The Razor

Gravity is important to cats. Their deep understanding of the subject allows them to accomplish acrobatic feats such as always landing on their feet in a fall. Therefore it is critical for felines to constantly check its state in case someone somewhere stumbles on a disproof of the Theory of Gravity and it ceases functioning. They do this by knocking things at random onto the floor. Some have suggested that this behavior is due to a cat’s instinctive dislike for anything containing an abundance of potential kinetic energy, and that by knocking such objects onto the floor they release the kinetic energy stored in the object and feel better. Of course having 8 cats I can assure you that while an attractive theory, the kinetic energy theory of cat behavior is incorrect. In order to know the truth one must consider the problem from the cat’s perspective.

Imagine what a cat would look like if gravity failed and it was unceremoniously plastered on the bedroom ceiling. No cat would survive the embarrassment, so all cats do the proper thing: test gravity by knocking things onto the floor. In the unlikely event such a test sends an object floating to the ceiling a cat knows gravity has failed and is prepared to execute a graceful turn and land paws first on the ceiling, saving it from embarrassment and impressing anyone – or anything – that witnesses the acrobatic maneuver.

So the next time you find your keys, your watch or anything important on the floor that you didn’t put there, rest assured that by continuously testing gravity the cat not only insures himself against embarrassment, but his human companion from stepping outside during a gravity failure and floating into the void of space.

Cats: Newton’s Gravity Inspectors

If you have 1 dog, find another.
If you have 2 dogs, find another.
If you have 3 dogs, find a cat.
If you have 2 cats, find another.
If you have three cats, find a dog.
Repeat

We aren’t going to solve the overpopulation problem until every pet owner becomes a multi-pet owner. I mention this as the owner of 8 cats and 7 dogs who is looking to adopt another dog to bring my home back into balance. All are spayed/neutered and up-to-date with shots. It costs less than you think and brings a completely new dimension to living with animals.

There should be no “cat people” or “dog people”, there should only be “animal people.”

Please don’t buy animals. Rescue them instead.

Guinness by Lisa Cervone Copyright 2013
According to the photographer Guinness was rescued from a drug dealer and has a new home.

The household is in grief over the death of our alpha dog, a chihuahua we rescued almost six years ago. He was old and epileptic when we found him, but he packed a lot of personality in that little body of his. He was loyal to everyone but like most chi’s he devoted most of his time to a single individual, and for us that was the Wife, usually sleeping behind behind her knees. He was extremely active and playful, running with us as we walked the upper field in the cold air yesterday evening. He was fearless, and crept off into the night while we weren’t looking after dinner, traveling an eighth of a mile for reasons unknown in the cold and dark to the road where he was hit by a car. I found him laying beside the road, alive but severely injured. A hair-raising drive to the emergency vet was for naught, and we had to put him to sleep.

2012 was a year of brutality. It started for us with the execution style slaying of a man nearby, followed by the killing of a rescued dog that had somehow had slipped our protection and was leapt upon by some of my upper-ranking females and died at the vet. The Wife’s sister was found dead in a Las Vegas parking lot. And now this. Friends have also suffered similar tragedies this year with pets and loved ones. Then there’s the local tragedy where a woman moved into a home and ran a portable generator in the house, killing her two children and almost dying herself. Expanding outward there is Sandy Hook of course and Aurora, and abroad the horrors of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali and Syria. The Buddha taught that Life means suffering, and for some reason 2012 demanded more suffering both great and small than most years. I am amazed, stunned, horrified, disappointed and disgusted with the world, and I only wish the New Age Doomers had been right about the Apocalypse last week.

With my last breath of the year I am left speechless except to say, “2012: F*** You.”

I just came back from a patrol run on my property. When I go on patrol I go out armed, usually with a semi-automatic rifle and handgun backup. My property is mixed woodland with pasture and bears have been seen on the neighbors acreage. Not that I’d shoot one if I saw one, but I can’t be sure how the bear will react. There are also hunters who occasionally ignore the NO TRESPASSING signs on my property and it’s amazing how polite people get when they know both sides are armed.

Earlier I had spotted two pit bulls near my pond. Both looked like fighting dogs without collars with scars and wounds around their necks that come from to-the-death fights. I have written before about my feelings about pit bulls. I am not comfortable with the breed and trust them less than I do other breeds.  I have eight rescued dogs on my current roster, and none of them would stand a chance against either of these muscular fighters, so I chased them off with my SUV when I went out and after I returned an hour later got on the motorcycle, armed myself and canvassed the area looking for them.

I love animals and that includes pit bulls. I do not fault them for being who they are, and deeply despise the human beings who have bred and fought them for sport. I understand that some are valued pets and would never hurt their owners, but these two I saw on my property were not pets. They were fighters probably dumped instead of shot by their owners. But no matter what my feelings are, regardless of how much I would love to feed them and clean them up and watch them frolic and play with my pack of misfits, the reality is that if they got close to my house they would  likely decimate my pack, from the chow-shepherd mixes down to the minpin and chihuahua.  So bleeding-heart animal lover I am, I set off on my motorcycle to make sure they did not threaten my rescues and moved on, and if they stood their ground I was prepared to kill them. I hate killing animals, hate it more than anything, but Nature rarely cares about the human conscience and confronts me from time to time with threats to my family or my pack. Rest assured that at these times I do what needs to be done to protect those under my care, regardless of the pangs of my conscience.

A horror is unfolding a few hundred miles away, and while I fully expect to hear the usual calls for the confiscation of my ability to protect myself and those I care for, I am prepared to resist them. I understand the pain that causes people to respond in such a way, but I wish they would heed what responsible gun owners have been saying for decades: the solution is not to confiscate guns it is to provide them to those who we task with caring for our loved ones in our absence. We are not going to change the hearts of the insane killers who slaughter just as I am not going to turn the pit bulls who crossed my property into pets happy to join my pack. All it would take to stop such massacres is a person carrying a gun and trained in its use. In fact murders are deterred all the time by law abiding citizens wielding a gun in self-defense, but these cases rarely make the news. They usually won’t because we can never see what would have happened had the gun owner not reacted, had they not carried a weapon and used it to defend themselves, their friends or loved ones.  In such events we have a single dead criminal instead of multiple innocents, but such things ever make the inner pages of the newspaper and are often ignored completely.

