Earth Herbal

I’m in the process of writing a book, one I choose to believe will change how the rest of the world see the world cats live in. They share the planet we live on, they were bred to be companion animals, and now they’re being exterminated by the thousands for being where humans have put them: on the street, in the park, lost, homeless, feral. I’m including an excerpt from the book, and I’m leaving comments open for this one. I want to hear what you have to say about this. Check out my posts page for any comments you wish to leave, and read others’ comments.

Feral Colony (an excerpt)
The other cats in the room were reasonably calm when they came back in from outside. I was jealous. I wanted to go to the outside. I wanted to stretch and practice hunting and leap. They went into their boxes without any difficulty, even leaping into their respective boxes of their own accord when the openings were opened. I was surprised. This was a well-coordinated clan. They respected their leader, and she seemed to have everyone well in hand. They hadn’t gone in to the silver room like we had, but I suspected they would get their spay and neuter done soon. And the vaccinate too. I wondered if they would get their ears cut like the kits had, as well. It was a curiosity. While I was in my box, waiting, I saw another large box, the thing the doc had called a cage, come into the room, full of more cats. There were empty boxes on my side of the room, so I suspected that the new cats would go into them. I hoped they’d move me away from them. I didn’t know these cats, and I was afraid that there would be arguing and questions I couldn’t answer asked of me otherwise. The humans that brought them were Reggie, with his garlicky scent, and another male human, one I thought was the one from the last time the new cats had come in. They opened some boxes, and placed sleeping cats in them. They worked from top to bottom, placing cats in each box, and then moving over to the next set. There were a lot of cats this time. They went out, and then came back! They had even more cats with them. They continued filling the boxes, until they came to my box. They took me out of the box I was in, taking my soft thing, and my basket, and food and water bowls. They refilled my food and water, and placed my soft thing in my basket, then took me to the other side of the room, with the rest of my things. I got put in a bigger box, on a higher level, and I could see even more than before. I didn’t have as good a view of the sick cat as I had before, nor could I see the mother cat whose kits were in the other room, but I could see the new cats. They continued putting the new cats in, and then went and got even more cats! I wondered where the cats were coming from.
When they got to Sharatgrrron’s box, they moved him to right beside me, and all his things came with him. His soft thing was in his basket, and he was staring, like I was, at all the new cats. “Why are they bringing all those cats in here?” he asked me, with an odd note of almost fear in his voice. I didn’t know, and told him so. I was waiting for the other cats, the ones that had come in just a couple days ago, to get their time in the silver room. It was odd, how the humans kept moving one or two cats, and then placing more cats in the boxes on that wall. There were a lot of cats. Then, when they brought more cats, they started moving the cats on the wall I was on, so that they filled up all the boxes on this side, and I saw that the cat that was unhealthy, and the cat that had kits were left alone. Then the humans did something strange. They brought tables and put them up in the center of the room, and put more boxes on them. These boxes were covered with soft things, but they were really big soft things. They smelled like those things humans had that blew hot wind out of the sides of their dwelling-places. The humans finished with the tables, and the boxes they brought, and they left. There were more cats in here than I had ever seen in my life! Delores came in and walked around, wearing her mask and gloves and gown, making sure the new cats had food and water. Most of them hid behind their baskets, and tried to be as small as possible. I gathered that these cats had never been around humans, and didn’t know what they were. Then Delores left, touching the wall and making the fake sun dark. I went to sleep. I didn’t have to worry about anything, I thought, since I could imagine waking to see Stacey in the morning. I certainly hoped I would see her. I missed her terribly. I missed her scent and her rubbing and petting and all the attention she gave me. I missed hearing her talk to the other cats as well. She treated us like she would treat another human, talking to us, and even being nice and making sure the food and water bowls were filled.
The next morning, I woke up to a lot of bustle and noise. There were a lot of docs and other humans in the room. I could tell the docs, even the female one, because they have a scent of authority to them. Plus they were telling the other humans what to do. Each human had a different thing to do. One was laying out and putting together pieces of something that looked like a box, and it had spaces in it for putting pieces of the see-through stuff the fronts of our boxes were made from in it, and another was laying out surgical kits and making sure each one was filled up, another one was mixing some liquid up and filling tubes with pushers on the ends. It was all very strange. I looked up, and saw I had a new thing on my box, in the corner of the clear stuff. It looked like it was floating, and it had those funny splashes on it. The splashes looked strange, all backward from what normal splashes looked like. I vowed not to let it worry me, and I started looking for Stacey in the crowd. I didn’t see her just then, but I got distracted by the things the humans were doing. One of them had gone into the silver room and got the thing that made the cloud smells, and brought it in to the room with us. Why would they do that? Were they going to make all these cats fall asleep in here? It certainly looked like it, when one human put on really long shiny gloves and reached into a box and grabbed a cat by her neck. She wrapped her body around the human’s arm and started trying to bite him. The shiny stuff was keeping her from succeeding, however. The human put the cloud-smelling blue-clear thing up to her face, and held it there for a time, and when she fell asleep, he stuck a tube with clear stuff and a shiny top into her skin. She didn’t react, since she was asleep from the cloud smells, but then the human handed her to another human, who proceeded to put her on a clear thing, and put strings on her hands and feet. He tied her up! Oh dear. I hoped they didn’t do that to all the cats! The human that tied her up then passed her to another human, who took a funny-looking thing that made a happy noise, and it had a shiny thing on the end, and she put the shiny thing on the cat’s belly and moved it around, and the fur came off. Then she put a thing that was next to her over the fur, and it disappeared! It looked like the cat-sized thing next to her swallowed it! That was really strange.
