Four Cats Up Being Fixed Today

Another male from a pair of sisters in N. Albany, who keep having strays show up there, unfixed. Difference with these wonderful women, they pay for the fix and for shots. Far cry from most people I deal with.

Then the fourth female from the situation off Queen. She still has one old female needing fixed, who just had three kittens, and three kittens from one of the ones I've now taken to be fixed.

I was to pick up four adult cats at a downtown location this morning. When almost there, I saw a Siamese male, recently killed by a car, laying in the street. I stopped about the same time the community police office stopped, to pick up the body.

I knew the cat. I got him fixed one year ago this month. He was fed on a porch a block away. He'd been abandoned by a tenant in a house on Railroad, the same house whose next tenant abandoned Hope, who was later horribly injured by blunt force trauma that knocked an eye from its socket.

This Siamese male is the father of Romeo and of Cozy, two flea ridden kittens also fed a block away. I ended up coaxing the badly injured Hope, whose left eye was dangling from its socket, out of the empty rental where she had taken refuge with her three kittens, Jiggles, Scruffy and Teddy. Those three kittens brought ringworm into my house last summer, which I fought for two months. Romeo is still up with Poppa's president, is huge and beautiful, a flamepoint Siamese. Cozy lives on the coast with a woman who works in Eugene.

Jiggles, Teddy and Scruffy, Hope's kittens, all overcame the ringworm, were fixed, and got homes. Hope too, after a long journey, ended up back with me and then went to about the best home she could have ever imagined, in Bend. I get routine updates from Hope and her adoptors. This male, had turned feral since he was abandoned, but I trapped him and he was neutered nonetheless. He lasted a year more, and now he's dead. I stroked his head and then I left. But it wears on me, the way people behave, towards the animals. The suffering and misery that results.

The people did not have any of their four cats confined, as they had promised. I knocked and knocked and knocked and knocked. I could see someone asleep ten feet from that front door on the couch, but he never twitched. I finally went and called through an open window. A different man and his wife finally came out.

I had by that time confined one male who had come up to me, in a carrier. They chased around looking for the other two. I fed three kittens, about ten weeks old, all boys, skinny and playful, racing around the driveway. Finally they brought out one of their two adult females. The other just had another litter. I took the two up, fed up with the behavior of humans.

Last night, tired out, stomach hurting, I couldn't sleep. Some nights are worse. Thoughts of cats and their fates plague me and I want to cry, to save them. Misty, a wonderful brown tabby tux female I carried out of Camp Boondoggle last summer, killed by coyotes within months. Misty. Bucky, adopted to what seemed to be a polite kind old man, who had rescued also a black female, from meth addict neighbors, later in the news when he rammed two pregnant woman at a Corvallis complex, with his car. That complex is full of drama, drugs and crime.

I left a two word message on the mans' phone several times: "Where's Bucky?" I cruised that neighborhood. I finally called the jail and asked to talk to the mean old geezer and finally told the jailor why, when she said I could not talk to him unless he wanted to talk to me. I asked her then, if she went by his cell to say to him, "The cat woman wants to know 'Where's Bucky?'" I hope they hang him high.

The man fooled me. He checked out, had a clean place, was kind or seemed to be, had the other cat who was already fixed and paid an adoption fee. Bucky paid the price.

Willy Wonka and Simba, two Siamese brothers I spent days searching for and saving, down at Hull Oaks. I adopted them out unfixed, to what seemed like a perfect little family from South Salem. The little girl brought a basket with a pink blanket and a stuffed animal for their ride home. They paid the adoption fee for one cat but took both. I later paid out of my own pocket to have them fixed at a Neuterscooter clinic last October.

A month ago, Joey calls me. He wants them gone. They're not cute anymore, you see, and they just don't have time for them. I fumed. I had all these kittens here, then with coccidia. No room. He was going to take them to Willamette Humane, where, I told him, if he did that, they would be likely killed because it's kitten season. He had no emotion about this possibility.

He finally called back to say some cousin would take them, although she lived with her mother. I don't know if this happened or if he was just lying, like they did when they came, late last summer, with the little basket and pink blanket, pledging they would keep them and love them forever. I trusted their promise. Those boys lives depended on it. So many humans have no ability to commit to anything, are selfish, and would throw out a life without a second thought.

These things haunt me.