There will always be pit bulls that know nothing but killing just as there will be people without souls who will do heinous acts that tear at the souls of those of us who have them. My pack surrounds me, trusting in me to protect them, and I am alert. It is all I know and what I am.

A few years ago my young son dragged home a stray black cat. It had been tormented by the neighborhood kids, so my son caught it and brought it home figuring that his parents could either care for it or find it a new home. It was a healthy, young female cat, not the friendliest at first but she did warm up to us quickly so we I after a few weeks I made arrangements to have her spayed. By the time of the appointment I noticed that her belly had gotten bigger, and on the ride to the low-cost spay/neuter clinic I realized that she had not gone into heat but had gotten a lot friendlier. Ours is a pro-life house, and it applies even to kittens, so I turned the car around, returned home, canceled the appointment and waited. A few weeks later she gave birth to a litter of four kittens on my son’s bed.

I had never had kittens from day one, but I was determined to raise them into perfect house cats. After a few days I started handling them and had the family spend time with them. As they grew I supplemented their mom’s milk with expensive soft food formulated just for kittens. We brought them into our living room, onto our sofas, and even onto our beds, trying to imprint them with an affection for humans.

Fast forward a few years, and all four kittens are four large cats in my house. One of the cats, the only non-black cat in the lot, is a friendly, well-behaved cat that spends time with us as we move about the house. The other three cats have to be captured to be petted; one grooms himself furiously after being petted, desperate to remove our scent from his fur. The other two will meow at us when they need something, like when their food dish or water bowl is empty but otherwise I rarely see them.

In fact the only time I see them is when the dogs come in from the outside. The cats greet the dogs, padding in and rubbing themselves against them. Sometimes the dogs chase them away, other times they tolerate it, but for all the effort I expended on creating the perfect house cat I realized I have succeeded: I have created the perfect house cat – for a dog.

A Monday morning after a shortened weekend thanks to a makeup day on Saturday for a Snow Day earlier in the week (an inch of snow is enough to cause the school superintendent to wet his pants but not enough to build a few snow days in the schedule, go figure.) The mornings are regimented down to the minute as The Kid and The Wife duke it out over the bathroom with the former needing more time than the latter to get ready, proof that the metrosexuals behind the cosmetics and fashion industry have infected straight youth with the siren song of body washes, sprays and other accoutrements that once were the domain of young women. Meanwhile I’ve thrown on something that doesn’t smell (I think – my sense of smell is shot in the morning thanks to decades of smoking), made coffee, and gotten the dogs outside to pee before a sofa or freestanding lamp morphs into a fire hydrant in their eyes. Time is of the essence as we milk every free second between waking up and the first bell of the morning at school. During that time each second is accounted for, and spent on something necessary to prevent nasty letters from the school system telling me how much of a bad parent I am as well as something warm to stuff into the Kid’s belly courtesy of McDonalds or Bojangles. Seconds lost must be made up on two-lane roads clogged with farmers, rural school buses and old people who believe they are majorettes leading parades of cars on unpassable roads through the winding hills of the Blue Ridge foothills.

Then everything comes to a screeching halt as my 12 year old Honda clatters down the gravel drive at the sight of a dog laying next to the railroad tracks. A border collie cowers fearfully at the side of my drive where railroad tracks cross it. She’s young and very healthy. I roll down the window and my traveling dogs (the “bye bye boys”) go into a barking frenzy, but she doesn’t run. I make baby noises at her, and she wags her tail, so I open the door, scoop her up and rewind the morning tape. Seconds later she’s in the house and the pack is outside baying, but I have to leave her and make up time. Pushing the 4 cylinder engine to its limits with squeals of tires around the curves and a bit of luck with the elderly waiting outside of the rebuilt Dollar General for it to open instead of tormenting people in a hurry on the roads, we pass through the McDonalds drive thru and make it to school with a few precious seconds to spare.

Time slows down as I return home and contemplate the latest arrival at my doorstep.

Bi-color, female, border collie with a dark nylon collar. Thin but not undernourished, of average weight for the breed. I take out a tennis ball and bounce it on the hardwood floor across the room. The sound startles her but her instinct kicks in and she fetches it and returns it to me. Over the next few hours I introduce members of the pack and she shows proper respect to the pack hierarchy except for one of my little male dogs who lunges at her. Testing her it’s clear she understands basic commands and even hand gestures, making her smarter than most of my crew, but then again her breed is known for its intelligence. She is very fixated on me, and sleeps at my feet as I work. It’s possible she comes from a single or double-dog household and isn’t used to large packs, but then again few dogs are. Her fur is clean enough and her nails are clipped. Her belly is flat, so she’s either too young to have bred or has been spayed. She is definitely not a farm dog, and the likelihood of her escaping from a pampered home life in this area is miniscule for the simple reason that there aren’t many homes, pampered or not, in the area. In all likelihood she had been dumped at the nearby bridge like so many other animals that I have rescued in the recent past.

Although my home is restless with animals, I am not what veterinarians euphemistically call a “collector” and what most people call a crazy animal person. My pack, my cat collection, my poultry – all are spayed/neutered (poultry excepted) and receive veterinary care. I make it a point to never search out these animals, and will only intervene if one is in immediate danger or is on my property. Those two criteria are enough to build my pack into the barking, braying crowd that “welcomes” visitors to my property.

