The Colonization of Cats

| By Lauren Taglienti |

[Photo by Deklanşör 67 via Pexels]

INT. GRANDMA’S HOUSE - DAY, 2004

I'm four years old and filled with the inherent admiration and joy that instinctually accompanies seeing a precious creature. The creature is my grandmother’s black and white cat, Domino. A gentle smile spreads across my face, and I speak to Domino softly as to calm her. Reaching my hand out hesitantly, I'm met with a hiss and sharp claws which paint my skin with my own blood. She scratches, rips, and tears. I watch. 

I do not fight off Domino; I could never hurt her. I could never hurt her because she is a living being, and I love her. Why would I hurt those I love? 

After just a few minutes, Domino makes my arms look like a Jackson Pollock painting, except she stabs her canvas and the paint flows out of its seams, whereas dear Mr. Pollock layered and splattered his paint onto his canvas. 

My grandmother retrieves the hydrogen peroxide and yells at Domino. The scratches burn with a type of pain I'd never felt before, but I don't cry. I tell my grandmother that it’s fine and that I don’t mind. I just sit there and watch the blood trickle out of my veins, wait for her to mend my wounds, and watch Domino. Sitting beside me as if she hadn't just lacerated my arms, as if she hadn't done that to me. Had she done it to me or not, it didn’t matter. All that mattered at that point was how I was cleaned up. I couldn’t control Domino, nor did I want to. She was just doing what she thought was right. She didn’t know any better.

EXT. TWO-WAY STREET - EVENING, 2017

Enjoying the ride as always, I'm driving home from my friend’s house. I notice two girls in their early teens standing on the right side of the street, looking upon a carcass more towards the middle of the two-way side road. The body appears to be a large white cat with the head bashed in by cars running it over only above its shoulders repeatedly. The kill is fresh. If its head weren’t bashed in, it would have looked like it was just taking a nap. 

Shocked by this initial sight, I drive past them. I turn around at the end of the block. They are still there when I pass the second time, so I turn around again. I pull up behind the body, not too close to the girls as to not scare them.

“Is everything alright, you guys?” I ask. 

“Yeah,” they say tentatively.

“Is it yours?”

“No, it's not ours,” one speaks up, “but we want to do something to get it out of the road. We don't want people to keep running it over. We feel bad. And they just keep running it over.”

Practically on cue, a white SUV drives over the cat’s head, and the sound of blood-damped head innards being crushed pierces our ears. I wince. If the cat was any bit alive before this car trampled it, it was certainly not alive now. 

“Yeah, I feel ya. Well, is there anything I can do to help?”

Another car.

“No, we’re okay,” the same girl replies, as they both back up in a synchronized fashion, playing with their sleeves and retreating their heads further back into their hoods like turtles. 

The other girl says to the first, “What should we do?”

“Alright. Well, you guys be safe, okay? Don't touch it with your hands, okay? You'll get sick. Get a shovel or something. Be safe, alright?”

“Yup, thank you.”

One breathes from a vape and blows the smoke back into the Long Island air. They turn away.

“Have a good night, guys,” I say as I roll up the passenger seat window.

I'm so dumbfounded by the situation that I zone out when the light turns from red to green. I do not move. My eyes remain fixed in that facet of space in which I could time travel to relive the event in my head. I do not hear the honk of the horn behind me until I return to the present. 

If this land weren’t colonized, and if society weren’t so industrialized, then tragedies like this wouldn’t happen so frequently. Humans have stolen the animals’ land.

INT. ANIMAL SHELTER - DAY, 2009

I am 10 years old, and we are waiting for the manager of the animal shelter. We are volunteering at this no-kill shelter because we want to provide support to a respectable establishment. I look around. There are only a couple other volunteers. I overhear them say that they are there on state-mandated community service. They talk about adoption rates being low all the time. Only a couple people ever visit to adopt, so that makes sense.

It’s so glum and depressing here. The energy is dull yet unnerving, as though there are anxiety-inducing agents interspersed with oxygen in the air. Maybe I’m having an allergic reaction to the cats? No, no. That can’t be it. I’m not allergic to cats.

The manager, Rick, signs us in, and my dad and I excitedly go to play with the cats. My dad had initially brought me here to substitute buying me a dog. He thought that letting me play with cats every weekend as volunteer work would quench my insatiable desire for a pet dog. I’m not allowed to play with the dogs because I’m too young, and you need to be 16 to work with the dogs in case one of them bites you. For insurance purposes.

I get to work, petting and grooming all the cats I can while my dad brushes their hair out of their fuzzy towers. We do this for hours and hours every weekend. My dad and I never would have thought that spending time in floor-to-ceiling cages would be fun, but it’s our favorite activity. 

A lot of the cats aren’t very friendly, and they scratch my arms quite often. Sometimes they strike my arms from behind me to catch me off guard. They don’t know any better. They’re just trying to protect themselves. But I just want one of them to like me and let me pet them. I just want to love one of them. Or more than one. But one is enough.

