HABITAT

Animals are produced by habitat.  I don’t mean that mice are created by dirty old rags in the corner as once was thought, but that rags are such a nice little cuddle-down for mice that they slip in and use it, leaving their mouseberries and nibbling the cloth into bedding.  One way to get rid of mice, is to get rid of their habitat.

Last night at the town council meeting, the mayor’s wife expressed disapproval of her neighbor who feeds “feral” cats, creating a habitat for them.  (Cats, chickens and dust are the markers of degeneration to certain housekeepers.)  But it’s an interesting question to ask what habitat that Valier-dwelling cat-feeder is attracted to and why feeding cats is part of her life.  Is it comforting her somehow?  Is she remembering ranch life?  Does she miss children?  Does she simply enjoy watching them?

At the moment there is an adult cat in my house: Bunny.  She had four kittens, I edited it to two, she figured that out and since the trapdoor to the crawl space was open, moved the other two down between the floor joists where I had no way to get to them.  They emerged only a few days ago: one a little tuxedo-wearing fellow and the other the image of Bunny, gray with gold smudges.  They’re doing pretty well, considering that they were raised in the dark, which means they do a lot of staring.

In the garage is the GrannyMamaCat, a white-based cat with calico patches, thus called “Patches.”  She’s been feral along this street for years and I’ve told the story of her descendants.  Since I also “edit” her kittens, she gives birth in some secret place away from here (five this time) and then was raising them undetected in the rosebush border until a storm drenched and chilled them.  Then she moved them into the garage, which is good because she is so fierce that she keeps all other cats out.

I confess that I feed these two sets of cats, but I actively run others off the premises.  Ancient Caspar, who lives across the street, comes tottering over on hot days to sleep in the “cat jungle.”  That’s real habitat, a tangle of tall growth of honeysuckle, suckers from the dead plum tree, grass, and cottonwood self-planting.  This cottonwood and the poplars want this yard to be a forest.  They attack my house as an intruder.  I had intended to cut the jungle down to the ground this summer.

Two tomcats show up seasonally:  the “bull” tomcat who is stocky, white with black ears and tail, and an all black cat.  Both appear to be owned.  The “dark” calico and her kittens (now half-grown) are not welcome but occupy (off and on) the back workshop/shed.  My goal for this summer was to empty and harden that structure, but my neighbors have occupied so much space that I haven’t felt comfortable even being in the yard.  

I’m conflicted about that workshop because it was trucked down from Swift Dam, the 1965 rebuild.  I also have the watchman’s shack.  They’re not really historic — maybe just nostalgic, possibly only this side of debris.  They were since occupied by a ceramic kiln workshop and a gunsmith workbench.  There are no foundations.  The floors are plywood.  The roofs — minimal from the beginning — leak and some of it has fallen through.  

At one time it was a bat roost, but Squibbie killed them all.  I stash junk there, which is handy but creates excellent cat habitat.  I find evidence of people smoking or huffing — I assume kids.  It would be interesting to see whether I could sell the building either in situ or to be moved.

Neighbors are an important part of habitat.  I am not a good neighbor.  All I do is sit and write all day.  I do NOT chitchat, which is very bad form here.  On the other hand, I don’t keep a barking dog and I haven’t put up a high bad-neighbor fence, which was one of my original neighbor’s fears.  

This post is NOT about how to get rid of feral cats.  It is about how to get rid of the habitat of feral cats, which includes people who like and feed them.  One dynamic is that aging people who can’t afford maintenance will let disintegration create access to shelter, however minimal.  Cats are good burrowers, as good as foxes.  Another is human lonesomeness and powerlessness: one can at least be useful to stray cats.   But people who don’t like cats, esp. in numbers, will easily transfer their resentment to the person who feeds cats — who then feels persecuted, unjustly stigmatized — which gives rise to resentment and even stronger identification with the cats.  

Often the person who objects to cats is the more recent occupant while the (possibly elderly) neighbor has been there a long time, so that the feeling of being invaded collides with the expectations of the newcomer.  A newer dynamic is a young woman with a baby but no husband, who is herself dependent on charity.

