Daily Prompt

I grew up around feral/homeless cats and developed a life-long appreciation and affection for cats in general. Too many were lost to larger predators, perhaps to even a cat-hating human. (I knew about a few guys willing to procure sick satisfaction from torturing to death those naively-trusting thus likely sweet-natured cats whose owners had allowed to wander the neighborhood at night.)

As a young boy, finding them slaughtered the first thing in the morning was quite traumatizing. Also, in the decades since, I’ve found that, along with individual people, society collectively can also be cruel toward the felines.

Last year I read in the local news that 59 kittens and cats had been rescued from a feces-filled home. While one local newspaper rightfully deemed this worthy of frontpage space, another didn’t give these afflicted animals any newsprint at all. Were these felines and their suffering worth so little?

Also, I read a few years ago that the city neighboring mine had an estimated 36,000 feral/homeless cats, very many of which suffer severe malnourishment, debilitating injury and/or infection. And I was informed a couple years ago by Surrey Community Cat Foundation that, if anything, their “numbers would have increased, not decreased, in the last 5 years.”

Yet the municipal government, as well as aware yet uncaring residents, did little or nothing to help with the local non-profit trap/neuter/release program, regardless of its (and others’) documented success in reducing the needlessly great suffering. That TNR program is the only charity to which I’ve ever donated, in no small part because of the plentiful human callousness towards the plight of those cats and the countless others elsewhere.

Yesterday, I was greatly saddened when told by that non-profit via email that, “Our TNR program is not operating. There are no volunteers that are interested in trapping and there is no place to recover the cats after surgery until they can be returned to a site with a feeding station.”

All of the above basically translate into a whole bunch more feline suffering that has long been already needlessly too high.

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