Keeping these animals isn’t easy. The chickens and ducks need daily feeding and watering and egg collection. The cat’s litterbox is a 100 gallon plastic tub filled with 120 lbs of clumping cat litter which must be shoveled weekly and replaced monthly using the front loader of my tractor. One of the dogs is an epileptic needing twice daily seizure medication, and one of the little dogs, the “dog of the seven bladders” cannot stop hiking his leg up on everything, requiring constant vigilance and floor cleaning. Another dog is sick with worms and slinks into the basement where she has explosive diarrhea on the concrete floor. I washed the floor on Saturday only to find this morning that she had done it again. Every dog needs personal attention which can be a challenge when five dogs decide it’s now their time with me. Over the years I have had cats throw up on me and scratch me in my sleep. I have had dogs pee on me in bed and throw up half-digested deer meat on my sofa. If it comes out of an animal I have stepped in it in my bare feet or cleaned it up as I dry-heaved.

But I can’t complain. As my late mother-in-law often reminded me, I chose this path. My mother saved one of my first scribblings as a child where I promised that I was going to have a home where all the stray animals could come to live together in peace. Without even realizing it I have achieved that dream – though I doubt peace is possible between the Blue Heeler and the Chow mix, two girls who simply will not get along.

I have strong opinions on animal welfare. Living in the South I am exposed to the religious belief that animals do not have a soul. I in turn believe that many religious people lack souls, jihadi clerics and the Westboro Baptist Church come quickest to mind. I no longer believe that it is morally responsible to breed dogs and cats for profit while shelters are full of unwanted ones. I can no longer watch dog shows that celebrate in-bred pure breeds, and would rather watch a dog show that celebrated the intelligence of mutts. I especially hate PETA, a group that intellectualizes animal rights yet does nothing to rescue animals. Worse it actually kills them, saving as an organization in a year little more than what I as an individual have saved in the same time frame. And no one got naked on my behalf.

Supporting PETA is easy. It’s trendy and it makes you feel good. It’s theatrical and knows how to make news. Pulling an elderly beagle with a belly full of ulcerated tumors off a bridge at night isn’t as glamorous, and the expense of the $700 vet bill that follows to remove them doesn’t feel good. As for making news, abandoning animals doesn’t make any, nor does rescuing and caring for them. Movie stars don’t stop by no-kill shelters to publicize them, and from what I’ve seen they prefer to spend thousands on pure breeds instead of tens on strays from the ASPCA.

If you really care about animals, adopt one from a shelter. If you can’t adopt from a shelter, donate to one. No matter where you live there are animal shelters struggling to educate the public to spay and neuter, and to place animals in forever homes. You may not be famous, but the animals you help will think you are a star.

Lay the body in the shade of the tree and scan the ground for a place to begin digging. Two heavy roots dive into the clay soil at right angles, leaving an empty patch where there are likely no large roots (I don’t want to harm the tree, a tall and strong hickory). Scrape away the top layer of small stones and hickory nut husks with a steel rake, then set down my phone and sunglasses in the grass. Grasp the spade shovel, place it onto the hard pan and stomp on it – but it barely scratches the surface before hitting a rock underneath. Repeat the motion again and again as a begin to shovel out the general shape of the grave, north – south axis with the tree a few feet from its southern end.

Two inches and it’s the first root – about an inch thick that stops the spade shovel. Beads of sweat begin to form on my forehead as I throw down the shovel and grab the pick axe. The dogs have all settled around me after a few cursory sniffs of the body wrapped in a green towel in the red cat litter pan. Swing the pick ax and look at the body (will she be cool enough in the shade?) swing again, sever one side of the root, swing again miss and again before severing the other side of the root, I raise it high above my head for a final blow to loosen it from the soil and feel the clay crumble down on me, mixing with the sweat as I swing the ax down. The root is severed but there’s another, and plenty of rocky clay. I move her body into the cool basement and the dogs scatter, some following me but stopping at the door, no doubt afraid I’ll lock them in or remembering that it is a no-go zone for dogs (it’s where the cat’s litter box is).

Return to the grave, just a pit actually that seemed deeper when I left, I grab the spade shovel and begin to dig. I hit rocks and small roots that I place the shovel to slice through and stomp on it with both feet to send the blade home. The sweat’s coming down in rivulets now and I wipe my face on my shoulder, making my blue checked shirt orange with wet clay.

What Buddhists call the Monkey Mind runs amok in my thoughts. How deep do I have to dig? Will her decaying body contaminant our well? It’s odd knowing she will spend eternity here; that’s a long time. Is she too close to the house? One by one I answer as I continue kicking at the earth with shovel and alternating it with the pick axe. About 3 feet. No our water is separated by two hundred feet of rock and clay from her. Eternity is doubtful; her bones will probably be dug up in a few hundred years by accident. No – we want her close by because she was happy here and this was her home.

Swinging the axe I stumble, my lungs are already hurting and sweat is in my eyes (You are so out of shape – you middle aged failure, Monkey Mind interrupts). I stop and lean against the UTV, breathing heavy and wiping the sweat on my shirt tail. Graves should be hard, I consciously say to myself. They should be sweaty if not painful because they are the final act of love.

I swing the axe high and shower myself with more clay.

There were easier ways. “Do you want to drop her off?” the vet tech asked. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. I suppose I could have dropped her off to die among strangers, and had her body burned with others, their ashes in a heap swept out and then forgotten like so much trash. But she wasn’t trash – she was a living breathing entity that lived a hard life of abuse, thrown out of a car on a long bridge over a shallow river in the middle of the night. As I crossed the bridge I saw a shadow huddled against the concrete wall in the dark and I knew what it was, I just knew. I stopped the car mid-span ran to her and without thinking scooped her up into my arms. Her belly was wet – had she been hit already? But when I got her into the pale overhead light in my car I saw the old beagle with open weeping tumors on her belly.

The grave is a foot deep now and the roots are gone. The clay is more uniform in color with a mix of small bits of quartz that shatter with blows from the axe. It is narrow and long enough for her body – but the roots are containing its shape and size so I can’t widen it to dig deeper. Instead I switch to the straight-edge shovel and continue. Sweat drops onto the sides of the hole as I struggle, fighting the earth to give me an inch of space, using my arms to chip away at the hard clay then the spade to clear out the rubble before moving on to the pick axe. Eventually it too can do no more because the hole is too deep for the handle, my hands banging into the side of the hole, singing with the pain.