It is a recurrent problem that much of the thought about such problems as cats (and a lot of others involving animals) is done by urban apartment dwellers with a minimum of owned and constantly vet-monitored cats.  Some of the philosophers of the feline are so abstract that they are hardly intelligible.  Abused or simply damaged cats and esp. cute kittens saved from fires or crashed cars, are great money-raising issues for the major humane societies.  “Send five dollars or I’ll let this kitten die.”  

People in rural environments can only wish they had five dollars for every dead kitten they’ve seen.  After a harsh winter I’ve found a “flat cat” (kitten-sized) — little more than fluff and few bones — in my back shed.  When I pulled all the bedding out of the dog house I put out there to add a little shelter, the husk of a kitten was under it all, hollowed by insects.  Several have been killed by the fenced dogs across the alley — the kittens were trespassing.  Mostly, kittens have an impulse to leave when they approach adulthood, and they do.  The town owl occasionally swipes one.  They say the coyotes that occasionally trot down the night streets will nail cats, but no bears care anything about cats.

Habitat is a complex of society, objects, satellite animals, interstitial insects and rodents, and things like weather or economics.  Habitat is a holon, wheels within wheels that add up to grinding down or lifting up, making space or blocking out.  Unless one considers the whole process, complex as that might be, the individual examples just keep coming back, whether they are unruly kids, old ladies who feed cats, or buildings that are falling down. 

Some of us moved here thinking this was a tolerant, low-cost, semi-rural village where we could live quietly.  In the last decade we’ve been joined by people who want a kind of suburbia without any obligation to serve the town infrastructure of volunteers or to pay for services.  They're often arrogant and demanding in a way that people out West are not. 

Coming next in the campaign is to get rid of abandoned cars, defined as cars that don’t run.  Good luck with that.  It’s sort of the older male version of feeding cats.

CATS (Part 2)

“CATS” IS BACK on Broadway.

Previous posts about cats on this blog include:

6-24-16   “Patricia Nell Warren’s “Gentle Being”

5-18-16   “Steve Jobs and the Cat”  (not really about cats at all) 
12-15-15  “The Counterclockwise Cat”

10-10-15   “Cat Begats”

6-2-14       “Spring Shadows”

11-11-14    “Two Degrees above Zero and Sinking”

8-4-14       “Community Cats: A Tribe of its Own”

GrannieMamacat, Smudge, the Skeezix

What I want to look at now is quite different from the stories above, which were mostly descriptive and about domestic cats, both feral and actually domesticated — that is, affectionate and dependent.  Now I want to look at cats as a species in terms of today’s households, current agricultural practices, ecologies around the world, economics, emotional dynamics, children, and as much other stuff as I can think up.  But first I need to tie off the narratives.

Let’s review the story of Patches, the Granniemomcat.  She’s been surviving on this street for many years.  I’d catch a glimpse of her now and then and always talk to her.  I thought she belonged to Old Dave, who lived across the street.  When Old Dave died, another woman also saw the cat, now called Patches by me, go in and out his pet door and tried to catch it to find a new owner.  No luck.  “It’s a crazy cat,” she declared.

Another year or so after that, Patches came marching into the yard with a little following of half-grown kittens.  That story is the 9-4-14 post.  The kittens gradually disappeared, some to bad ends (the yard dogs across the alley kill cats) but possibly some slid into homes.  None allowed a person to touch them.

Smudge had her kittens in fall and since I reduced them to one, thinking that it would keep her from coming back into heat right away and ease her milk reduction process, she took that one under a big pile of windfall sticks in the back building.  But kittens are meant to be several-in-a-pile, who occupy a nest and warm each other.  This kitten barely survived and didn’t develop properly.  

Finnegan

I called her the Dust Bunny, as she was exceptionally fuzzy rather than furry, and a blue sort of gray.  Then, like other emotionally damaged teens, she fell madly in love with a stranger, the Weirdo/Hop/the Striped Terror/Finnegan — long-legged lover of heights.  At first he tolerated the Bunny.  He wasn’t much more than a kitten himself.  But as time went on, she was too clingy and he began to hide.  If he napped hidden under the comforter, the Bunny simply slept up against the lump he made.  If he were outside, she went through the house calling, and then went out to search, still calling.

