PuddleMonkey

My parents used to have a cat named Fang. He earned the name after attacking a German Shepherd in the hallway outside their New York City apartment. He died of natural causes before my parents moved to Denver. Bird made the move, though. Five years later he was killed by two dogs who cornered him along the side of our house. He could have escaped, jumped onto the fence that separated our property from the apartment building next door, but a barking dog on a nearby balcony spooked him and he froze.

Bipi and Awful died of old age. A stray dog attacked and killed Sophie, the cutest little Russian Grey I’ve ever seen.  She belonged to a family of strays my mother found taking refuge on the back porch one cold winter day.  My mother domesticated Sophie, Momma Cat, Lulu and Rambo. She was never able to tame Bro, but eventually she trapped him, along with Lulu and Rambo, and took them to the Denver Dumb Friends League. She hoped Lulu and Rambo would be adopted. Bro, who was deemed “unadobtable,” was euthanized.

Momma cat lived with us for many more years…until my parents divorced. My mother and her three cats moved from a large, open neighborhood, and a house with a cat door, to a dense community of townhomes. No longer able to come and go as they pleased, Digit and Wuss routinely attacked Momma Cat. My mother was consumed with guilt and decided she needed to find Momma Cat another home. That home turned out to be a farm some 50 miles southeast of the city. The new owners saw Momma Cat only only a few times before she disappeared.

Five years ago my mother adopted two cats she expected to be her last, Woody and Gus (named after the title characters from Lonesome Dove). Then 65 years old, she calculated that Woody and Gus could live to be 20 years. Only a few months earlier, the Wuss, a cat I’d grown up with, finally had to be euthanized at the ripe age of 25. But only six months after she adopted Gus and Woody, Gus became ill and had to be put down. He had FIP, Feline Infectious Peritonitis, a disease for which there is no cure. There also is no diagnostic test to detect it. My mother was heart-broken but determined to find Woody a companion.

For reasons I still don’t quite understand, my mother decided she wanted to adopt a cat from a no-kill shelter. I suppose she considered it a meaningful gesture, but within the week she returned the animal after it attacked her and she required emergency medical care. Next, she adopted Sammy from the DFL. A stray all his life, Sammy was a bit peculiar–he didn’t know how to play and never became much of a companion to Woody–but he was sweet and adjusted well enough to domestic life. Less than a year later, though, he was dead. A necropsy revealed that cancer had invaded his entire body.

And then my mother adopted Crash, a solid gray cat who earned his name after jumping from her second story loft to the living room on the first floor. He was a sweet animal and a good companion to Woody, who was very affectionate in return. But Crash was also incredibly skittish and often refused to come out from underneath my mother’s bed. The first day my mother brought him home, he marked one of her curtains, but she excused him, reasoning that he was scared. Over the years, though, he started urinating around the house more frequently. At first, he peed only in one spot, and my mother surmised that something frightened him and the incident was simply an accident, but that didn’t stop her from obsessing about it constantly: “What if he pees on the floor again? What if he pees somewhere else in the house? It’s the most awful smell.”

Though my mother tried several different methods to try to discourage Crash from peeing outside the litter box, he continued to mark different areas around the house. During the last week of his life, he peed three times in the same spot behind the front door. My mother had enough and returned him to the Dumb Friends League. He was evaluated, deemed unfit to be adopted, and put to sleep.

I have very mixed feelings about how my mother handled the situation. The smell of cat urine is horrible–not something I would expect any reasonable person to live with–and my mother will probably never stop worrying that Woody and his new friend Nougie may smell it and begin peeing in the same areas. But I am frustrated by her decision to return Crash to the DFL and eventually asked her, “was he just on loan for three years?”

The irony, because there is always irony, is that my mother volunteers several days at week at the Dumb Friends League. On the cat desk. And she has seen hundreds of animals returned for the most inane reasons. My dog pees on my boyfriend’s head when he’s sleeping. We’re having a baby and won’t have time for the dog anymore. I’m moving and my new landlord won’t allow cats. I have no choice. My mother knew that Crash would never be adopted again. She knew he would be euthanized. But instead of taking responsibility for her cat and paying with her own dollars to have him put down, she burdened someone else with that task.

Maybe I’m just an idealist, but I expect people to exercise responsibility for their pets. I understand there are too many unwanted and stray animals in this country. I understand that a lot of good animals are euthanized because shelters can’t find homes for them. I understand euthanasia is an unfortunate but necessary evil. I wish that every shelter could be a no-kill shelter, but that’s not the reality. I have no quarrel with the measures shelters and city/state governments have to take to control animal populations. I take issue with people who believe animals are disposable. I take issue with people who don’t accept responsibility for the decisions they make. I take issue with people who leave their problems to someone else to solve.