Catgate

The cat rescue world is full of drama.  I'd never experienced drama like I did once I began helping cats.  I was embarrassed by it and thought it must be that cat women were more prone to drama, for some reason, maybe because many come from difficult backgrounds, as do I.

But no.

My brother, when we talk, describes the extreme man drama in the contractor world.  It's worse than any soap opera you could imagine.   It's captivating too.  I get drawn in and always want to know the latest.

There's sports team dramas.  Like the current Deflategate.  Big Tough Man drama, at its finest!  Sometimes I think high profile drama is choreographed.  For profit.   

Work place drama may be the most destructive of all types.  I'm told office politics can kill you and is a million times worse than going through middle school.

So....I came to terms with drama in the cat help field.  It's part of human nature.

I was told end of December that a cat had been found abandoned in Salem and that she had a microchip that was registered to me and to Heartland Humane in Corvallis.  The cat had already been adopted out again, by the Tigard rescue group.  End of story, I thought.

For kicks, I requested the chip number and then looked up the cat in my records.  I gave the Tigard rescue the information I had on the woman I'd gotten the cat fixed for, back in 2012, in case she wanted to try to call her.

Hmmm, seemed strange for this cat to end up in Salem.   She is a torti point Siamese named Priscilla I got fixed for an Albany woman, that same year Heartland was imbedding microchips at no charge, when a cat was fixed.  She got the chip and I returned her to her owner, over on 10th street not far from the hospital here in Albany.

Priscilla in April 2012

I would ask folks if they wanted the free microchip, most did, and hand them the paperwork upon return, so they could re-register the chip to their own ID, but none of the people whose cats were chipped that year ever did do that.  Costs money, is why.

In fact, here's the post I made the day Priscilla was fixed, back in April of 2012.

Priscilla was not the first cat I helped this particular woman get fixed.  Back in December of 2010 I took these two teens, a girl and a boy, to be fixed up in Wilsonville.  They were not chipped.

They'd be over four years old now.

Suddenly, in my mail, I find something from 24PetWatch.  They're the company that owns the microchips imbedded by Heartland.   The paper states "Congratulations!  Your cat, Surri, has been micro chipped and her information registered."  It goes on to give details, but provides no name in the box of shelter or vet clinic where it was done.  

What?  Surri was a kitten I took from the massive colony out in N. Albany and had been micro-chipped years ago. I got about 79 cats fixed for that old couple and took out as many kittens as they would relinquish.  That included a sweet torbi tux I named Surri.   And a shyer Lynx Point boy I named Grumbly Rumby. 

 Both were micro-chipped at Heartland when they were fixed and prior to their adoption.  Surri and Rumby were adopted together, by a very kind Albany couple.  I'd helped out her parents once upon a time, in N. Albany, when they needed cats in their barn caught and fixed.  Seemed so right to adopt this pair to them. 

Upon receipt of that odd paper from 24PetWatch, I called both PetWatch and Surri's adopters up, to try to figure out what was going on.

Surri

Grumbly Rumby with Miss D

24PetWatch had no clue, and I mean, they really had no clue.  However, Surri's adopter said Houdini and Jasmine (they got new names) were just fine and dandy.  They had not recalled the pair were chipped.  They've had them three years now.

The date listed as the date Surri had been micro-chipped, on this paper from PetWatch, rang a bell.  It was the same date Priscilla, the abandoned cat, also micro-chipped to me, had been re-adopted out by the Tigard group.

  PetWatch wanted me to call them back to talk to a supervisor so they could try to figure out why I would suddenly get something stating Surri had just been chipped, and on a date that was the re adoption date of an entirely different cat also chipped to me, but never adopted out by me. 

 I thought "Nah, not my job."  It isn't my job.  That was so strange it was something I'd think someone might do if they'd just snorted some crushed oxy.  Or smoked some dope. 

As luck would have it, the drama did not end there.

Last night I get a facebook message from a Lebanon woman.  The message gave me a link to some guy I didn't know.  Then said "These are the people who abandoned those cats by B (her in-laws).  Be nice if you would turn them in."

I had no clue what she was talking about and told her so.  I figured she had messaged the wrong person.

Then she went on, that I had adopted a cat to them, so she figured I'd turn them in, because the cat was micro-chipped to me.

News to me.  I still couldn't figure it out.  Then it dawned on me.  That had to be Priscilla, the cat the Tigard rescue claimed was found abandoned in Salem.  Apparently no, not in Salem, but rather she was abandoned months ago, along with some other cats, in Lebanon, by the Albany woman, allegedly, who had moved up there with a shack up boyfriend.  

The Lebanon woman had eventually loaded up the remaining three abandoned cats and taken them up to someone connected with the Tigard rescue and I applaud her actions, to help those cats.  She knew the woman and her in laws lived near the woman. That was a few months ago.

Apparently she had been recently on the receiving end of mean gossip, claiming I should have reported the cats abandoned because I adopted at least one cat to the people.  It was just a little too much last night.  The melodrama and its target---me.

What she was really saying, seemed to me, since it has been months since the cats were abandoned, is how bad at screening for adoption I am, that I would adopt a cat to someone like that.   It was jab at me, an attempt to throw guilt at me.  She knew it would hurt me.

Newsflash:  I didn't adopt a cat to her.  Newsflash:  you knew her and could have turned her in when she moved and left behind her cats.

I don't take that well, late at night, after a particularly rough day.

That damn woman discarded that poor cat like a bent dirty meth needle.  Newsflash:  the cat didn't reproduce more unwanted cats to be left behind because I got her fixed for that woman years before she even moved to Lebanon.  Newsflash:  the cat isn't on the street anymore suffering because you cared enough to get them off the street and to a rescue.  She's the villain, not you and not me.  And it all worked out, so let's all be happy!

We're all guilty of drama production now and then.  If I tried to claim innocence, I'd be lying.

This drama doesn't matter at all, in the end.  It's people pushing and shoving each other around, for various reasons, many of which relate to ineptitudes in social conduct and relations or sometimes just displaced aggression.  We cat owners all know about displaced aggression.

 I have very few skills in face to face communications with people but its even harder for me with messaging/e-mail encounters.  

We are all so different.  We take words differently, and depend for accuracy of translation, on body language and speech inflections.  We don't have these translation aids anymore when we mostly communicate through machines.   

I'm not saying there are not really mean people out there who deliberately twist the truth around to hurt others.  Plenty of those mean girls (and boys) in the world.

Drama, it's human nature. And maybe part of being alive. And it's not just girls.  Man drama is astounding.  I've heard tales of public agency drama (between county law enforcement and city police or between fire and police departments) that is epic.  And who hasn't heard stories of high drama in the military but especially between branches.  Even the cats here divide into cliques and create drama from nothing daily.

I didn't know where this post would go when I began to write.  I felt a need to write about drama and that it happens daily and its part of being human, for the most part, outside of a few people who thrive on creating it.  I felt the saga of the cat exemplified how we humans stumble along at many things, but any failings along the way in communications, record keeping, letters sent, or in accusations sent out of exhaustion or meanness, none of these matter really.

 The humans stumbled and fumbled and delivered nonetheless!  We kicked it through the goal posts for the cat!

In the end, all the words don't matter.  The outcome does.  

Priscilla is in a fine new home.