Then this one cat meows loudly at me. I turn around to see who it is. I notice a pair of green eyes on a backdrop of black fur staring at me on a tilted, curious face. I walk over to see what she wants. I open the cage, and she nuzzles against me. I pet her the rest of the day and ask my dad to pick up my slack in the other enclosures and cages. I was told to never ask the names of the cats, but I can’t resist. This one is too perfect.

“Hey, Rick? Can you come here for a second, please?”

“What’s up?” he says.

“What’s this one’s name?”

“You know how I feel about telling you their names.”

“I know, but please. She’s just too perfect. Look at those green eyes! Please, please, please, Rick. Plea—”

“Okay, geez. Her name’s Jasmine.”

“Thanks, Rick!”

I beg my dad to adopt Jasmine. He refuses. I settle for knowing that Jasmine will be waiting for me when I come back next weekend and the weekend after and the weekend after.  I know she’ll be there waiting for me. And she’s there weekend after weekend for a decent amount of time. Until one day she isn’t there. 

“Rick, where’s Jasmine?” I ask.

“Oh. She got adopted is all. She’s in a better place now,” he says. 

Jasmine got adopted, of course. Anyone can take one look at her and see how amazing she is. But even considering that, I’m surprised she was adopted because people don’t really adopt black cats because of the irrational and damaging stereotype/superstition that black cats are bad luck. I was sure she would be mine for forever because people generally don’t like black cats. Jasmine’s shining personality must have gotten through to someone besides me, though. Because now she’s with whoever adopted her and not me.

My heart sinks, and I cry. I’m happy she was adopted but so distraught because I loved her so much and wanted to take her home myself. It had gotten to the point where my dad had often left me at the animal shelter for the day to spend time with Jasmine and then picked me up before closing. 

Filled with sadness and directionlessness, I try to socialize with other cats and become friends with them. But every cat that becomes my favorite ends up getting adopted. I keep losing the cats I love.

One day, I walk into the back room to get a new hair brush for the cats, and I notice two community service volunteers holding a dog with the fur on its neck wet with blood by the sink. 

“Is he okay?” I point to the dog.

“Shit. What are you doing here?” one says to me.

“Dude, get her out of here,” the other whispers.

“Does he need help?” I say.

“Listen, everything’s fine,” one says. “We accidentally cut him while grooming him. Now get the fuck out, you hear?”

I run out of the room and slam the door behind me, the dog screeching.

And that’s when I realize. This isn’t a no-kill shelter. They’re killing that dog in the sink right now. And they don’t even do it the “humane” and painless way that they’re supposed to. They’re slaughtering that poor dog. 

They kill the animals, and they kill them right here in the back room. Every screech I’ve heard from the back room wasn’t the dogs playing with each other like they had told me. They were cries of pain. Of absolute agony and horror. That’s why they didn’t want me asking the names of the cats I loved. They didn’t want me to get attached because they knew they’d be gone sooner rather than later. They always say how adoption rates are low, but my cat friends were all disappearing at alarming rates and being replaced by new cats. No one was adopting them. The shelter had been killing them. Jasmine wasn’t adopted. She was murdered. All my cat friends weren’t adopted. They were all brutally murdered. 

No wonder why this place is so fucking glum all the time. Animals know things. They know they are sent here to die and are just waiting until their day comes. They know, but I didn’t. And my dad didn’t know. Until now.

When we confront Rick, he assures us that no animals are killed on the premises or in any operations related to the shelter. Bullshit.

Disappointed, my dad insists that we stay away from the shelter so as to not contribute to killing animals.

It isn’t until the shelter is bought by a private company that genuinely does not kill animals that we return and have our suspicions confirmed: we had been volunteering for a kill shelter the whole time and didn’t even know it. 

I guess it’s kind of like hospice, though, if you think about it. Caring for those near death until they die. Except people in hospice are sick. And there’s nothing wrong with these cats. There’s just “too much of them,” as those who are proponents for kill shelters say. As if that justifies a genocide. 

I’m sure cats think that there’s too many humans and would kill us if they could.

Because this shelter killed, it really wasn’t a shelter. It was holding cells for death row. They had lied about the abuse and killing to make it seem like a more approachable place. Customers don’t want to adopt from a kill shelter because they don’t want to support the killing of animals. Ironic though, because the animals in a no-kill shelter will survive, whereas those at a kill shelter are on death row and can be saved from that fate by an adoption. If you adopt from a kill shelter, or are you supporting the shelter or saving a cat? If you volunteer at a kill shelter, are you supporting the shelter or supporting the animals in what could be their last days?

Walking into the new, genuinely no-kill shelter that’s under new management, the entire aura changed. There’s happiness in the air. The cats know they’re safe and that they’re in good hands. They don’t hear the dogs scream from the back room anymore.

I long for the day when I can adopt a black cat and name her Jasmine.