Just back from taking the injured and clearly moribund feral "Coony" up
the road for that "last campaign." :- He'd given up on being feral
today. I saw from him that gesture of predator defeat where the animal
puts its head down with its haunches up. I felt the burden of being
human. So I gave him some pets, seeing as how he'd now accept them, and
offered him a last meal (refused - the cat was starving itself or unable
to swallow, or some such), and picked him up and put him in the
pheromone-treated carrier.
I don't know about any of this. Is
it right to consider this 'good behavior' on my part? It was a matter of
convenience, certainly. I'm about to have a lot of machinery in the
yard digging a three foot trench and putting in a new water line. I
couldn't see Coony surviving that. Also, when he died, I'd have a corpse
which I'd have to transport for cremation. Suffering? I don't know.
Yesterday, I watched him as he moved out in the open, still trying to do
his rounds. I saw him out peering with his new one-eyed gaze at what
once was the vast expanse of his territory: the car wash, the streets,
the restaurant, the parking lots, the hiding places, the others- both
prey and predators - still out there engaged in the battles for
survival. I knew it was just a memory for him. It was all over.
Suffering? I don't know. He had a golden, mild, beautiful last day
yesterday. Today, he took his first and last car ride to be detained
briefly in a cage, no longer in his life, to be injected with death. He
never knew what hit him. The other way would have been starvation. (That
was Amethyst's way. She "tasted the whole of it.") I still don't know.
But the burden for me this day as the "humanitarian," the human burden -
was that I made the decision and acted.
The sorrows of being a grown-up.