small (literally) disaster
Saturday 28 July 2007 | someone left a cookie
The feral kittens got into the Brujo’s cactus babies.
Before I go further, I should explain that I have watched him raise them from seed for over a year, fussing over them, spritzing them with a fine mist bottle, carting them inside and out, adjusting their temperature via electric seed tray and their humidity via a complicated arrangement of little sticks, hurrying home to put them indoors out of the rain, monitoring their sunlight and soil. Every day. For over a year. We’d be sound asleep together at my house and he’d wake up and fumble for his glasses and say, It’s going to storm, I have to go home and put my seedlings inside.
Now sometime between ten this morning and four this afternoon, the kittens playfully devastated their minute habitat, but totally. After I stopped retching, I brought them inside, put them on the dining table, turned on all the lights and set to work with a single hashi (pointed Japanese chopstick) and a pair of tweezers. Infant cacti are about the size of mosquito legs or ice cream sprinkles, depending. After an hour and a half, and a few itchy fingertips from microscopic glochids, they’ve all been replanted—but who knows if anyone will survive. I rummaged in the bathroom for the last few drops of Rescue Remedy only to find it all evaporated. Why did this have to happen on my watch?! Why didn’t I think to cover them with a screen or cage or something?
Apparently feral cats aren’t just our neighborhood problem. There are over 355,000 of them in the Tartarus area; they’re for the most part completely untameable; and euthanizing them solves nothing, only creating an evolutionary “power vacuum” in which female cats actually breed more frequently to fill the niche. It seems neither the county nor the cities pay a dime toward solving the problem. Instead, volunteer non-profits educate/advocate for/provide TNR, trap-neuter-release services to stabilize the population and allow the cats to die out naturally—and as another plus, while you’re charged $96 to euthanize a stray, it’s only $55 to have one sterilized.
Well, at least I can say one thing for the three adults and four kittens I’ve counted so far: they may in fact be helping to keep the scorpion population down. But that’s a whole nother post. In the meantime, I hover worriedly over ant-sized cacti and pray for their tiny survival.
someone left a cookie
post your glowing encomium (or bitter philippic) »
Follow this heated, lively discussion through its very own feed; also, you can pingback or trackback from your own doubtlessly much more interesting site.
Oh oh oh! I made a strangled choking noise to read of this. I am so so sorry. May they recover. Oh dear. I remember meeting the tiny cacti in February and your explaining to me just how very slowly they grow.