Continuing the human-like story, which suggests something about how much the adventures of teen girls are functions of hormones rather than intelligence, the Bunny was soon pregnant and then deserted.  Finnegan disappeared over Homesteader Days, as suddenly as he had appeared in the first place.  Maybe he jumped into someone’s pickup.  Maybe he was ground under by the massive farm machines that line up in front of my house for the parade.  Bunny searched and searched and got fatter and fatter, until she could no longer jump to the high shelves where they used to hang out.  She will not cuddle with me: she is imprinted with Finnegan.

Buddies

Because her snout is underdeveloped and small with a tiny tongue, I thought maybe her pelvis would prevent her from giving birth.  In the end she had four kittens in bed with me, just off the plastic and towels I had spread when she began the process.  I reduced the babies to two and installed them in a soft box in the dark closet, which meant that my laundry baskets had no home.  But Bunny moved those last two kittens down into the dirt space under the house and installed them between two floor joists near the place where the floor furnace hangs down.  These kittens will not be cold.  I can tell they’ve been nursing by checking Bunny’s nips, but I can’t see or hear them.  They will have trouble coming upstairs by themselves.

In the meantime another adventure was unfolding.  Granniemamacat had her kittens somewhere else — I suspected under the red house down the street, but I didn’t go looking.  She came to eat, then left.  Big thunderstorms have been coming through, and one was exceptionally powerful, both cold rain and slush.  The fields nearby were pounded flat.  

When it had passed, I heard what I thought was bird-calls.  Then it sounded like kittens.  I went out to see what was happening and it was clear that Grannymamacat had been nesting in the wild rose border against the house under my computer window.  They are thick and thorny cover, but no match for the storm.  She was against the foundation, soaked to the skin, and sort of stunned.  Soaked and shaking kittens were struggling in every direction, beeping like the warnings of backing-up trucks.  

It took me a while and a few stabbings to echolocate them and pitch them back on their mother.  Then I went for a lawn chair, a box with padding, and a section of plastic to make a tent over the chair.  When I got back to the nest, the mother had left, but I made my improvements (there were FIVE kittens) and went back inside.  What was I thinking?  This was my chance to do postnatal intervention, but their eyes were open and they were struggling to survive.

When I checked in a hour the kittens were gone.  I’ve been putting out kibble in the garage twice a day.  Next time I could hear the kittens and located them behind an old tin cupboard but didn’t interfere.  They’ve had their headquarters there ever since and now they come out to play and to eat.  Granniemamacat is nursing them in plain sight on the carpet.  She has claimed the garage and is not tolerating any other cats except Bunny, who is her granddaughter.

GrannieMamacat

This is very nice.  The cat I called the Dark Calico Mamacat appeared in June with kittens and wanted to move them in.  She’s been eating here.  Now she’s not allowed.  In fact, she seems to have left with her half-grown kits.  Also the two main toms are kept out.  The Grannymamacat runs them both off, though they are formidable cats: the Bull Tomcat, stocky and short-legged, and a lovely sleek all-black Tom.  These two cats are pets.  They only come around at the bidding of hormones.  I could probably trap them, but at the risk of enraging owners.

These matters are not usually discussed.  Those who are former ranch wives are sympathetic to the pathos but consider it necessary.  Some old men who love birds are sorry to miss an opportunity to kill their enemies.  Those who are single laborers away from their families or just here because they have to be somewhere, don’t even notice.  Little kids hunt for kittens and catch them if they can.  After that, it’s mixed.

Printer cats

The “common wisdom” is that a kitten that isn’t handled by humans by the time it’s twelve weeks old will not be tameable.  What I’m seeing is that there is enormous variability.  Some of the Grannymamacat’s kittens will tolerate being picked up and cuddled; others will spit and struggle.  The old cat attacks me, making her "snakehead" (all fangs, no ears) and jump at me, spitting and slapping my legs with claws.  I can’t put a hand on her, but if I did I would draw it back shredded.

In the animal control days, we could catch fugitive animals (both cats and dogs) by putting the equivalent of “roofies” in the food.  That’s not possible now because of drug laws.  I heard about making chloroform, but it takes more skill and equipment than I have, including a box like the one we used to employ to kill skunks: a two compartment box, one airtight and dark space for the skunk, and one communicating through a screen with a lid for putting in cloth saturated with chloroform.  

