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Edna first called me a week ago. She’d gotten my number from a list of feral cat advocates that Alley Cat Allies keeps. She said a mother cat and three kittens come to her yard, and she needed advice on what to do about them. She was completely ignorant of her options and didn’t know what to do. She’d spoken with animal control in her county, thinking that was where to go to save the cats. I told her to go instead to the humane society, and to speak to them, looking for people in her county who could help. I told her if animal control took the cats away, they’d put them down.
I told Edna about TNR,* and she was thrilled and said “oh, that’s definitely what I need to do!” Then she said over and over that she can’t move, and would be completely unable to take on any trapping duties, let alone carry the traps and transport the cats. She told me very emotionally that it’s all she can do to feed them. She feels deeply that they’re alone, scared, hurting, and needy. She is frantic.
Edna is in her late sixties. She has a number of medical problems, including an unnamed disorder or injury which causes her extreme pain and makes her nearly unable to walk, certainly unable of carrying anything. She also says she has some emotional problems. What’s more, she is caring for her ninety-year-old mother, and she speaks in terms of her mother’s impending death. She says things like, “she probably won’t last the year, I don’t know if she’ll be alive for weeks or months.” She repeatedly stressed her need to do something about these cats but her complete inability to do anything at all but pay for the services.
I told her I understood her problems (and offered sympathy, of course). Then I strongly suggested that she work the phones to find someone local who can help her. I gave her several phone numbers. Then I told her that as a very last resort, I would go to her home and trap her cats and take them to the clinic, but that she would need to find someone to pick them up and deliver them home.
It was hard to talk to her because she very rarely stopped talking. She would ask a question, then keep talking without waiting for an answer. Every time I was able to speak, it was only because I interrupted her. We talked that day, about a week ago, for forty-five minutes. As we left it, she was going to call the humane society and try to get some contacts, some folks who could help her. As we left it, I didn’t expect to hear from her again.
Edna called me again on Saturday night at 9:30 PM. That is too late. I did not answer the phone. She called four more times on Sunday morning, the first time at about 7:15. That is too early. I did not answer, and she didn’t leave a message until the fourth call. I didn’t answer because I wasn’t in a place to spend an hour on the phone.
When I called her back, I politely listened to this woman’s fears for fifty-five minutes. One of her neighbors trapped one of the kittens and gave it to animal control, who destroyed it. The mother and her two remaining babies aren’t coming around to her anymore. “What has happened to them? I don’t know if they’re dead, or hurt . . . .” Etc.
She called the neighbor who had the kitten taken away at 10:30 PM, on Saturday, the night she called me at 9:30. Hm.
My attitude grew more sour by the minute. I don’t like this about myself, but it’s reality.
At one point she asked me what I would do, and I told her I wasn’t sure I should tell her, because of our age difference, and I didn’t want to be disrespectful. She said, “it’s okay, just say what you want to say.”
So I told her about how I have to distance myself from the cats’ actual lives, and that I have to stop thinking of them as having human emotional traits. I have to remind myself that they have walnut-sized brains and that they are in fact animals, and although they’re sentient beings they lack the capacity to worry and fret -- at which point she interrupted me and said rudely, “well, thanks, but I really didn’t need the lecture.” After telling me to speak my mind. She told me she knows I am wrong – that they do feel everything we feel, and think everything we think. Hm.
Here’s where my attitude problem comes in.
I have offered to help this woman, but I do not want to talk to her anymore. I begin to wonder if she has just a little bit more than “emotional problems.” I begin to wonder if her tale is true.
I don’t like feeling this way about a woman ostensibly in need.
I don’t know if I’m asking for advice or if I just wanted to vent. :shrug: Thanks for reading.
* Feral or stray cats are Trapped, Neutered/Spayed, and Returned to the spot they were trapped. They’re usually marked by the removal of one ear tip to show they can’t reproduce and are part of a cared-for feral colony.
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