The Life and Death of a Rez Cat

Life on the Navajo rez was hard.  I was always the type of person who was easily moved by others' suffering, both human and animal alike.  So much so that my 4th grade teacher's rather cruel nickname for me was "Fragile" as if it were some fundamental flaw.  If there was one word that I would associate with the Navajo rez, the first word I would think of is "death" and the second, "poverty".  That was the way of the rez for not a day would go by where one wouldn't see the carcasses of wild dogs strewn across the highways.  A sight that I was told that I would someday get hardened to.  I never really did but, instead, hid my distress at the sight by ranking it for gore on a scale of 1-10.  It wasn't so much that people died all the time out there.  Instead, the greatest death toll was in both the cats and dogs that were born out there.  There were diseases that afflicted the animals for which the Navajo had no name, whether it would be the disease that ate all the fur off their bodies or the one that rotted them from the inside until maggots came out of a still living dog.  Then there were the animals themselves, frequently left feral and hungry.  The wild dogs would eat the cats or even each other.  I remember rescuing a puppy out there only to discover that it got out and found itself a carcass of a puppy to chew on.  It horrified me to the bone though it was the way of the rez.

On the day that my cats, Lucky and Gin, were born on the rez, it was nothing more than another typical glimpse of that brutal world.  They were part of a litter that had been given birth to in the parking lot or perhaps had been immediately dumped there by the cat's owner.  Hard to say but there the litter of 6 were left in a small pile within the parking lot of an office building.  All day long, the employees working inside clucked and pitied the mewing and dying kittens; yet, none did a thing to try to save them.  Survival for such an occurrence was an impossibility to the Navajos working there.  The only possible outcome for these kittens was a slow, cold and hungry death.  I didn't hear about the kittens until 5 pm that day when my daughter's father called me to tell me of the horrible sight.  He said that he heard a fierce mewing and sure enough, one of the litter had survived the day in the desert sun.  I demanded that he turn around and bring me the kitten immediately.  In the short time waiting, I found a recipe for emergency kitten formula and went door to door, looking for a infant medicine dropper with which to feed the kitten.  I'll never forget my first sight of Lucky.  His placental sac had never been licked clean and had dried to his fur in a dark brown speckled with clay dust. His umbilical cord was still long and he was a tiny, fragile thing.  I sent my daughter's father straight back out to the grocery store to pick up the supplies to make the kitten formula and immediately started to gently clean Lucky and clip down his cord.  As luck would have it, her father stopped one more time to check on the litter and found one more surviving kitten flopping in distress in the setting sun.  This was Gin and she was perhaps the luckier cat of the two for by the time she came into my care, she was cold. 

Just a few weeks old and already adored.

I spent the rest of the evening, tending to Lucky and Gin's distress.  After they were cleaned and both their cords clipped, I warmed them against my chest before giving them their first meal ever through the baby dropper.  I didn't even think twice about doing any of this or give any thought as to what it truly meant to take on the role of mother to two kittens.  Baby kittens aren't unlike human babies at all.  They needed to be fed every two hours, kept warm constantly, and on top of it all, baby kittens can't defecate and urinate without their mother.  After the first 5 days, I was deeply exhausted and was contemplating possibly giving up. I couldn't do that though because I was poignantly aware what precisely I was to these two kittens--I was the only mother they ever had known and they depended on me for life.  How could betray such tiny things?  My only real choice was to become their mother in return, just as much as I would be my own two human children.  It filled me with fear to understand this for I knew that it would only end in sorrow for me.  The norm is that our children tend to survive us.  These two children of mine weren't going to ever possibly do that.  I would outlive them both.  That, too, I accepted and we, three, survived the 5 weeks of every two hour feedings.  Living out on the rez where the closest veterinarian was a horse doctor, I also took on the role of veterinarian, too.  Gin had a concave chest that needed special care.  Both struggled with bouts of constipation and bloating from the kitten formula.  We got through it all though and I was rewarded with two beautiful little children with furry faces. 

