Where Have All the Kittens Gone?
How I Ended Up on a PETA Watchlist for Animal Cruelty
Igor Chudov wrote an interesting piece recently regarding a genetically engineered virus that seems to render cats infertile.
I had to write in my own two cents regarding this with the followup comment by SuperSally:
Jun 13Liked by Igor Chudov
I'm going to be linking to this post with my own thoughts in a bit. I wonder if they have already been distributing this virus somehow. I say that because the death and abandonment of a neighbor's home in Phuket, Thailand in December of 2020 led to me feeding then six semi feral cats that she had been feeding. It set up a natural experiment. I did and have done nothing medically to any of these cats: no vaccines, no spaying or neutering, et cetera. So you might expect that I'd be feeding 10, or 20, or 80 cats by now with the overpopulation problem. The opposite has been the case. At the height there were four queens, i.e. reproductive age female cats. A total of four friendly kittens were adopted out in 2021. One queen seems infertile as I have never seen her mate and she does indeed bat away male cats. Only one viable kitten that lived to adulthood was born in 2022. Now two of the feral queens have gone missing in the past three months. The total feral cat population I'm feeding now is thus 3. Does that sound like a cat overpopulation crisis to you? Or was it just another lie fed to us by charities always in need of money that need us to see some dire crisis that doesn't exist?
Writes Super Sally’s Newsletter
Certainly not the case here in the Philippines.. for now.... I was out driving last night down narrow alleys.... cats everywhere.... many clearly pregnant!
I go into some Muslim areas that look like that in Thailand. Indeed there was a population boom in our neighborhood in around March of 2021 when many cats had kittens around the same time with one neighbor having two cats who gave birth to litters of 5 and 7 respectively very close together! Then some kittens got adopted and a few died and some were taken by the neighbor's when they moved out in January 2022. Now from all of those kittens only one remains in the neighborhood (a black female). That had me musing though about the actual neighborhood I live in: there used to be many more cats than dogs, as the neighborhood is about half Muslim, and they don't keep dogs but do keep cats. There's still some in the area but all grown. I haven't seen a pregnant cat or a single kitten in this neighborhood since early 2022. The animal charities used to be known to come into areas like this and do rabies/vaccine/neuter/spay though much more often for dogs than cats. But they used to all tattoo their ear afterwards as our dog Cooper is. None of these cats have those stamps and I have not seen or heard of any such thing. Additionally spaying is usually overnight gone and they have a shaved underbelly afterwards. There hasn't been a sign of that. Now the dog population around here is, despite Daisy giving birth to 11 puppies, pretty much holding steady. Jungo had 6 puppies in March the family kept one. We still have three left. The few other dogs in the area are either spayed or male. The chickens likewise seem to be having trouble brooding chicks. Is it something in the air? All part of God's plan which we have little understanding of? Or is somebody tinkering with things in certain select areas?
Now I first wrote about my natural pet experiment a little over a year ago. Although I’ve largely been drawing attention to Daisy’s massive litter of 11 puppies, I hadn’t said much about either the cats or the chickens. Both populations seem to be in decline if anything. We haven’t had a hen that brooded a natural clutch of chicks in three months, with the last one having only one surviving chick. The last survivor chick before that was Sunday, which my daughter hatched in an incubator in late November of 2022. Sunday is still alive and sitting on a brood of eggs. The dogs might be part of the problem as they could be raiding nests. But there still don’t seem to be that many eggs around.
That got me to incentive structures and approved narratives. They started with the pets and the overpopulation problem. Hence me being on a watchlist for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) as an animal abuser. A Storytime with Amy Special.
In the Spring of 2009 me, my boyfriend, and my then 2 1/2 year old daughter went to the Central Flower district in Downtown Los Angeles. A black man, as though by magic, produced a teensy tiny white baby rabbit which fit entirely in the cup of his hand. My daughter was excited and enchanted, and her father immediately asked “How much?”
“$20.” The man said, and suddenly we found ourselves with a baby rabbit.
I tried to argue with my boyfriend on the way back to Venice Beach that a baby bunny was an unsuitable pet for a toddler. Rabbits have a freeze reflex that serves them very poorly and they are mostly nonvocal (although when rabbits do scream, it’s quite terrifying). Toddlers meanwhile like to poke and prod and are curious about everything, which would be much better suited to a more robust animal, like a puppy or kitten. At least dogs and cats can claw and bite and fight back.
A few weeks later, in coming home from Easter choir practice, I found Bunny hiding under the couch terrified with one of her eyes clearly bulging to near twice its normal size. My boyfriend said that our daughter had been playing with Bunny but I couldn’t get a straight story from either him or the 2 1/2 year old of what had happened. My best guess is that my daughter was poking at the poor rabbit’s eye.