It’s easier to catch a skunk than a feral cat, but the consequences of scaring a skunk are not good.  Anyway, killing skunks is only because of them carrying rabies and, curiously, everyone has become very blasé about rabies.  Rabid dogs go crazy and run around biting.  Rabid cats tend to go hide until they are dead.  It is a brain virus.  There is a vaccine.  I should read up on which parts of the brain and all that, assuming someone took the risk of studying it.

Finnegan

Much has changed over the years.  No longer do people have cows so they can squirt milk in cats’ mouths.  No longer do they cook at home, and packaging doesn't allow for scraps.  Fishermen clean their catch at a provided sink/bench by the lake. I’m shocked when I see how much chemical fallow is used.  It’s bound to have consequences, one of which is eliminating the vegetation where rodents and ground birds used to live.  When driving cross-country, there always used to be cats in barrow pits or crouching on porches.  No more.  No longer are there crushed ground squirrels on the highways to attract hawks.

A rural small town is no longer friendly to unwanted cats.  Cats are among the most resourceful of animals, but even their rural habitat is contracting.  In Portland this time of year we used to take in hundreds of unwanted cats every day, but there are more niches for cats in cities.

Bunny

THRESHOLDS, HORIZONS AND THE THALWEG

The word “homeostasis” is one of those Latinate multi-syllabics that suggest things it should not.  I’ve been looking for synonyms and right now I like this one:  “constancy.”  As a quality, it is meant to mean “unchanging,” but in terms of human life, it’s not possible to eliminate all change so maybe the word that works better is “consistency.”  Or self-faithfulness.

Life in mammals is not meant to be unvarying, but it must stay within limits or risk becoming damaging to life.  Those limits are of various kinds:

     Oxygen, calories, blood content, and other physical qualities

     Temperature, intact skin, discarding waste, movement

     Environmental, freedom from disease, movement, contact

     Psychological: autonomic, brain, hormonal

     Social: relationship, legal, education, culture

These are limits from side-to-side, often described as the banks of a river.  One must stay in the river to survive.  There is a geological term: “thalweg” which means the deepest center of a stream-way, but the truth is that it’s not possible to resist forces that push from side to side, except one MUST keep off either bank or die.

The river comparison is also useful in terms of flow.  Consider “headwaters” which is the area from which the water gathers in little trickles, gradually becoming bigger and faster.  Life sets terms of gathering-up and momentum, but can stop and pool until it is deep.

The creation of a human being begins with a big egg and an onslaught of little sperms.  Only one sperm gets through the skin of the egg and successfully winds together with the half-strand helixes of genes organized into chromosomes.  They might not do that task well enough to start growing.  A simple little clot, they will pass away. 

80% of miscarriages occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.  The reason in about half of the failed pregnancies is chromosomal abnormality, a broken plan.  If the mother is over forty years old her eggs are as “experienced” as she is, and success is affected by what has happened.  The next reasons might be in the support system: a bad attachment to the wall of the uterus or one in the wrong place, or the egg may have begun to grow in the fallopian tube where there isn’t enough room.  To some degree there must be negotiation between the immune systems of the mother and the baby, or the mother’s body will reject the zygote.

The horizon of birth has become blurred by our ability to support a fetus not quite ready for birth.  At the time of birth, the baby is meant to be able to self-maintain basic homeostasis of the body, given that it has food, warmth, and cleanliness — basic care.  Even then, there might be “crib death” or simply a failure of small parts to develop.  Sometimes something major doesn’t unfold, like the cerebrum of the brain, the most recently evolved layer that contains speech and other functions.  Such a baby is often lovely, but inert, and cannot live long.

At about 3 years a baby begins to have a “theory of mind” and to see causes.  This is roughly equivalent to baby animals beginning to hunt, to explore, and to separate from the parents.  By the age of three most children are walking, talking, and have considerable manual dexterity.  They are relating to trusted others or showing their independence by shouting “no.”

At about 5 to 7 years the child builds the ability to solve problems.  Given an environment fortunate and tolerant enough, a child this age could act like an adult in some ways, taking care of itself even in a household of neglect and abandonment.  This will leave many parts of the child undeveloped and will force it to compensate in ultimately damaging ways.  