The cat that had just had her belly fur removed was then put into the box, like it was a table, and the next cat had the same thing done to her. I squawked when I saw them pull a male cat out, and one of the humans looked up. The doc looked at me when the human got his attention, and then he took me out of the box. He told me, “Go show these people which ones are female cats, Grrl.” The male cat was put back in his box, and I showed the humans where the females were, even talking to the ones that tried to fight and bite the humans. Most of them were relatively easy to calm down, but one didn’t want to come out of her box. The humans had to drag the cloud-smelling thing over to her box, and put the face-thing on her face with her still in the box. I sniffed her, wondering what would make her so violent. She was going to have kits! Three of them, by the scent. I think she was afraid that the humans were going to hurt her kits. I went to the doc, dragged him back to her, and the doc took her away, and put her in a different box. He left again, and the humans continued with their project. Every time a box was filled with cats stretched out and tied up, another human would come and get that box and put another empty one in its place. I saw the human go into the silver room, and then later, I saw the boxes with the cats being brought back out. Each cat had a couple of fur pieces on its belly and two stripes that hadn’t been there before. Some were more a spot-stripe-spot pattern, and some were more a stripe-spot-spot-stripe. Each one was similar, but not the same. I didn’t know what they were doing on the other side of the room with the male cats, but they didn’t go into the silver room, they stayed in this room, and got passed to the other side from where I was, right under Sharatgrrron’s box. I’d ask him later what they did to the males. Every one of them was made asleep, and each one got poked and clear stuff inserted in their skin, and then the males were sent to the other side, while the females were kept over on this side to be de-furred and tied up.
The cats that had been in the silver room came out, and they were put in the right boxes, and each one had a part of one ear removed, in a straight line across the top. It made them look lopsided, somehow. Like they had their heads tilted. I wondered if it hurt. It was strange. When all the cats on this side of the room had been moved, and the group of humans were told “Take a break” by the docs, they finished up with all they had been doing, and stopped for a short time. Then they went out, and came back smelling like human food. Then they rearranged the tables a bit, and moved the female area over to the side where the males had been, and the males over to where the females had been. The females that had been in the silver room came back, and the males were put in their boxes, and they were starting to wake up. There was fresh food and water in most of the boxes, but the cats didn’t appear to be hungry. Some of them just wanted water. The rest of them appeared to be still sleepy, and not really wanting anything. I went to my place, and continued helping the humans separate the males from the females, watching them. I saw one female that had her ear already cut, and when they took her belly fur off, she had a couple stripes already on her belly. The humans put her back into her box. I wondered if she’d already been through this human-cat cluster before. The things on her belly showed that maybe she had been. I went back to helping the humans, and put it out of my thoughts. When we were done, I was looking around, trying to find the doc, when he came out of the silver room with the other docs. The female doc was carrying the last box of cats, tied up, still asleep, and they started taking them off the flat things, and putting them in their boxes. It was late, all the cats in the room had been taken care of, and the humans smelled tired and hot. They had a lot of cats to tend to, all the ones they had brought in the night before, and they took each cat outside, most of them in the big cage, some of them in their own boxes. The big cage had to be filled two times, and when it came back inside, it was empty.
I was tired from all that I had done, and I wanted to go back to my box. I went to the front of the table, and sat down, waiting for a human to notice. One came in, after the rest had left, and opened my box for me. He looked tired, too, so I didn’t request a pet or anything. I just hopped into my box, wrapped up in my soft thing, and curled up in my basket. No food, either, though I knew I’d wake up later hungry. The food wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe, when I woke up, Stacey would be there. I hoped so. I really missed her though I hadn’t had time to think about how much I missed her during the busyness of the day. I suppose I must have fallen asleep at some point , because when I woke up, with my belly growling, and hunger pains gnawing at my middle, the fake sun was dark. I had my fill of crunchies, drank a little water, and then I went back to my basket and fell asleep again. When I woke up, I was feeling a lot better, and I thought I smelled Stacey’s scent in the room. The fake sun was bright again, and the room appeared almost empty after the cluster of yesterday. Even the tables had been removed.

That’s part of Chapter 3, the description of the ASPCA’s formally authorized and accepted mode of the feral Trap-Neuter-Return program. It’s real. Check it out.
These links will help with learning about the program.
alleycat.org
humanesociety.org
wikipedia.org

These and other places I have been researching and studying, for the wealth of information and history they provide. There are numerous ways to have pet cats, some of which don’t involve having a house for the cats to live in. Managed colonies of these feral cats can live as long as 10-15 years, in some cases. The managed colony the cats in my book are from, have numerous caretakers, which will be introduced in other places in the book. The names of the cats have been translated into the closest approximation of human speech we have.