© Port Whitman Times 1997
Dear PWT:
I offer this as one solution to one of our population problems: the over-breeding housecat. We came up with something that might not be the most pleasant answer, but it worked for us... for awhile.
We were poor. Below gentile poor, living in a townhouse in an "urban" environment, gentrifyers, rehabbers, sweat-equity folks. We couldn't even afford to have our cat spayed, so she, being an indoor-outdoor cat, kept having kittens, which we gave away at first, but finding fewer and fewer folks, then no one upon whom to prevail to take a little kitten, we decided to have the litters "taken care of." The feline final solution. We took them to the animal shelter to be "put to sleep."
There was really no difference as to where the kittens went, between being "put to sleep" by us or the animal shelter, just an exchange of money for the service, and an hour's drive to deliver them to the final sleeping place. Consider too that the operators at the shelter were not emotionally involved with the little creatures, thus could dispose of them with few qualms. Therein is the sticky point, the emotional attachment, and the qualms. So we resolved, next litter, to accomplish the task BEFORE any sentimental attachment could build up.
Between each other, we, as humans too, seem have developed an emotional attachment to just BEING human, sufficient to keep us from killing each other directly, even under the worst conditions, which gets in the way of our survival mechanisms too. So in wars we use bombs, planes, bazookas. Anyway, when the time came, and Mama-kitty had her next litter by Papa-kitty-unknown, I went directly into action.
Having read since childhood of people who disposed of cats by putting them in a bag at the end of a pole and holding the bag of kittens underwater in the river, I thought "Now that's a humane way to get rid of the little creatures - Drowning, a pleasant way to die, so I hear, like going to sleep." OK, get the kitties from Mama by luring her away from the litter momentarily, put them in a sack and hold them underwater. The stick and the river seemed too Dickensian, so I decided to do it up close. Holding the few kittens underwater and watching them struggle and claw, crying out for life was just too much for me. It seemed like a case of taking your local murderer who had been condemned to death and instead of the needle or the electric chair, tying his hands behind him and throttling him to death. Uh-uh. Not for me. Even with kittens only a couple of days old, some emotional attachment had crept in, and a humane streak survived somewhere deep in my soul. So it was off to the shelter, resolving never to try that method again. But what was it to be next time?
With animals it cannot adopt out, the pound disposes of them in a painless way we assume, sticks them with a needle and lets them die in their sleep... At least that's what we would like to believe. Pleasant, but certainly not instant. Practical, unfeeling, efficient.
They say the best way to be executed if such should be your fate, is by the guillotine, as you feel nothing beyond the terror you experience while rolling toward the mechanism in the tumbrel. The blade coming down is the last sound you hear before your head is lopped off, ending your body's time here. It is said that no particular date is set for the execution, so that there is no factor of anticipation such as here, where you can read about your case in the newspapers right up to the time you are sizzled, or gassed, or injected, or hung, whatever. In Ireland, if the movies are to be believed, they come to get you anytime, in the middle of the night, drag you off and hang you before you can think about it for more than a minute. Still, it would seem that the guillotine is the most humane way, being so instant. The same is true in the case of cats, of course, they don't want to sense that they are going to be disposed of either, or in a slow process, as they must when they are allowed to hang around for long in a place where their friends keep disappearing.
Finally I came up with a way that would meet all of the humane qualifications: instant, painless, efficient, and would leave me no carcass to dispose of after the animal was, ah, put away. But be prepared, it may shock you to hear it, to think of it, yea to see it in print. But it worked, for as long as we could stand to do it. Mamakitty finally got her needed fixing when the money was available.
As soon as the litter was born, I separated Mamakitty from them so that she would not develop any love beyond the instinctual one mothers naturally have for progeny. This done, the rest was easy. The little things were still soft and boneless, freshly born, eyes closed to the world, having been for weeks in an almost liquid state, so offered no hard resistance to a mechanical device. No, I did not devise a guillotine, but my method would rival that sanguine separator for humaneness easily. One by one, I gathered them around, and dropped them, head first, into the already running disposer in the kitchen sink. In a split second each was gone, churned to smithereens by relentless machinery whose job it was to make instant particles of dinner scraps of former cows, chickens, pigs, or parts thereof, suitable for treatment at the local waste plant.
Now you may think this horrible, heartless, cruel, and so did I at first, but upon rationalization, even for the many years that have passed since, I cannot for the life of me find a more humane way to handle the situation, at least without the trip to the pound, where Heaven knows what is done with them. I trust the machine didn't bruise what passes for cat souls, and they are resting somewhere in peace today.
Many times we simply do what we have to do. There is not an element of choice, only of expediency.
Name Withheld by request