Her nails were overgrown and had never been groomed. The first night she spent with us she soiled herself in the crate against her own instincts, meaning that she had probably been caged most of her life. We took her to the vet and had her tumors removed, her feet cleaned up and several of her rotten teeth removed. He said she had probably spent her life pregnant at a puppy mill, birthing scores of puppies that were trained as hunting dogs. Once they became too old to hunt, they would go out on their last hunt and never return from the fields. Her cowardly owner didn’t have the stones to pull the trigger on her himself, so he took her to the bridge to drown her – but didn’t have the balls for that either, so he just threw her out.

My heart is pounding in my chest and I am wet with sweat. I want this grave to be right but I cannot trust my own judgement so I walk inside, grab a tape measure and measure the depth of the grave. Two feet at the lowest point. I need six inches more. I snap the tape back into place and lay it in the bed of the UTV. I then walk to the patio table and find a hand shovel used for gardening and return to the grave. I kneel down, feeling the clay hard on my knees, then I lay down on my belly and reach into the grave with my hand holding the shovel. I begin to stab at the clay.

In the first days she cowered whenever I raised my voice or made an unanticipated move towards her. But my soothing words and gestures calmed her and she took to following me on the tractor as I mowed the fields. At first I was afraid that she would run into the mower, but she knew what she was doing and stayed a respectful distance behind me as I made pass after pass in the field, leaving sweet smelling hay behind me that she ambled through, her ears and tongue flapping. When we come home she would announce our arrival with loud beagle bays. The other dogs didn’t have much to do with her; it was clear to them she was beyond issues of pack hierarchy although one would occasionally attack her to improve her own standing in the pack – and was often squirted by a hose for the effort.

My shirt is filthy, there is dirt in my hair and in my nose and I can taste it on my lips. I stop for a moment and lay face down on the cool ground marveling at the geological processes had taken the Appalachian mountains and turned them into this clay, this evil soil that resists my honest need. How many millions of years does it take to weather a mountain peak and send it to the plains below? Yet for all that violence, all that change, it fights me for every grain. My Monkey Mind flashes with the story of eternity told to us by the nuns in grade school, how a bird flies to the tallest peak imaginable, alights on it, then rubs its beak against the stone briefly before flying away. A thousand years another bird arrives at the spot and does the same. A thousand years passes before another, and another… On and on until eventually the mountain, after having been visited every thousand years by birds with itchy beaks, is worn down. That is eternity according to the nuns. My Monkey Mind added that erosion would take the magic out of that story, but I still find it rather beautiful.

I look into the hole and it feels like an eternity stares back at me. I don’t want to do this. I could go inside and have my son help me. Or better yet I could go out into the well-tilled fields and bury her in its soft, easily shoveled soil. But this isn’t about me. Isn’t it? My Monkey Mind shouts back. But I push it out of the way and thrust myself up on my hands and continue digging with the hand shovel. The clay absorbs the tip and then flakes off as I chip away at it.

She had never been house trained, probably had never spent any time in a house whatsoever, so when we let her in it became her favorite place. She would scramble into the living room and leap upon the soft cushions of the sofa where she would often lay for hours. It became her obsession, and it wasn’t easy to live with. She’d bully her way in at our feet as we opened the door, and then when we weren’t looking, she would shit or pee on the floor. She had never been trained, and after months of frustration trying all the techniques I had read about to break her, she would never be. Cleaning up her messes became a chore, multiple times a day. Walking barefoot in the house was a guaranteed way of finding them. Eventually we ripped out the carpet and laid hardwood – hickory of all species. And as she declined the messes were easier to clean up and didn’t seem to matter as much as they once did.

I scoop the clay out with my hands, feeling it slide beneath my fingernails. Hands can be washed I tell myself and I keep pulling handfuls of the clay chips out.

She was always happy – until the final weeks. She stopped following the tractor months ago and the barks announcing our return home ended soon after. I noticed that she had begun losing weight. She had fattened up after we found her and I nicknamed her “Fat Girl” not to offend her but because the more nicknames an animal has in this house the more it is loved. It’s our culture here. But then she slimmed down and I knew that while we had removed the worst tumors, the cancer was continuing its spread within her. We tested her urine and found blood in it, and there was blood in her stool as well, but she didn’t seem to be suffering so we continued caring for her. She couldn’t leap onto the couch so we picked her up and placed her there. When she quit eating the dried food we give our animals, I made her omelets from eggs laid by the chickens ranging in our front yard. Then a few days ago that was thrown up, and finally she had refused all foods including cooked chicken and ground beef. I had never had a dog refuse those before.

I push myself up and dust myself off but the dry clay clings to my clothes. Hands will be washed, clothes will be cleaned, but not now. I feel time pressing on me and I check the phone – soon it will be time to attend to other matters, but not now! I must finish this. I grab the tape measure and measure the depth of the grave. It is deep enough. I snap the tape back and throw it into the back of the UTV.

When she stopped drinking water I knew the end was near. I called the vet and made arrangements. “Do you want me to come?” the wife asked. I said no. I felt that I needed to do it myself because I had avoided Death so often in the past and allowed myself to be shielded from it. The last time I saw my father was through the backseat window of a car. His coffin was closed. When my childhood pet was dying I left her with my mother and got drunk on cheap wine, returning early in the morning to bury her in my shame, hungover in the dark. When our first dog died I had been at work and left the Wife alone to handle it. It was time for me to accept this as a part of my love of animals. If I was to cradle a kitten in the palm of my hand, I had to cradle a cat in my arms as it breathed its last.

