Saturday, March 12, 2011

Crying

I relocated some cats from a Lebanon collector that KATA and I had to deal with to a south Salem woman. That was a year and a half ago. She lived a ways off Ankeny Hill road on Riverside drive. She responded to a recent post of mine, about the apartment cats in Albany, about to go unfed. I wondered why.

I asked her what about the cats she adopted less than two years ago, what happened to them. She claims they've moved and that before they moved a mountain lion must have killed them.

But less than a year after she adopted them, I saw two cats along I5 at Ankeny Hill, a black cat and a brown tabby tux. It didn't cross my mind for a month they might be the same cats, although the distance, as the crow flies, to where they had lived would be a couple miles.

At that time, I was dealing with another situation on Cloverridge road. An Albany woman got involved and I was happy to not have to deal with it. But those cats seemed doomed also. Another Ankeny hill woman got involved, whom I had not met before. She contacted the Albany woman offering to help.

She did contact me eventually, said she had helped a Turner woman, who does trapping for TNR, and had two of her traps so was trapping the Cloverridge cats with the Albany woman. I got them fixed. She also offered to help feed then trap the two cats I'd seen on the freeway near Ankeny Hill. I did not know she was a compulsive liar then, and actually believed she had set up a feeding station and was trappng for them.

She also took in a white calico from Cloverridge and then, must have done something horrible with her. I only found this out after delivering her a donated bag of cat food, when she stated she gave the calico away, to a Salem man. She had told me she wanted her and would give her a forever home. But less than three days after she took the cat in, the cat was gone and I don't know what happened to her.

I found the Salem man's number on craigslist and called him. He had not taken in the white calico from this woman but described a chain of events with her bringing him three cats, not the calico, all in horrible shape, one of them a kitten from the Cloverridge situation. While he was talking to me, he said she was desperately calling him, wanting him to lie to me about the white cat and tell me he took her, when he didn't.

What she did with that cat I will never know. All I know is it was a time of great despair for me. My horror and despair only increased when I discovered both the cats along the freeway eventually were hit and killed and she had never tried to trap them or help them. She'd lied to me about that also. If I'd known this, I would have helped them myself.

And now, I believe those cats were from the Lebanon situation, abandoned when the woman who adopted them, moved and left them behind. They were on a search for help, for food.

My sorrow is extreme right now, my regrets also are extreme. Both those women should be ashamed of their behavior, but ultimately, it was my fault, for entrusting lives to people who had no respect for life or even truth.

In the end, I realize, I can trust only myself. I have to move on, but today I'm going to cry. I'd like to curl up and shutter myself off from the horrors out there, the liars, the twits getting cats and leaving them like it's nothing, getting more. I'd like to shield myself from my own guilt over believing the wrong people. I'd like to blast my brain dead with alcohol right now. Or laughter. Or wrap myself in someone's arms.

I want to tell those cats I'm so sorry.

This loss for me will deaden over time. Right now, there is grave suffering going on over in Japan.

There's not much we can do about the suffering in our world. But there are small things, like, if anyone is reading this, and your cats aren't fixed, for crying out loud, get them fixed. You can stop immense suffering by doing just that little thing. Not only for the cats, but for the few out there burdening themselves with helping the vast vast sea of unwanteds born because there is an equally vast sea of people out there who just don't give a shit.

If you're one of them, one of the people who mindlessly let your own cats breed, for money or other shithead reasons, get it done now.

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