Cats and the Order of Nature

[chochiyo_sama]

With a shout out to Samantha and this post http://www.livejournal.com/users/schistosity/17691.html?view=65307&style=mine#t65307   about the demon cat
Elliot because it is what shook this memory loose from my brain.

First off, you need to know that I was raised on a farm.  I was brought home from the hospital to a small diversified farm--and I lived on first one farm and then another until I graduated from high school.  When you live among animals--especially animals raised for human consumption--you learn all sorts of things that you sometimes wish you didn't know.  Being raised on a farm can do many things to you.  One thing it can do is make you perceive all animals as objects to be exploited for financial or material gain--and it can make you callous to their pain and/or suffering.  I know many people who took a perverse pleasure in causing even more misery/pain/suffering to the animals that are part of the day to day life on the farm.  Or, they vent their rage and frustration at other matters in their lives on the poor dumb beasts that can't do a thing to defend themselves against the human tyranny.

For example, my father, always an angry, unhappy (crazy) man, once got pissed at one of our dairy cows because she went into the wrong stanchion.  The stanchion is the place where the animal goes to have its head locked into place so it can't meander off in the middle of being milked.  There were other devices called "kickers" that were strapped to the back leg joints if the cow tried to kick either the milking hoses or the person operating them.  Most cows didn't need "kickers"--they were happy to be milked and have the pressure out of their bags. 

   This is what a modern stanchion looks like.  In my childhood, they were more clumsily made of wood.  Imagine being locked into one of those stocks that they used to put people in back in the Puritan days. 

   Once you are locked in there, it doesn't matter how hard you jerk against it--you AIN'T getting out--whether you are a human in stocks or a dairy cow in a stanchion.

In the barns--especially in OUR barn because we were poor and couldn't afford to have fans in there--the air was thick, humid, and filled with dust--in the summer it was unbearably hot.  I suppose my dad milked between twenty and thirty cows in those days.  I know I was nine or younger because this was still at the first farm--before we moved to the second.  And we moved there when I had just turned ten.

I had to stand in the doorway of the milk room (where the milk from the milking machines was poured into the milk cans) so that no cow would take it into her head to go in there. 

As I said earlier.  Some poor hot cow who just wanted to get into the barn and have a cold drink from her water cup and eat some feed and some hay, stepped into the wrong stall and stuck her head into the stanchion.  This of course caused a chain reaction of confusion among the other cows coming in because cows are creatures of absolute habit.  When somebody is in the wrong place, nobody knows what to do about it.  So there was chaos. 

And my dad, an angry violent man to begin with, stepped up and punched the cow in the front shoulder to get her to back out.  She didn't know what she was being punished for and stuck her head in further--trying to appease the Taker of Milk and Giver of Food and Pain.  Screaming and swearing, he pummeled that poor cow.  When she still didn't move, he grabbed the hay fork--a shorter version of a pitchfork and began jabbing it into her back and sides--again and again and again.  I was sure he was killing her.  As a child, I noted that the blood squirted out from the holes in her sides in streams--as if from a squirt gun.  As an adult, I realize that the cow must have been so terrified that her heart was hammering fast enough to make that blood spurt out like that.  The stabs were not deep enough (no more than 1/2") to strike anything vital. 

I will never forget the look on that cow's face as she twisted her head around to look at her attacker--bewildered, pained, and more than anything, anxious as she thought,  in her slow, ponderous cow-way, what exactly it was that she was doing wrong and what she needed to do to appease the god of her existence.

I know I screamed and cried and tried to pull the fork away from him, and got slapped to the ground a couple of times in his wrath.

I know exactly how that cow felt because in the same basic period of time, I had reached across the table to take a potato from the bowl--and Dad apparently decided I didn't need it, because he jammed his fork into my hand.  I don't think he intended it to break skin and go into my hand a good 1/4," but it did.  The pain of a stab is so quick and sharp that you don't even recognize it as pain to begin with.  I remember my shock and horror--I was bleeding!  But, worse than that, my dad--the guy who was supposed to love and protect me--STABBED ME.  I don't think I even cried.  I was stunned.

I remember my mother taking me into the bathroom to hold my hand under cold water and slap bandaides on it.  I remember seeing the red drops of my blood on the white potatoes.  I remember that my dad kept eating--with the same fork.