I get into the UTV and drive into the field where I had mowed yesterday while she laid on the sofa. The cut hay is a mix of grasses and wildflowers, some with brushy soft seeds. It is soft and fragrant after laying all morning and afternoon in the sun. I feel the warmth of the hay drying and decaying as I plunge my hands into the pile and load an armful into a box in the back of the vehicle. I stop at the basement door and load her into the back. I pull up to the hole, set the brake and get out.

She didn’t struggle as she rode on the backseat of the car on the green towel. I caught her lifting her head once or twice but she seemed exhausted, too tired to resist. I passed a slow driver on the rural highway. Did I really need to rush to get to the appointment Monkey Mind asked? Her breathing is labored, I replied, and it is time to do this. We arrived at the vet’s office on time.

I make a bough of some hay at the bottom of the hole and pat it down gently, smelling the earthy clay and the warm hay as the dusty air rises up. I pick up her body, already cool and stiffening with a faint scent of decay, and place her on her belly, her paws at her sides as if ready to come when called, her head pointing north because that is tradition isn’t it? I place the coin with the year’s date by her side – a  talisman  (my own personal tradition), and then sprinkle hickory nuts and shells upon her brown fur – some which she may have cracked herself in better days, my final offering to her happiness as she lays in the soil of the land I love so much beneath the tree that she loved near the house that was her home all too briefly. I leave her collar and her tag on because when I found her she didn’t have one, and the collar and tag were the symbols that she was of my pack. I then lay some more of the freshly cut hay on top of her, a natural shroud in place of the old bath towel that held her body while she breathed her last and acted as her shroud until now.

I gently push the soil back with the steel rake until it is filled. She was a good dog and I miss her my Monkey Mind says. I quietly agree. I place the tools in the back of the UTV, start it and drive away.

One night last June I was driving into town to pick up the Kid. It was dark, with the heavy black storm clouds that characterize Summer here in the South blocking starlight and keeping the full moon from doing anything more than glow dully in the eastern sky. As I drove across the concrete bridge that crosses a not inconsequential river, something caught my headlight nestled against the wall midway across the span. It could have been a raccoon but it wasn’t. I stopped the car on the bridge and got out.

I called out soothingly as I walked towards the shadow huddled against the concrete. It came to my feet. I wasn’t exactly sure what breed it was because I couldn’t see much, but it was a dog and judging by the wagging shadow of a tail I knew that it was happy to see me. I reached underneath it to pick it up, and felt bulges of flesh that shouldn’t have been there. A twinge of panic raced down my spine. Had it been hit already? As I walked back to the car I felt the coat and didn’t feel the sickening stickiness of blood. As I felt her belly and the large orange-sized irregularly shaped lumps on it I knew what it was.

I had grown up around dogs – mostly poodles with the occasional large breed like a collie or setter. For some reason my parents never got the dogs spayed or neutered even though they never bred them. Most lived long, but when they died breast cancer often took the unspayed females.  I had been a little boy when I had last felt the outward manifestation of breast cancer in a dog, but the knowledge was there. By the time I got her in the car and held her up to the overhead light I had diagnosed her.

How had she ended up in the middle of that bridge? The bridge is a favorite spot for dumping animals, and her owner didn’t have the guts to take her to a vet or even to  put her down “Ol Yeller” style. I suppose they thought they were doing her a favor, but one didn’t need to be psychic to foresee her likely being hit by a car, starving to death or set upon by coyotes.

We have named her Brigette, of course. She is an old beagle with broken teeth and a belly full of  cancer. She has suffered such cruelty at the hands of one human being that I don’t quite understand why she wants the company of another, but she does. On walks she is at my feet and does her best to keep up with my pack of rescued misfits. She doesn’t whine. When I come home she stands on the deck to greet me. I swear the dog smiles.

I had the tumors removed soon after I found her, but another is back. She’s starting to slide downhill; there is urine in her blood and she’s had some small seizures, but her last year has been a warm one. I give her food and medical care, she gives me love. It’s not a bad trade off in the scheme of things.

Since moving here less than two years ago we have rescued 8 dogs and 4 cats. I’ve found homes for two of the dogs; one even went to the realtor who helped us buy the property. The rest have joined my pack where they are sterilized, vaccinated, cleaned up and treated with care. The area is a notorious animal dumping ground. I’ve heard it said that people abandon their pets near my property because there used to be a dog food factory nearby, or that a kind-hearted vet lived across the river. I’ve heard it said that people are dumping their pets because they can’t afford them due to the bad economy, yet somehow the rural poor manage to have satellite dishes on their mobile homes, big screen TVs in their living rooms and cell phones in their pockets. I’ve seen truly poor people in Africa; the problem here isn’t poverty it’s priorities.

The governor recently signed another animal abuse bill into law.  This state does not need any more laws; it needs people believing in them and following them. We are not going to legislate a solution to animal abuse or animal overpopulation. In the remote areas where I live people come here to escape the heavy hands of the law. No one who loves animals and lives out here believes the bill will do any good.

Animal cruelty and animal overpopulation are not legal problems, they are moral ones. The river that I crossed that night is a favorite for baptisms because it is wide and shallow, and there are more baptist churches in my county than fast food joints or liquor stores. I’d like to see a preacher give a rousing sermon on the evils of animal cruelty but being a non-believer in these parts, and a Yankee one at that, doesn’t give my hopes much weight. The last thing the locals want is to be lectured by another outsider and so I’m stuck waiting for Jesus to lead the Baptists to a place where animals are treated humanely and responsibly.

Last weekend I spotted a female Rottweiler standing in the middle of the road that runs through my property. According to the locals at the general store somebody pulled up, laid out a blanket, and left the female along with another dog. I tried to coax her even though the last thing I need is another dog, but she ran off. Unlike Brigette she’s not ready to trust another human.

I can’t say I blame her. I have a hard time trusting them myself.

Those that don’t know me very well are often surprised to learn that I am an avid NFL fan. Of all the things I’ve been, punk rocker, goth, IT nerd, ending with middle-aged parent and Tea Partier, the NFL doesn’t exactly fit the profile. But I’ve paid the rights to my soul to DirecTV for their NFL Sunday package so that I can watch games on an embarrassingly large Panasonic plasma HDTV.

