Unintended Pet Cruelties – A multipart recollection of memories that inspire guilt, pain and joy.

Part 1

Inspiration

After reading an extensive post by a friend about how he and his, then, wife had visited some unintended cruelties on a pet dog, I decided to recount the stupid/foolish/unintended mistakes with my pets in my youth.

As I began to write this I noticed how so many of our pets I have no pictures of and the memories live only in my mind. This has certainly changed with the emergence of the digital camera and the ubiquitous cell phone camera.

First Dynasty: Happy, Sir Lancelot, Ainsika and Murgatroid

My first pet was a cat we called Happy. She was a stray that appeared in our backyard. We didn’t know it at the time but she was pregnant. Happy was a beautiful reddish angora (long hair) that was incredibly affectionate and seemed willing to put up with almost anything a young boy could put her through. Nothing cruel or harmful but for example, she would lay, uncomplainingly, on her back in a narrow fruit basket as I put covers on her as if she were a doll.

After we realized she was pregnant, I told my mother that I wished she would have her kittens under the honeysuckle bush in our backyard and, wouldn’t you know it, she did! I think she had about 5 kittens. My mother told me not to touch the kittens because once a human touched them, the mother would abandon them.

Right! Try to tell a young boy that he couldn’t touch those incredibly cute kittens. I carefully watched as Happy nursed her babies, then petted her. No complaints. I then touched one of the kittens, then stepped back. She looked at me then proceeded to lick every inch of that kitten.

OK. No rejection. The next day I followed the same steps: Pet Happy first, then the kittens – all 5 of them with no complaints, except for the baths.

As time went on I played with the kittens more each day until they started to come running after me when I came out into the yard.

What to name them? I was going through a King Arthur phase so I named them all after the characters. My favorite, I named Sir Lancelot and begged my mother to agree to keep him. She said yes, as long as I got homes for all the others – which I did.

The people who took them all remarked that these cats were entirely different than any cats they’d interacted with before as they were friendly and affectionate – some even came when called.

None of us knew it at the time but my handling them as kittens was responsible.

That’s the good thing I did.

As I look back on this time, I see we did some really wrong things with Happy:

1. We didn’t “fix” her so she had litter after litter – though we found every one of the kittens a home.
2. We let her out every night or any other time she wanted – which is where all those kittens came from.
3. My mother went to the butcher and evidently he recommended feeding Happy cows lung which he had in abundance and was very cheap. My mother used a large knife and a pair of scissors to cut the lung. Pretty soon, if we wanted to find her, all we had to do was click the scissors and she’d come running, figuring it was dinner time.
4. In the winter, Happy stayed in the house overnight and usually held her “business” until the morning. Why? As far as I know, “cat litter” hadn’t been “invented” yet, certainly we’d never heard about it.