Imagine yourself at the pound in the twentieth century. Hundreds of dogs and cats sit in cages waiting to be adopted. This is not a no-kill shelter: this large city, known to truckers as The Big Dirty, is basic in its approach to unwanted animals. You walk past rows of cages. The dogs and cats are frantic, terrified, bewildered, listless, or have given up. They whimper or wag their tails. They bark or meow. They stick their paws through the wire. They can smell death; they can smell the euthanized animals burning in the incinerator behind the building.
I try not to think about the incinerators, about the animals smelling burning flesh. The incinerators are monitored by the EPA and state air pollution agencies, because they generate toxic emissions, as do the incinerators at human crematories. Bodies are mostly water, but the gas-fueled incinerators emit carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and oxide nitrogen.
An anxious employee told me a horror story that haunts me. She was traumatized and going mad, or she wouldn’t have told a stranger. Someone had dropped off a litter of kittens stuffed in a paper sack. These poor terrified mutilated kittens had to be euthanized. I gave her a pack of kleenex from my purse.
I took a deep breath. I did not share the sad story with my husband, because this was supposed to be a happy day.
And at that moment, a tiny black-and-white kitten demanded our attention. She climbed up the wire cage door, stuck to it with her claws, and meowed plaintively.
She was the one.
We called her Starbuck. She relaxed as soon as we left the building. She purred in my lap in the car. A car was a better living space than a cage. And soon we were at home. Wow, she loved running around that space.
Starbuck was so small that she had to be fed tiny morsels by hand for the first few weeks. When she caught a cold, I sat with her in the bathroom and ran the shower so the steam would clear up her sinuses. And perhaps because I gave her so much attention, she became not only a good friend to cats and humans but a social worker and feline rights activist.
A few years later, we adopted a kitten named Louisa May. Starbuck washed her, cuddled with her, and taught her how to use the litter box.
Starbuck and Louisa May were inseparable. One of their favorite activities was breaking into the attic. They would claw at the carpet under the door for hours, having figured out by kitty engineering or instinct that the door might open if they dug their claws in the right spot for long enough. One day I found the door open and the two cats happily burrowing in boxes of books. Louisa May left tiny claw tears on the cover of a Willa Cather book. I was so impressed with their break-in that I couldn’t stop laughing.
Starbuck also became a social worker. When our oldest cat, Martian, who really was ancient, began to spend most of her time dozing in the Barcalounger, she was bullied at meals. Emma was a feline rights activist: she escorted Martian to the food bowls and batted away the bully while Martian ate.
Nowadays, in our small city, a no-kill shelter seems to have taken over the work of the pound. And what a good thing that is! We loved our cats from the pound, but I am so happy that the animals now have a better chance of finding a good home. There are many adult rescue cats, as well as kittens. And the adult cats often are “buddy cats,” who come from the same home and cannot be separated.
An automatic family!