I am also deeply involved in animal rescue and have been for years. I have financially supported several local grass roots organizations: Forgotten Cats of Delaware, Dumpster Cats, the ASPCA, Tri-State Bird Rescue, and the Delaware Humane Association. I have also opened my home to dozens of stray animals over the years, finding homes for those that I could but assuring all that arrived that their suffering was over; they would never again go hungry or sleep alone in the cold. If I could not find them a forever home elsewhere, they would join my pack of misfits and mongrels. I laugh and tell people that I belong to the “Dog of the Month club” but that’s an exaggeration; on average my wife and I rescue a dog about every other month and we’re about due for our next one anytime.

Three years ago I wrote the following about Michael Vick:

I’m no saint, Michael. I’ve done stupid things in my life just like anyone. But I’ve never done anything as bad as what you’ve done. My parents raised me to avoid doing those things – killing for sport and torturing for kicks. I’m no sadist, and seeing a sadist stand there as the camera shutters whirr away really pisses me off.

I hope you turn life around, Mike, but if you don’t I won’t lose any sleep. You can then rot the rest of your life having tasted success while knowing you will never, ever taste it again.

I wasn’t just a Vick hater; I wanted to see him completely and utterly destroyed. I was beside myself with rage at a man who could do what he did to dogs, and a system that limited his punishment to less than two years in jail. There is something unique about animal cruelty that sets it apart from all but a handful of crimes except child molestation or abuse. I believe that it is because the only thing that separates it from cruelty towards children is the fact that the sadists are afraid they’ll get caught if they do to a child what they do to a dog. Both child and dog are innocents and incapable of protecting themselves, and I believe that the line separating an animal torturer from a child abuser is a thin one, and one that she or he will eventually cross if not stopped.

Michael Vick was stopped by the full force of the Law before crossing that line. He was stripped of his fame and his fortune and sent to prison, and even today I stand behind what I wrote 3 years ago. Should he have been punished more severely as some have argued? Should he have been banned from his passion and his livelihood forever?

I understand why people believe so. I sympathize with their fury at seeing his face on the cover of Sports Illustrated and his name hung on banners inside stadiums. Michael Vick had everything that most do not – money, fame, athleticism – yet none of that stopped him from drowning struggling dogs in pails of water. As Isolde of Avalon writes:

People want Vick to be punished more because his crime was not one of passion or bad judgment or desperation. It was one of repeated, cold-blooded, needless cruelty inflicted by a millionaire who had everything against a bunch of innocent animals whose nature is to be loving and faithful companions for human beings. That is why people want “more”.

I understand that, and it would be much easier for me to agree with him (or her – come Isolde, forget the nom de guerre and use your name. It’s 2010.) than to accept the nagging suspicion that the Truth is much more complex than that.

Michael Vick admitted his crime and went to prison. In every interview he has not attempted to dodge the severity of his crime or his responsibility for it. He has followed the letter of his sentence without complaint. He has listened to his mentors like Tony Dungee and his former and current coaches – and by doing so he has forced me to answer this question:

Is it possible for a man to atone for his crime no matter how heinous its nature or how honest his atonement?

As an alcoholic I did terrible things to others. As a recovering alcoholic I have done my best over the years to make amends where possible for these actions. Now nothing that I did was anywhere near the same magnitude of what Michael Vick did, but who are we to judge whether redemption is possible for one man but not another? That sounds like Supreme Diety turf to me.

Over the past three years I have viewed everything Vick has said and done through the lens of suspicion, just as every ex-con or recovering addict understands the games played by other cons and addicts. Everything he says is worthless; only his actions add credibility to them. Vick followed the program laid out to him by the courts and by his mentors. When the Human Society president Wayne Pacelle spoke well of Vick’s efforts to end dogfighting, I took note. I respect the The Humane Society because they don’t get to cherry pick the easily adoptable dogs the way some so-called “no kill” shelters do, and they are often on the front lines of cruelty, working in the inner cities where the affluent are afraid to go to rescue or adopt pets.

How many people haven’t done something that they need redemption for? How many have never experienced the shame and disappointment of finding yourself in a deep well dug with your own hands and struggling to see the light above? How many have never struggled upward against a heaviness that sucks you down as you reach upward towards the light? How easy it must be for them to not feel the icy fear in the pit of your stomach with each loose stone that pulls away at your fingertips.

For Michael Vick the well is deeper and the light dimmer, but does the possibility of redemption exist for Michael Vick? Do the screams of dying dogs echo in his dreams the same way as the sobs of loved ones do in mine? Does redemption exist on a spectrum or as a binary event? Again, these are questions only Michael Vick or theologians can answer.

Before I heard of Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels I had no idea that dog fighting existed in the inner city. In the Midwest where I grew up it was known as a backwoods “sport” practiced in the Ozarks or in “Deliverance territory” in the Deep South. Vick’s case shone light on its prevalence in the inner city, and has helped authorities and animal rights activists to roll it back there.

It pains some people when good things come out of evil actions. Of course the end should not justify the means but shouldn’t we accept that Vick’s case has helped the cause of ending animal cruelty? Vick’s success on the gridiron only furthers that cause by keeping the issue in the public eye and funds flowing to animal rescue and support groups. Would these groups and their cause be doing as well with a broken Michael Vick in prison or in a half-way house somewhere?

When I sobered up there were people who wanted me to pay for my actions as well. I followed the 12 Steps and did the best I could, but for some it wasn’t enough. They never forgot my mistakes or forgave me for them, and that’s something that I will always have to live with. But sitting on the loveseat next to me as I write are a chihuahua mix and a beagle, the former found abandoned as a pup in a box without his mother and the latter running around alone in my field on the coldest day of the last Winter. They are warm, well-fed and loved. Would they prefer that I was ruined to pay for my mistakes?