I washed them clean a few times a day with a warm, damp washcloth wrapped around the tip of my forefinger to emulate a mother cat's tongue.  As they grew older, I taught them to pounce and drag away tiny stuffed animal kills for these were survival skills that I knew that they may possibly need.  I taught them to touch noses as a way of saying hello. In the end, they became two very unique cats--a mixture of both human and cat qualities.  My son helped me during the day with Gin and she bonded most with him.  Lucky was my son, through and through, loving to be held like a baby and reaching his paw up to gently touch my hair and face with a look of complete adoration on his face--just like my own human children did when they were infants.  None of us ever considered either of them to be as simple as pets.  They were our family, through and through. They were more than just survivors of what should have been a fatal birthing, they were survivors of the Navajo rez.  Some of the Navajo came to see them once they had survived and were taken aback at how amazing the two kittens were. 

Little People were way cooler to Lucky than a lousy ball.

When it came time for Lucky to be neutered, there was little choice but to go to the horse doctor.  Yet, he had experience in the neutering and spaying of smaller animals for he, out of grief for what he saw happening to the feral cats and dogs on the rez, would capture them and fix them for free before setting them loose again once their wounds were healed.  He was in absolute awe over Lucky and I think he didn't want to part with him at all when I went to pick him up.  I knew my Lucky bear was special.  I always did.  I was so happy when we returned to Oregon because the neighborhood we were in was sheltered and safe.  Lucky liked nothing better to play in the backyard and would only leave the yard to occasionally walk with my daughter and I to the school bus stop around the corner.  Life was great for Lucky until 6 months ago, a feral cat wandered into the neighborhood.  Perhaps turned out by a desperate homeowner in the midst of this recession, it began to terrorize all the cats living in the block.  Lucky became injured and formed an abscess over one eye, which my son and I promptly treated that night.  I took Lucky in to the vet the next day to make sure that he would survive and updated his shots.

Touching noses

 Lucky's abscess quickly healed and he became himself again.  Doting, adorable Lucky who was an example of perfect health with his shiny, thick fur, good build, and clear eyes although he had taken up the most heinous cat activity of urinating outside of the litter box. I presumed it was spraying to ward off the feral cat, who did eventually disappear.  He also took to drinking from the faucet and rarely left my side.  Beyond these new affectations, however, he was such a picture of health that it deeply confused me when I started to feel like he was going to be leaving me soon two months ago.   There wasn't a single thing about him that had changed but yet, something had imperceptibly and irrevocably changed, which terrified me.  Yet, there was Lucky, seemingly the picture of health, to grab my hand from his perch on my bed to tell me that it was time to sleep only to sit upright on my chest with his own chest puffed and a cat smile on his face, purring wildly at his conquered victim.  In fact, he exuded so much good health that, when an accident occurred one night and his tail became injured, the vet gave him his checkup and found that Lucky was extremely anemic.  More testing came and feline leukemia was found.  A fatal flaw had been made when Lucky had been treated for his abscess--he was not given the vaccine.  My Lucky bear was dying yet, even the vet was convinced that he had much more time, despite the dangerous anemia.  His fur was so shiny, his weight so good.  Such a happy cat despite the pain of his tail injury.  She sent him home with me for which I'm glad.  Lucky passed away in my arms that night when he no longer had enough red blood cells to keep his body alive.  A mother always knows when her beloved child is dying, even when everything seems right.  We still know. These past two months, both Lucky and I savored each others' company, seemingly with the poignant awareness that we would soon be parted.

The next day, Gin was taken in to be tested for feline leukemia.  Delicate, beautiful, tiny little Gin immediately charmed the entire staff as much, if not more, than Lucky did.  We all cried for joy when she came up negative for the disease that had killed her brother just the night before. Lucky's poor veterinarian was devastated that he had died.  I told the staff to remind her what she had said herself about Lucky--he tried so hard to keep everyone from worrying about him.  Lucky duped us all but, because of her, Gin had a chance.  Lucky, himself, had given her a chance by all his little weird behaviors from stopping using the litter box to no longer sharing a water bowl with her.  Gin, in return, is taking care of me for Lucky in picking up all of Lucky's routines with me that he can no longer do. Lucky may have been born a rez cat but he was a rez cat extraordinaire and so, too, his sister.
 

Reaching for my hand, saying "love me!"

I know it's hard in these uncertain times to remember or rationalize the cost of a vaccination for a beloved family member but I urge you to take the time to do so.  Most cities in the US have mobile pet clinics that are also low cost.  Many also run vaccination specials that can further bring down the cost.  It is far better than tears, grief and loss for your family or for your neighbors. 