The eye bulged out to an extreme degree and after a few days it was clear that it was getting worse, not better. I decided to take the rabbit into a veterinarian with my daughter. I thought it would be a teaching moment for her.
The veterinarian at VCA Animal Hospital immediately insisted that the eye was infected and that if Bunny did not have emergency surgery she would die. The entire eye would have to be removed. This seemed extreme to me and risky, least of all on a baby rabbit weighing six ounces.
The price for the surgery would be $1200.
I did not have $1200 at that moment. The vet explained that they had started a new animal charity called Rabbit Rescue. Some PETA animal welfare types had become concerned about people adopting baby rabbits like Bunny to small children like my daughter around Easter. So I could give up the baby bunny to Rabbit Rescue.
This seemed suspicious to me. It was win win for the veterinarian. If Bunny died during the emergency surgery, Rabbit Rescue could quote the vet’s heroic efforts to save the rabbit and use Bunny’s death as a poster child for why the charity needed more funding. If the rabbit lived one eyed Bunny would be perfect for promotional pictures of the horrors caused by people stupidly adopting pets not suited for toddlers.
Either way I was going to be branded as an animal abuser. The veterinarian, a young woman who seemed fresh out of college, became more argumentative. I was not sure that the rabbit needed this surgery at all. I told her that I might be able to scrape together the $1200 for it if I went home and asked my boyfriend. The vet told me that I had 24 hours to release the rabbit to Rabbit Rescue or bring Bunny back for the surgery or she would call animal control on me.
So much for teaching my daughter a lesson about bringing animals in for medical care. The vet did give me a prescription oral antibiotic for the rabbit. This, combined with an antibiotic cream that I picked up from a very old school not corporate chain pet shop in Santa Monica, did an amazing thing. By that night the swelling on Bunny’s bulged out eye was down noticeably. By the next morning I was positive that the rabbit was on the mend and did not need the risky surgery that had a very good chance of killing her.
I called the vet’s office to try to tell her that the rabbit no longer needed surgery. I was put through to some VCA corporate teleservice. Then animal control started calling me. My mother in Las Vegas said she would take care of the rabbit. I told them that Bunny had moved out of state. Animal control still came to our house in Venice Beach to do a welfare check on the rabbit. Thankfully their power stopped at the California Nevada state line.
I am probably still on a PETA watchlist of known animal abusers over this incident. Bunny’s eye healed with the medicine. She always had a cataract that clouded the eye, though it was clear that she had vision in the eye from her reaction to things on her right side. Mom kept the rabbit in Las Vegas for several years until she died of an unrelated stomach bug.
The problem with animal charities is that in their need for funding they often create the crisis that they are ostensibly trying to solve. All of the money is in saying that pet overpopulation is a pressing problem. All of them have in their mission statement something about neutering, spaying, vaccinating and rescuing stray and abused animals.
If three legged dogs do well on promotional posters and in charity drives, you are going to have demand for three legged dogs. Or one eyed rabbits.
I do need to adopt out the remaining puppies. This has been made more difficult as, in an effort to prevent the dog and cat meat trade in Asia, you can no longer post anything on Facebook marketplace and the like regarding any live animal. It seems to me that a rule designed to prevent animal cruelty might funnel more animals into the system needlessly. You can neither sell puppies or give them away, so what do you do with them? I did post regarding the puppies on AseanNow, but the feedback I received was mostly negative. Everybody knows there is a massive dog overpopulation problem. Why didn’t I spay the dog? Why aren’t the puppies vaccinated? If you take your pets to a vet, the first thing they do automatically before any medical treatment for the problem is jab them.
Is there really a pet overpopulation problem? What do you think?
The incentive structure seems to be driven by depopulation…
when I was a kid there were stray dogs all over the south side of williamsburg in brooklyn. And also in gowanus. For what it's worth, both neighborhoods are on the water (though I dread to think what would happen to a dog who drank out of the gowanus canal).
Today zero zip nada. Gentrification? Dog registration rules? Btw nyc dog tags are gps-enabled
cats are more elusive. You'd think they'd be all over places like chinatown which are rat mega cities, but they're either fat and hiding or not there at all (hence the mega-expansion of chinatown rat city)
growing up in ‘60’s & ‘70’s there were always kids outside the supermarket trying to find good homes for a cardboard box of kittens. haven’t seen anything like this in at least the last three decades.
also wouldn’t surprise me all of the nasty stuff in the chemtrails.🙀😿.