Last week, I was alerted to a little visitor outside my front door - a small grey and white cat without a collar, sitting on my front step.
Amazingly, when I asked him to hold on, to not run away, he stayed put while I went to get him some food.
While he ate, he allowed me to pet him. And that's when I noticed that he'd lost part of his ear, and had some scars on him that were still healing.
I was pretty sure he had no home to go to, so I fixed him up a little bed in my backyard, and left my fence open so that he could wander on home at any point, if he wanted to.
But he was still there in the morning. And he's been showing up at my house ever since, at odd intervals. I'm tempted to take him to the SPCA, because after watching him limp in after another fight with another cat, I assume, it seems to me that even if he has a home, he's not being looked after.
And that makes me angry.
I don't understand how people can look at their pets and consider them disposable, how they can just not care if they don't come home one night.
I was raised on a farm. I've had innumerable cats that I've called my own. And each time one went missing or died, I grieved. And those were the cats we kept in the barn, not the house pets.
The existence of the Humboldt SPCA is proof that not all people feel the same way about their pets. Ask them and they will tell you some horror stories about how they've found animals, or how animals have been left at their doors. For these dedicated volunteers, the thought of how some of these pets have been living must give them nightmares.
It baffles me, it truly does, how people can be so cruel to other living things, especially those who depend on them, and are predisposed to love them unconditionally.
To simply turn out a pet because you don't want it anymore is a completely selfish act. These animals have no idea how to fend for themselves. They starve, get hit by cars, get attacked by other animals. They don't understand why you did it. And they never will.
When you become a pet owner, you assume a certain responsibility for an animal's life. You are the one to feed it, to ensure it's healthy, to entertain it, and to love it.
If you no longer wish to have that responsibility, your last duty is to find it another home. Not to turn it out on the street, or drive it to the middle of nowhere and leave it for dead.
My parents welcomed a second dog to their farm a few years ago. It showed up one day, skinny and starving for both food and love. It got the former right away from my brother, and the latter from pretty much every member of the family, including their other dog, Joa.
Mugga, as she was named by my dad, is not the most attractive dog in the world, and was likely tossed out by her last owner once she grew out of the cute puppy stage, we think. She has a tendency to dig up my mother's tulip bulbs, likely because that was what she found to eat after being abandoned. But she does have a lovely spirit, is well behaved and pretty smart, and she adores my parents. She follows my dad around like, well, like a puppy.
Those who so cruelly abandoned her are missing out on that.
That is their punishment, I suppose - that they will never be treated like that by a pet, because they've never treated a pet that way.
But it still makes me angry when people treat these animals, these creatures we invite into our lives, like they don't matter.
They do matter. Or they should.