Over the past 10 years I have helped raise a decent kid, supported a wife through medical school and residency, helped her through the loss of both her parents, and overall built a decent life for my family and dozens of stray animals – knowing throughout it all that one mistake would cause it all to evaporate. Should I have sacrificed those things and worn a hairshirt in payment for my mistakes as some even today want me to do?

What kind of payment is that anyway? What are the goals of people like that? In the case of Vick, what do they want him to do if not electrify the football field every Sunday that he steps on to it? What more must he do to redeem himself in their eyes?

True redemption is one of the most honest and beautiful things around. There are no more lies and clarity in abundance. The humility it grants endows one with a taste of serenity that a junky or criminal will never savor. Redemption replaces chaos with peace, selfishness with selflessness, wrecklessness with caution. It is a force of good in the world that can spread from the redeemed to transform the world around him or her.

I hope that Michael Vick’s redemption is real, but only Michael and his mentors know for sure. In the meantime I will not forgot his crime but I will cheer him on. I want Michael Vick to succeed to be redeemed and transform the world around him. I want to believe in the promise and possibility of Redemption.

UPDATE: Maybe the Eagles should reconsider this after their shellacking at the hands of the Vikings last night.
Eagles Pick Squeaky For Defensive Coordinator

I had planned on writing something a bit more political about supermodel Joanna Krupa donning a pair of wings and hiding her naughty bits behind a large silver crucifix in a billboard ad for PETA. My first thought was that it’s safe to piss off Christians. Had she held a Koran or one of the Mohammed cartoons she would have had to join Salman Rushdie in hiding or risk being hit by a homicide bomber at her next catwalk.

I then wondered how many rescued animals she cared for. We currently care for 13 dogs and cats – all rescues and most acquired this year. Each has a story.

2. “June”* was found in a dumpster in Japan still attached to the placenta. She likes drinking water straight from the tap and is the eldest of our crew. She survived the parvo virus while we were still in Japan. The Japanese vet even came to our small apartment to attend to her.
   
3. “Betelgeuse” was a black cat abused by teens who likes to be brushed and is a fierce mouser. Last year we had to have one of his canine teeth removed after it became abscessed – for $700. I guess one mouse didn’t go down without a fight.
   
4. “Killer” our chihuhua is 13 years old and suffers from epilepsy. I have to give him phenobarbital twice a day wrapped up in a slice of pepperoni. He is fiercely loyal to our family and taught me to appreciate this unique breed of dog.
   
5. “Lady” is a 3 year old black lab mix who is one of the fastest dogs I have ever seen. She is also one of the most gentle, although she doesn’t like being disturbed once she has staked out her place on the bed.
   
6. “Bella” is a complete mutt who ran up our driveway here in North Carolina. She loves stretching out on her back next to you on the couch. She also enjoys chasing deer and playing with the kittens.
   
7. Four of our six kittens were born last May when the Kid brought home a pregnant stray into our pro-life home. “Cow” has a thick tail and loves sleeping beside the Wife. He was the last one born.
   
8. “Chirp” is all black with white whiskers and has a meow that sounds like a cricket.
   
9. “Sinatra” is black with a tuxedo pattern. He thinks he is a dog and saddles up to Lady and Bella more than people.
   
10. “Siouxie” is all black and likes to lay beside me and nibble on my fingers while I’m reading.
    
11. Then there is “Baby”, a 12 week old Siamese who somehow crossed several acres of coyote infested open farmland and woodland to meow outside our bedroom window. It was love at first sight, and he’s sitting here watching me type. I’ve always had a soft spot for Siamese since my sister had one when I was a kid.
    
12. “Tortie” is a tortoiseshell we picked up from an elderly couple along with the following two feral cats. She was originally wild but showed a pleasant demeanor when being fed. So one day we brought her in to join the crew. Her fur isn’t the best colored – looking like a box of crayons melted together – but it is soft.
    
13. Kitten #1 is the sister of Tortie but is completely wild.
    
14. Kitten #2 is a long-hair who lives with Kitten #1 in a shed. I had to put him inside a cinder block to hold him while treating an eye infection. The infection cleared up – and he’s outgrown the cinder block.
    

All of these animals have been spayed, neutered or are in the process of being so. All are fed, watered, housed and taken to the vet when sick. All are up to date on their shots.  Even Kitten#1 has been to see the vet because all three ferals were sick and needed medicine. Only “Tortie” chose to be domesticated.

Compared to all the work I do for my creatures, holding a cross in front of my naked body would be much easier. Try cleaning up bloody diarrhea first thing in the morning – after you’ve stepped in it.  Or how about holding your pet while he’s having a seizure, whispering to him and stroking him as he stiffens and convulses at 3am.  She could afford the vet bills much easier than most – including us.

But we chose this path. In fact it’s one of the reasons we chose this house. As a very young child I dreamed about having a lot of land where I could let all the cats and dogs needing a home live out their days in peace. We’ve made that dream a reality – at least for these 13 animals.

So Joanna, put down the cross, put on some clothes and adopt a homeless animal or dozen. While I agree with PETA’s message, I don’t like it’s methods and would rather see it do fewer theatrics and more actions to find homes for homeless animals.
——

*All names have been changed to avoid putting TMI on the Internet.

I woke up this morning to the sound of gunfire. Musketfire to be exact. Deer hunting season switched from bow and arrow hunting to muzzle loaders on Saturday, and hunters have been on the neighboring property “hunting bambis” as they call it around here. The gents next door started their day at 6:30am. Dickheads.

Things will get worse soon. Rifle season starts on Saturday and continues till Christmas. I’ve posted new signs around my property but plan to run daily patrols. I have no quarrel with hunters unless they step foot or kill on my land. I owe the bank a large sum for this land, and if I want to let the bambis run on it without fear then I’ve bought that privilege. If they want to hunt land like mine then they should buy it just like I did.

It’s going to be an interesting couple of weeks.