But--that is not the story I was going to tell.  The one I intended to tell triggered this one somehow.

Childhood.

"Hell if for children" Yes indeed.

 

The ORIGINALLY INTENDED STORY:

This was at the "new" farm--so I was at least ten.  I was playing in the freshly gravelled driveway, digging eggs out of the sand and rocks that was dumped.  I thought they were snake eggs at the time, but they were probably turtle eggs.  The gravel/sand pit was on the edge of a pond.

My dad was cleaning something out.  I don't remember if it was the car or the seat of a tractor--or maybe even something in the grainery.  All I recall is that he hurled a wad of something into the driveway.  It was something like cotton or shredded rags--maybe even insulation.  I just know it looked dirty and nasty.  When it hit the ground near me, I realized it was squirming.  As a farm child, I was well acquainted with the writhing mass of maggots that infest any carcass in a very short time.  I had this irrational fear that if one ever got ON me, it would reproduce exponentially  in seconds, covering me in a mass of maggots and eating me alive.  So I was freaked out and moved away from it, but kept looking at it in morbid fascination, trying to figure out what it was.

Suddenly, a couple of the many cats that were always around--spay and neuter was not a part of my childhood!--leapt onto the mass and started digging into it.  Squeaks and horrible screechy noises came from it.  Then weird looking pink things--like maggots the size of my thumb pads--tumbled out of the bundle of crap.  I didn't know what baby mice looked like.  I'd never seen them before.  I thought they were some kind of horrible giant grub.

  They looked like this--only not as clean.  They were coated in sand and bits of crap from the nest. 

The cats gobbled them up rapidly.  Farm cats are always hungry. 

I saw a cat grab a larger thing and shake it and toss it.  I realized then that it was a little gray field mouse and these were her babies. I nudged her under the car with the toe of my sneaker so the cat wouldn't eat her.  I always thought mice were cute.  (I sprang traps in the house too....even though it was a dangerous business.) 

She had a giant gash in her side--cat fang, I'm sure. 

Now, here's the sad part, the part that Samantha's post reminded me of.

There were two big cats at least--maybe more.  They ate this little creature's babies as she watched.  She hobbled out from under the car and nuzzled a baby that had been flung closer to her as the cats devoured the others.  When one of the cats noticed her and the baby and stalked over, she stood up on her little mouse legs between her (probably already dying) baby and the cat and put up her little mouse hands, and bared her teeth.

Before my horrified eyes, the cat ate them both, mother and baby.

But I will never forget the nobility and maternal instinct of that mouse, stepping between the giant fanged monster and her offspring.

I remember I threw a stone at the cat, but it was too late.  She was probably doomed by the gash in her tiny body anyhow...but...I felt a deep sorrow for that little mouse and her babies.

In retrospect it makes me think two things...(1)  size and strength has nothing to do with honor and courage.  (2)  I wonder what kind of maturnal instinct my own mother had--she never once got between me (or my siblings as far as I know) when my dad decided to beat the hell out of us or hurt us in some way.

Remember at the beginning I said that growing up on the farm with animals can do many things to you?  Well, another thing it can do is make you empathetic.  I empathized with those animals--powerless, confused, trying under a rain of blows to comprehend just what it was they were doing wrong and just what they needed to do to make the pain stop.

I'd tell you about the time my dad beat the skull of a pig with a hammer because it wouldn't go into the right pen--but I've depressed myself enough for one night.

Shiva the destroyer indeed.

I have been in the presence of destruction--there is nothing good about it.

 

 

 

Comments

[kikiwritingbird.livejournal.com]

I have never been subjected to any sort of abuse like you've mentioned, and I'm sorry you were, even if I have no business in it.

If it makes you feel better, nearby the Kent area is a farm called Happy Trails that I've volunteered at a few times. It's sole purpose is to tend to farm animals who were once abused by their owners or are too old to 'function' as they once did. For example, two pigs there are so old and decrepit that they can no longer walk on their own, but the caretakers and volunteers of the farm generously care for them by wrapping them in blankets in the winter, bringing them out into the sun in the summer, and moistening their feed so they can eat easier.

Doesn't it just feel nice to know such a place is out there?

[schistosity.livejournal.com]

That is just so sad. I don't even know what to type. But thank you for telling us your story.