I find it very sad that all cats don’t know the happiness and contentment of living in a good home. I tell Walter and Jozef when they turn their noses up at good food, or protest about having to stay in for a while, that they don’t know how lucky they are.
But jokingly of course because why should they know, it wouldn’t make life any better for the cats who are not as lucky. There are many different ways a cat’s life can turn out:
- Cats in good homes, loved and understood and respected as well as being physically cared for.
- Cats in bad homes, living their lives in fear of being yelled at or punished.
- Some pestered by the child and/or dog of the family.
- Some fed poor diets, some neglected, some ignored.
- Cats in laboratories, being used by scientists for experiments, living in steel cages, their only escape will be death when they have outlived their usefulness.
- Cats on farms, living outdoors, some fed, but some expected to live on the rodents they are kept to hunt.
- Feral cats, in some places cared for having been trapped, neutered and returned and have people caring for them and feeding them.
- But in some places living on what they can scavenge, being chased away, having litter after litter of kittens to face the same hard life.
- Show cats, forced to endure bathing and grooming and being toted around Cat Shows, being examined by a strange vet, sitting in a cage for hours, being gawped at.
- Breeding cats, giving birth to litter after litter of kittens to be sold, some of those cats loved and cared for by the breeders, but some just used as money making machines.
- Stray abandoned cats, struggling to survive, wondering why the people they trusted cast them out, living in danger, especially the declawed ones.
- Shelter cats, having been abandoned or relinquished, shut in cages wondering why they have no home of their own any more.
In kill shelters they may lose their lives just because no one wants them and room must be made for more cats the same.
Why are all the bad things happening to the unfortunate cats of the world? Surely they all, each and every one of them, deserve a happy fulfilled life. We who care can never seem to be able to do enough to help those cats and it breaks my heart.
I often have to remind myself of this quote:
‘Saving one animal won’t change the world but it will change the world for that one animal’
It’s like hitting your head off a brick wall trying to even help some folks, the people who Ruth told about the CP free neutering scheme just didn’t want to know and now we see the first of the very young queen cats starting to fill out and put weight on and coming to our house and grubbing about for crumbs that have fallen from Narla’s plate on the wall. So what do we do? Do we put extra food out for the poor little thing and attract all the antisocial neighbours 5-6 cats and the visiting toms, risking Walter and Jozef and Narla’s health by fighting or germs, or by them chasing the cats away and being hit by a car, and the wrath of neighbours who don’t approve or do we stand by and watch a young, thin, permanently hungry pregnant queen cat search for food while the house that she lives at stands opposite with doors closed and three well fed dogs (with well fed and quite unpleasant owners who we really daren’t tackle again) happily ensconced in there looking out of the windows. Life is so unfair to cats and this will be happening all over the country, all over the world in fact, and it breaks my heart.