I lost a friend today

His name was Zeus, and he was a black lab.  He turned 15 on Valentine’s Day.  In his last year, he suffered a degenerative hip, atrophied muscles of his hindquarters, a tumor on his left flank the size of a softball, and probably cancer.  He was deaf and nearly blind.  If he laid down on a hardwood or linoleum floor, we had to lift him so he could regain his footing.  My heart broke every time I watched the old guy hobble to his food or water bowls, and I winced each time he moaned or cried.  So it was time to end it, and today was that day.

With help from my son, we lifted him into the back of the car, and I drove to the vets alone.  My wife offered to come, but I knew she really couldn’t bear it, and it would be better for me if I didn’t have to watch her suffer on the trip home.  I learned long ago that I prefer to grieve alone, although when I returned home, my wife and I had our sorrowful moments over Zeus.

Soon after Zeus and I entered the patient room, a tech came in with paper work and said cheerily: “So, this is Stormy?”  I told her no, this is Zeus.  “Oh.  Sorry”.  Geesh lady, let’s not put Stormy down and then return to clip Zeus’s nails.  After the vet administered the drug, he was gone in 10 seconds.  He was lying on the floor and he put his head slowly down as the drug coursed through his body, and he then looked exactly like he did when he was sleeping on the floor at home.  Quiet, peaceful, uneventful.  They left me alone with him for a few minutes while I said my feeble goodbye to a dog who couldn’t even hear me when he was alive.  But I had to say something.  I guess we all do.

I have thought a lot about dogs over the past few years.  To be honest, most of the time I secretly object to the entire phenomenon of dogs and cats as pets (see my earlier blog about cats as killers of wildlife).  The way most people pamper their pets actually disgusts me.  In decades past, when I was a child, dogs were rarely kept in their owners’ houses; they were considered too dirty.  We kept them in dog houses outside.  Remember those?  For better or worse, we have come a long way.  And then there is this.  In 2016, Americans spent $62 billion on these family pets!  $62 billion to purchase them, and for food, toys, collars, leashes, grooming, flea and tick medicine, occasional kenneling and, of course, the never-ending vet bills.  As I write this, teachers in West Virginia are on strike for higher pay and better benefits, but they are meeting voluntarily every day to pack lunches for their poor, hungry students who are now missing that essential meal because their school is closed.  What a pathetic state of affairs.  No civilized country should be able to report such a fact.  So I think of what $62 billion could do to address both of those problems, and I lament.  But, of course, money is never fungible in that way.

We all love our pets, and I loved Zeus.  On the other hand, I was often impatient with him and angry when he relieved himself in the house, or woke us up in the middle of the night, or had to be let out AGAIN, or wouldn’t come when I called to him, or when I tripped over him lying on the floor when I made that important first cup of morning Joe, or when my wife and I decided not to travel because of “the dog”.  And the hair.  Blackish hair—everywhere, all the time. 

But now, I already miss hearing his toe nails clicking down the hallway, the feel of his velvet ears, and the look of those eyes, which were huge for a lab, when he tried to make sense of my human gibberish.  One minute I loved him, and the next minute his existence irritated me. What a confounded and complicated set of emotions come with pet territory.  I have concluded that I love dogs, but dislike being a dog owner.

Will I ever get another dog?  No.  I’ve had dogs since I was about five years old, probably eight or nine.  I’ve done my time.  I don’t want another dog for all the reasons of inconvenience and financial costs that I’ve mentioned already.  But the main reason I will never have another dog is that I can not bear to lose a friend after they have gotten into your heart and become a part of your soul.  Why invite that kind of sadness voluntarily into our lives when there is sadness in abundance already?  I simply can’t do it again.   

Cats: our feline friends, or are they?

(Cat eating a bird it has just killed.)

About a decade ago I had a student in my Conservation Biology class named Scott Boomer. We were discussing the problem of non-native organisms that week, and Scott told me he had kept some interesting records on the behavior of three cats that he and his wife had at that time. The cats (one male, two females, and all neutered) had access to food and water in Scott’s apartment around the clock. The three natural predators had the habit of capturing prey outside and bringing it back to Scott, often dropping it at his feet or putting it in their bathtub. Scott is a biologist and he was able to identify all the prey items returned to his apartment over a 2-year period.

The list included:

Mammals: 5 deer mice, 2 woodland jumping mice, 5 Eastern chipmunks, 4 meadow voles, 1 gray squirrel, 6 star-nosed moles, 4 short-tailed shrews, 1 cinereus shrew, 2 little brown bats, 1 Eastern cottontail

Amphibians: 2 green frogs

Reptiles: 1 Eastern painted turtle, 3 Eastern garter snakes

Birds: 3 common yellowthroats, 2 black-capped chickadees, 1 house wren

Total: 43 animals

Now, there are about 90 million cats in the U.S., according to the 2005-2006 National Pet Owners Survey. A certain percentage of those cats never go outside. But anyway you run the numbers, the collective mortality on native wildlife by U.S. cats must total millions of individuals of dozens of species. In some places in the world, feral cats, those that have gone completely wild, are responsible for the demise of rare species of birds. The Stephens Island wren (a flightless species) in New Zealand went extinct in the late 1800’s due to the island’s cats, or so that story goes. The wedge-tailed shearwater in Hawaii is also impacted by cats. Conservation biologists actively control cats (as well as non-native rats, mongoose, etc.) in such places today, especially on oceanic islands.

We hear a lot these days about our “ecological footprint”, or the impact that a human has on the earth’s natural resources and ecosystems. I doubt that our pet ownership is included in these calculations. Remember that I tend to think in terms of quantity and quality of habitat for biodiversity. I usually think of our “habitat footprint” as defined by the boundaries of our house and the lawn surrounding it. But the effect of that living space penetrates further depending on the chemicals we use on the property, how far away we or our children trounce on the environment, and the influence of our pets, of which cats are probably the worst offenders. There are zones of concentric circles beginning with the epicenter of the house itself, which include areas of decreasing influence on the fauna and flora that is there now, as one moves respectively outward. Cats probably have an effect in each of those zones, but they may represent the only threat in the outermost circle, which is perhaps several hundred meters from the edge of the house.

In fact, last year someone built a new house about 100 meters from the edge of my woodlot. For the past few months, I have had two cats roaming my property that I am sure live at that house. I have not had cats on my property in 20 years. And so it goes. We increase our collective ecological footprint, we chip away at the quantity and quality of wildlife habitat and, in my opinion, the quality of life is diminished just a little bit more---again.

In these few paragraphs I wanted to increase your awareness of an idea that perhaps you have not thought much about--- how that lovable pet cat of yours is possibly reducing the biological diversity in your neighborhood. I do not intend to explore a detailed solution to this problem, although attaching a simple bell to your outdoor cat would probably reduce its kill rate. You might be thinking that cats kill organisms that people do not like very much anyway, so what the heck. But I can assure you that every one of those species killed by Scott’s cats represents a unique and interesting biological story. Remember that not so long ago, nearly everyone thought it was fine to shoot, trap, or poison wolves, mountain lions, and eagles.