddling puppies, insulated from the reality that divided volunteer from employee. But my enthusiasm for the cause was commensurate with my compassion, so I went up the next level. Whereupon reality set in. We were a private, not municipal, shelter, so some individuals above four months old survived. Just not a lot of large breeds, active breeds, sight hounds, scent hounds, or animals who bore the stigma of their past abuse. If you had been beaten down, we didn't have time to raise you back up. We didn't have the money. We didn't have the foster homes. But at least, I told myself, in your last hour, in your last minute, you had me, and you had a hand on your shoulder, and a kiss on your head, instead of another kick. You went gently, and I loved you.

But there is no justification for killing what shouldn't be killed. However fearful or even dangerous an animal in our shelter had become before he reached us, he had become so not through his nature, but through man. And I might be easing you gently into death, but had you only been loved you would have had ten more years of running and playing, ten more years of returning thousandfold the comfort you had been given.

Anyway, ultimately I couldn't do it anymore. Four and five litters at a time, needing to be dispatched ASAP, of three-week-old diseased and deformed kittens born in bad conditions from feral and domestic cats on the property of the same man who year and year again refused to let us trap and spay and release - free! at no cost to him! with no more litters needing to be born only to be killed immediately! - was one of the things that did me in. So, too, was falling in love over and over with little guys too scared of everything by that point to be sufficiently predictable so as to be good pets. Guys whose natural reaction to everything they had experienced condemned them. Guys who deserved, not death, but a meadow and some soft food and a slow, slow building of trust so that one day, years in the future, when they were completely ready, they could roll over and get the best damned belly rub they had ever had.

That's what ended my animal-welfare career. In brief format, at any rate. But back to tonight. Except not now, when I have already made this entry far longer than I had intended, by unintended digressions, which I can only hope were illustrative of something -- if not, necessarily, my intended topic.