Dominique Swain posed for PETA a few years back, but that hasn’t stopped the starlet from dumping a litter of unvaccinated puppies at an animal shelter in Malibu without even leaving a donation. A PETA spokesman responded “”We’ve not worked with Dominique in years and there’s no excuse for her allowing her dog to breed in a city that is overflowing with homeless animals literally dying for good homes,” said the rep.”

Once again I agree with PETA. Too bad they haven’t woken up and realized that your doing your cause no good by hiring hypocrites to get their message across.

Last night my son watched Whale Wars on Animal Planet as I stepped into the back bedroom. “Hello children,” I said in my best South Park imitation of Issac Hayes’s Chef’s voice. Suddenly from under the book case appeared four little mewing kittens who leapt onto my lap as I sat on the floor.

I’ve lived my entire life with animals, and while my political labels have changed over the years my interest and care for them has never abated. Now as I push the envelope into libertarianism I find myself comparing the evolution of my political beliefs with my innate ones as a kind of reality. If I find myself espousing causes that conflict with these ideals, I know that it’s time to back-off and reassess the situation. Doing this I’ve successfully steered myself away from extremes on both the left and right, pursuing a middle path that in retrospect is uniquely my own.

Whale Wars chronicles the attempts of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to shut down the Japanese whaling fleet in Antarctica using “direct action” – actively intervening to stop the whaling ships using tactics that push the legal line. Reviews of the show tend to fall along typical political lines with the New York Times and other liberal media outlets praising the show and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal criticizing it.

Most of the large scale whaling that is still conducted in the world is done by the Japanese. Japan’s whaling is based on a cultural argument that whaling is essential to Japanese culture. “Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture would compare to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chips.”

As Greenpeace Japan notes, this is a load of whale crap. Whale meat played a minor role in the Japanese diet until after World War 2 when it overtook all other protein sources, its consumption peaking in 1962. This was by necessity since Japan could not afford to import other protein sources and lacked a domestic meat industry that could supply its booming population. Since then Japan has developed internal poultry and pork industries and secured beef imports from the US, Australia and South American.

As a result whale meat has been in decline, even after a concerted effort by the Japanese government to encourage its consumption. The Japanese government has a poor record of encouraging the public to eat what it doesn’t want to eat. In the 1990’s the Japanese government, under pressure from trading partners, allowed the import of rice which the Japanese shunned. The Japanese consumers viewed domestically produced rice as much more fundamental to their culture than whale meat and avoided it, leading the Japanese government to give away the imported rice to North Korea and other nations as food aid.

In short Japan’s population doesn’t need to eat whale meat today because there are cheaper and more sustainable alternatives. In fact surveys show that the Japanese public does not want to eat whale meat no matter how much its government promotes it. Without the support of the Japanese government Japanese whaling companies would go bankrupt. In the end a free market would end a practice faster than shipfuls of pissed off “whale lovers” throwing urine bombs. But given continued government sponsorship of whaling, the actions by those “whale lovers”can be justifiably condoned.

Yet the argument that whaling is uneconomic without government support is a weak one. All it would take is a whale meat fad to sweep Japan and the whaling ships would take to the oceans again. Karl Marx believed that all human activity could be explained by economic theory – particularly his own version of economic history, so it’s important for conservatives to avoid making the same mistakes Marx made when justifying our beliefs.

In his book “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy,” Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush makes the conservative case for animal rights. The basis for Scully’s case is stewardship, that we have a moral duty towards animals to treat them with respect and as humanely as possible. This perspective differs from the “animal rights” groups which view the rights of animals as intrinsic to animals. “What the PETA crowd doesn’t understand,” Jonah Goldberg wrote, “or what it deliberately confuses, is that human compassion toward animals is an obligation of humans, not an entitlement for animals.”

The idea that animal stewardship derives from humans rankles animal rights groups on one hand, but on the other hand threatens the industries built on animal exploitation. America’s animal shelters are overrun with unwanted dogs and cats, yet there is an entire industry devoted to breeding these animals. The annual celebration of this industry, the AKC/Eukanuba National Championship is even hosted on Animal Planet.

Animal Stewardship does not make one a vegan. Apes have evolved an omnivorous diet over tens of millions of years. We can’t deny our own biological heritage just because it’s inconvenient to our ideals, but some will try. They may choose to attempt to pursue a vegan lifestyle; personally I have no problem with tearing into a steak. But I want to see the animal that I eat treated well and killed mercifully. This puts me at odds with the beef, pork and poultry industries in the USA that cram chickens and cows into cages just as much as it disgusts the vegans who throw paint on people wearing fur or torch mountain resorts.

I have no problems with hunters who eat what they kill. I do have a problem with men who shoot up the countryside on a weekend bender – drunks with guns. Life is precious and should be treated as such, and I have no respect for a man who shoots something for “sport” and leaves it to rot. If conservatives don’t conserve life, what do we conserve?

So I find myself to the right of PETA and to the left of BeefUSA thanks to my inner compass and my kittens. In case you are wondering their mother has an appointment to be spayed after they are weaned. In the meantime their litterboxes get cleaned, they are fed twice daily and treated with the care that my responsibility for them demands.

The kittens are 2 1/2 weeks old and are pushing 400 g now. Eyes and ears are open, but they are now in the mastering gravity phase. They don’t stand all the way up and walk unsteadily. Yesterday we heard our first purr, and one seems to have a severe case of wanderlust: he crawls away on his own. The queen is taking excellent care of her four kits, and I must say that I look forward to coming home from work, grabbing a kitten and kissing it. Nothing lowers the blood pressure like a basket full of kittens.

And the entire household is on tenterhooks. Here’s an introduction to Little Girl.

They need to come out with a feline edition of “What To Expect When You’re Expecting,” ...

UPDATE: 2:32am Friday May 8, 2009

One ER visit (for a bad cat bite to the Wife – who got a little too close during a kitten birth) and 4 kittens later…

Note that 3 of the 4 are completely black.

Guess I just can’t escape my goth heritage…