Good Neighbor Mobile Vet Clinic

The New Dark Ages

We live in a most pivotal time.  As much as that may be so poignantly hard to believe as it is far too easy to get up in the morning, drive through relatively clean suburban neighborhoods to work, spend the day working with others who, through the very onerous task of maintaining the depersonalized world of business by eschewing human emotion, emphasizes a sense of stability. Only to drive back home through those same relatively clean suburban neighborhoods to eat dinner and watch television programming that makes real life seem so much simpler in some ways.  Rinse and repeat.   Yet, there are little seeds of discontinuity even within those relatively clean suburban neighborhoods.  The homes in need of paint, lawns slightly overgrown, the empty storefronts within the strip malls--all prickling away if one is attentive.  Each of these harbor untold, unshared stories of desperation.  What has happened to America whose ideals were once the white picket fence flanking a pristine yard and the well maintained home? 

Historians have the task of labeling the various time periods of human civilization through terms that adequately describe them.  The Golden Age, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, The Industrial Age.  If there is any term that I could say most adequately describes our own time period, it would be none other than the New Dark Ages.   Some may balk at such a comparison for certainly we have far greater technology and are far cleaner.  Our educational system is still providing learning for the masses and the average way of life is still a vast improvement from our prior Dark Age counterparts.  Yet, that would also be turning a blind eye on those seeds of discontinuity buried within our own seemingly pristine world.   We need to recollect the very basic idea of cause and effect.  For every thing that occurs, there will be a resultant effect.  Nothing lives within an isolated bubble.  Quite the opposite, we, along with every other living creature on this planet, live in one bubble together.  The ramifications of changes within this bubble will be felt throughout.  So as more and more find it increasingly difficult to obtain adequate health care, then so will disease increase.  Already, diseases once thought abolished through vaccinations have been rearing their ugly heads as parents with little choice but to continuously cut corners, choose to put food on their table over vaccinating their children.  A very poignant example of cause and effect. 

The Dark Ages, however, are not defined as simply being a very dirty, disease ridden time. On the contrary, the Dark Ages were dark because human beings lost any form of enlightenment.  Dark is the absence of light.  The Dark Ages were a time where the masses were left uneducated and where feudalistic structures stratified and removed all hope of opportunity to surpass the economic and social status of one's ancestors.  A time period where the mass of human populous, with little doubt, had no choice but to be subservient to their masters whether through inducement of poverty, stripping of land ownership, and even life, itself and could not believe in anything otherwise for to oppose such forces most certainly meant death or incarceration.   Intellectualism and the sciences were shunned and deemed heretical while religion fleeced out promises that, at the end of it all, the meek shall inherit the earth.  Yet one has to ask whether God would smile upon those who allow themselves to grovel in the dirt over utilizing the very gifts that God so purportedly gave to them to shine?  If I were to point to the greatest source of deprivation for the masses in the Dark Ages, I would say that it was that human beings were deprived of the one thing that normally would drive them to improve to their fullest potential--self interest.

We are in the New Dark Ages indeed despite our cleanliness and education because that is precisely what has been stripped of the human masses.  We have lost our self interest to survive, to seek better for ourselves, and shine.  How different from the Dark Age world is Greece?  Spain? Or even the United States?  I have found it so baffling to see so many willfully strip away their and others human rights of choice, liberty, and opportunity for prosperity through a sense of self-interest that is no different than the farmer willfully giving away most of his crop to protect what little livelihood he could maintain.   We live in a time where science again is regarded as heresy and where a man making less than $30,000 a year will vociferously and sacrificially defend a man making over 30,000 times more.  Where has self interest or even the concept that we, as communal beings, benefit when our communities thrive gone?  Humanity is no less indoctrinated in belief systems that, either through gentle persuasion, irrationality or brute force, enforce subservience.   To say that this is unacceptable is not to condone revolution for the only revolution that can possibly hold any hope for humanity as a whole is not one filled with blood but a revolution in thinking.  We need another Renaissance.  Yet, is it any mistake that even those who may recognize this so perversely blame the root of it as being the Illuminati, the very name of the group of scientists and philosophers who strove to rekindle enlightenment in humanity so long ago?   We need to recall that it is not a matter of whether we deserve better but to recall that we can do better for ourselves and for our children.  That to shine, to be a light is what illuminates and enlightens us all.