Pussy-Footing Round the Problem

Coco and McCosker, the first two kittens we found in the garden, so tiny we put a hot water bottle beneath them, and a cuddly toy beside them for company.

I was reading Isobel's blog last week, in which she quoted a Seamus Heaney poem, and threw the subject of unwanted kittens and puppies into the arena. It was done with her usual light touch, and left many unspoken questions hovering in the air.

It also reawakened a memory that has haunted me all my life.
Of finding a bucket of drowned kittens, their bodies, not as Heaney describes them 'sluiced out on the dunghill, glossy and dead,' but rather drifting in a kind of dream world, their fur fluffed out in the water, their paws stilled, their faces closed.
I still see them now.

I wouldn't be able to drown a kitten.

McCosker tried to drown himself. He learnt how to drink by bathing in it

But drowned kittens aside, it never ceases to startle and appal me how some people try to dispose of animals
How some people treat animals.
It makes me want to reach for a gun.
(And it's not the animals I want to shoot.)

Someone once rescued a puppy that had been thrown into the river here in a sack. They saw it being dumped and rushed in after it. And I was brought a kitten by a sobbing tourist, many years ago. Driving along a road not far from here, they had witnessed with horror someone hurling the small, inoffensive creature out the window of the car in front, presumably to perish beneath their wheels. The woman - her entire family - were, not surprisingly, distraught, not least because, on a touring holiday, there was nothing long term they could do to help.

We called the poor little mite Tattoo, for the scar her ordeal left above one eye.
She was, incredibly, only superficially hurt, and never looked back.

Tattoo enveloped by her new family

On another occasion my small son came rushing home from school, fierce, angry tears streaming down his face. He was clutching a tiny kitten to his chest in one hand, his school bag in the other.
A parent, collecting their child, had dumped three kittens underneath a bush outside the school gate. My son's fury was only equalled by his grief. The other two had scattered in fright and he'd been unable to catch either. They were long gone when I returned to the school with him.

For years and years, when we first moved here, we would find unwanted kittens dumped in our garden, or inside the gate. Coco and McCosker were the first - who we found two days apart, and who clung to each other when re-united. There were four once, in a sack left outside my henhouse door where I'd be certain to find them. One tiny black tarantula of a creature was shut into a box made of field stones outside the back gate. It was the day of Prince Edward's wedding to Sophie I happen to remember. It rained all day, and every time I went outside I heard this plaintive crying. We called him Pink, because the aforementioned Tattoo took him under her wing like a mother.
('Tattoo was the mother of Pinkle Purr,
A little black nothing of feet and fur,
And by and by, when his eyes came through,
He saw his mother, the big Tattoo...'
A A Milne)

Inky black Pink with Top Dog and Dottie

On another occasion three little boys came to the front door one summer's day carrying yet another tiny kitten. 'We found her on the bridge,' they said. The bridge is old and narrow and bears all the traffic passing through the village.
I asked whether they had tried this house, that house - everyone I could think of who liked cats. 'We've tried all of them,' they replied. I didn't think their kind impulse would stretch much further.
So Pushkin arrived. She is now Senior Cat and is sitting on my lap purring as I write.

I could go on and on. There have been so many.


When I was a child in the West Indies, it was common practice to put unwanted puppies in dustbins. One in each dustbin down the street - or probably down someone else's street. It was seen as giving the hapless creatures a 'chance of life'. They weren't wheelie bins, remember and there would have been food scraps. Maybe whoever dumped kittens in my garden thought the same.

Would it have been better if they had drowned their 'litter' in a bucket?
It would have been better if they had prevented the litter in the first place.
Not difficult to do, these days. And there are plenty of charities to help with the cost for those who aren't financially able.

To my mind it's about taking responsibility. Which brings me back to Isobel's post.

Life was tough in years gone by, but I don't think I would have been inundated with unwanted felines during the deep watches of the night back then. I don't know whether country people had a more 'robust and practical' approach to their animals then or not. I suspect they did. I suspect they needed to have. My mother spent her summer holidays on a farm as a young child. She remembers seeing the matriarch of the farm knocking new-born kittens' heads against the wall. The idea fills me - and filled her - with horror, but rather like pulling chickens necks, I suppose it was quick and clean, when you knew what you were doing. She was a kind, good woman. All her family and her animals were loved, well fed and cared for. She was, I suppose, taking responsibility, at a time when that was the only option to prevent over-breeding, in-breeding and uncontrollable proliferation.


Now, conversely, when it's so much easier to take responsibility, so many don't, and now that none of us need get our hands dirty, need even contemplate having to drown kittens in a bucket or dash their brains against a wall, we have become increasingly squeamish.

Pushkin was delivered to the front door.

And woolly in our thinking.
Sentimental.


I don't know about you, but personally I rate quality far higher than quantity. I would rather put an animal down than see it suffer. Like my poor little Empress last week. Like my first dog Alfie, who developed severe epilepsy. Like Pink who developed HIV when he was only a few years old.

It's always heartbreaking, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the one thing we can do for an animal that we love but cannot mend, or an animal that no one wants. I really don't buy into animal charities - who in all other respects I wholeheartedly support - putting animals through endless treatments for illnesses or accidents when it would be kinder and better to put them to sleep and spend those much needed and hard-earned resources on the endless queue of fit and well animals needing help and a home. And what about the innumerable puppies and kittens they receive?

Ireland ships untold numbers of unwanted dogs to the UK and Sweden. Surely the UK and Sweden have enough unwanted dogs of their own? Can the organisations that ship these animals out of Ireland guarantee that each and every one goes to a loving, domestic home? I don't believe all of them can, in which case they cannot know what potential suffering those animals might yet endure. As far as I know, cats aren't shipped anywhere, but the cat rescue services are overrun with cats that no one seems to want.

If people won't neuter their animals, then dealing with the endless litters will become a greater problem than ever - an unsustainable problem. Perhaps it's kinder to be robust and practical. And we're lucky enough to live in an age when that doesn't have to entail brutality.

I guess kindness is the key.  The third essential qualifier to the robust and practical approach.
Together those three make for something stronger than sentimentality.
They make for love that puts the animal's best and long-term interests first.
Tough love, if necessary.