At the moment I have in my household a half-grown kitten that nearly starved to death in the past.  He is uncontainable and ruthless when it comes to searching for food or taking it away from other cats.  But he is very seductive and coaxing when wanting something from me. Predators play and play hard for long periods of time.  Eaters of vegetation mostly do childhood gymnastics without focusing on other creatures, but predators are both preparing for combat and for hunting.  This Striped Terror jumps to the tops of things, creeps under and behind things, and loves chasing the smaller kitten, the Dust Bunny.  I’ve caught ST standing on the cookstove twice in the last half-hour.  Luckily, nothing is cooking.

The Striped Terror and the Dust Bunny

But the cat does not stop this behavior once it is fed and full.  Its sleep is instantly broken if there is any hint of activity that might mean food.  The Striped Terror earned his name by being combative, destructive (because of reaching under, knocking over, and getting carried away in play), and inventively resourceful.  He does things that are beyond what the other cats might do.  My house rewards this, as it is a yard full of fallen branches, a garage of saved boxes and jars, indoor surfaces with paper piles and small objects like paper clips and paint brushes, and un-prompt dishwashing.  The two pre-existing ancient cats sleep through everything, but if the Striped Terror bothers them, they are literally sharp in their reaction -- tooth and claw -- which he regrets and remembers.

The Striped Terror came from nowhere but I suspect lived in a house for a while.  He wants to drink from the toilet and stubbornly believes there is a door where there is none, which means his mental map is not adjusted to this house.  Because of the weather patterns in Valier, all the house doors open to the south side, but ST thinks there’s a door on the north side, so maybe he’s come from somewhere far enough away to have a different climate.  Maybe he came as a stowaway.

The Dust Bunny

The Dust Bunny, born in the back shed, was developmentally messed up because of some kind of disease or trauma when he was very tiny.  At one point he was just a head and the body of a sparrow and I thought he would die.  He was missing for weeks, and then one day appeared with his mother though she wasn’t pleased.  So he claimed the Striped Terror, who was from about the same birthing season, but twice his size.

The DB’s mother was a runt, unusually small, and she was very attached to her mother, Patches.   I called her Smudge, a little gray shadow in the grass at her mother’s heels.  I can’t go near the Dust Bunny, who is even vaguer and fuzzier than his mother, but he is devoted to the Striped Terror, who mothers the little fellow.  They sleep on the bed — in fact, on me, with the comforter in between — but if the DB sees my head or hand, he’s gone.  Still, DB watches ST very closely and imitates him and ST loves to be petted and cuddled.  This pairing up is done by at-risk kids and even adults.  If these cats were dogs, they might join a pack. 

So now we have the same teleological problem as every living creature.  Successful constancy, in terms of a whole life, is usually defined by where it is going.  For the sake of the species, the goal has to be making more examples of the creature, but that might be achieved at the sacrifice of some of them.  We don’t mind that — if the creatures are rabbits or chickens — but we DO mind when it comes to humans.  If we know them.  We pretend we don’t and if the pretense is broken, we don’t like that one bit.  We don’t even like thinking about what happens to housecats.  These are cat boys who will fight the tough local Toms.

There’s no use in doing reparative work for youngsters of any kind if there’s no life for them when they reach adulthood.  But changing society in order to find roles is tough when the roles themselves are in such a storm of change.  College professors and doctors are finding life tough, too.  The cats are missing several one-time niches.

The good old days

No one wants more pet cats — we’ve all got enough and there is an outcry against them from bird lovers.  Wheat farmers still need more feral cats who will keep down rodents as they’ve done since the invention of granaries millennia ago.  These days attrition among feral cats around farms is very high because the predators who once ate rabbits or pheasants now can’t find any because of the way wheat is raised, constantly plowed and poisoned.  Therefore the predators eat cats.  It is a role with a short script.  I do not like to think about hawks eating the Striped Terror or the Dust Bunny.  But this is exactly what we are doing to feral children, letting them be destroyed by predators.  We even begrudge them the drugs that help them endure it.

None of the classic questions of philosophy are beyond a seven-year-old’s understanding. If God exists, why do bad things happen? How do you know there’s still a world on the other side of that closed door? Are we just made of material stuff that will turn into mud when we die? If you could get away with killing and robbing people just for fun, would you? The questions are natural. It’s the answers that are hard.
-- Eric Schwitzhebel