Miracle Cat

I worked at the South Florida Wildlife Center for many years. I had many adventures there (including a bite from a rabid raccoon...fun), this is one of them.




Miracle Cat


To work with animals is to work with death. There are no two ways about it. Life is a delicate and complicated balance that can easily tip towards disaster. At times it seems futile to struggle against it.

Working in Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center I saw that battle lost many times. However, it was never the failures that I focused on. I knew that in order to keep my heart in what I was doing I needed to concentrate on the lives that I did save, the animals that through careful care and a will of their own survived.

This tunnel vision helped rationalize, if not actually ease, the pain of the lives that slipped through my fingers. Since the animals I worked with would have had no chance of survival without the Wildlife Center it was easy to say: “Well, at least we tried”.

Working with wildlife is not like working with pets, you don’t get the same attachment to them. There is no owner behind the lost life to mourn its passing, only Mother Nature: who shows no pity to the weak.

I became so used to Mother Nature’s point of view that I started to carry out her work for her. I could open an incubator full of baby birds and instantly pick out the ones that would not make it. If there was some chance I would give them the best care that I could provide. However, when they did not survive I had no place in my heart to mourn. I could tell myself that they were simply not meant to be.

When it came to animals that I knew would never survive in the wild I never hesitated in giving in my recommendation to the vet staff that they animal be euthanized. For their part the vet’s never questioned my recommendations. After all I was the one working with the animals, I was in a position to know if they were not responding as a ‘normal’ animal should. Acting on behalf of Mother Nature I decided what made an animal ‘fit’, in the Darwin sense of the word.

I never questioned my methods or my approach to wildlife. If the animal just needed a ‘push’ to get it back in the wild I was right behind them, shoving. If it would have to live under artificial care for the rest of its natural life, I was ready to cut that life short. A few of the volunteers in the baby bird nursery coined me the ‘Angel of Death’. I didn’t mind, Nature does not have time for such creatures, and neither did I. We were always short staffed, and forever under funded.

It wasn’t until a ten week old kitten came into my life that I lost sight of the fact that Mother Nature works the way she does for a reason. Like I said before working with domestics is different. A wild animal is brought into the world because Nature put it there. A domestic animal is brought into the world because Man wanted it. Unfortunately we as humans are not always careful of what we wish for and nobody wanted this kitten.

It was probably this sense of responsibility that caused me to take in this hopeless case, or maybe it was just that fact that kittens are so damn cute, no matter how mangy they are. And DeeDee, as I named her, was most certainly mangy. Her age was anyone’s guess because she was so under sized. However, by the teeth we decided that ten to fourteen weeks was a good estimate.

She had been left in one of our overnight drop boxes (in case you find an injured wild animal after hours). She had been wrapped in a plastic bag, most likely because the mange had caused her fur to fall out in big patches and whoever found her probably didn’t want to touch her. To add insult to injury the little kitten had a severe respiratory infection, and a gut load of parasites.

Policy told me, Mother Nature told me, common sense told me, to call Animal Control and have the misfit kitten taken away where it would be instantly euthanized. The Wildlife Center does not handle ‘domestic’ animals, and Animal Control does not have the time nor the funding to handle disaster cases such as this one. My rational side reasoned that it would be for the best that the kitten be euthanized. There are too many stray cats in the world as it is.

It was this same reasoning that made me keep the kitten: if there are already too many stray cats, what’s one more?

So I kept DeeDee and started what would end up being a long series of drugs, tests, force feedings, etc... I would have never forced any of this on a wild animal and I shouldn’t have forced it on a domestic. I kept telling myself that it was different, that as a domesticated animal it was my responsibility to keep it alive and make it healthy.

I also kept telling myself that there was hope for DeeDee when in my heart I knew there wasn’t any. I could callously smell death on the wildlife I worked with, but when I caught the same scent of decay on this pet I denied it to the last. It was in this moment that I discovered the incredible bond that can exist between man and animal. It wasn’t until later that I discovered the damage this bond can do when it comes to doing what it right for the animal.

All the signs told me that I should have DeeDee euthanized. However DeeDee kept it from being a clinical decision. Every time I picked up her thin body her frame would vibrate with purring. I’d come home and she’d come running out on bowed legs whipping her little rat tail, made furless from mange. She displayed a desire for life that the doomed wildlife never seemed to express. So I kept trying, and for her part she kept trying as well.

Every time I thought she wasn’t going to make it through the night she proved me wrong. At the same time every time I thought we’d beaten one of her illnesses she’d come down with a new one. It was when she stopped eating that I was faced with my biggest test, and shamefully enough: I failed, at least in the eyes of Mother Nature.

I brought her into the vet clinic (again) that I worked at when I wasn’t working with wildlife to see why she wasn’t eating. DeeDee had developed ulcers at the back of her throat which was making it painful to swallow. With all the other things that were still wrong with her it really was time to put her down. I could see that she just wasn’t meant to be. However the ‘Angle of Death’ had developed a soft spot for this little kitten and I couldn’t find the courage to end her life.

I let myself fall into the Miracle Cat trap. You often hear of owners going to extreme lengths to save a dying pet, and the stories that you hear are usually the ones where the animal despite all the odds makes a full recovery. They become wonderful companions and the owners say: “To think, I almost gave up on him”. In my heart I wanted to believe that DeeDee could be one of these Miracles and so I brought her home from the vet with a new set of drugs.

Three days later I came home from a nightmare to a nightmare. There had been a storm and the Wildlife Center had been flooded, not by water, but by new patients. Among those were six young opossums, and four baby squirrels that needed feeding every two hours. This meant that I had to take them home to keep up the feedings.

After working eight hours at the Wildlife Center and then five more with the dog and cat vet I was about to drop...and so was DeeDee. She had gotten worse while I was away and could barely stand. I gave her some fluids, fed the ten young animals I had brought home and went straight to bed.

Two o’clock in the morning DeeDee crashed and woke me from a dead sleep with a very pitiful yowl. She has been meowing all night for the entire month that she’d lived with me but something was different this time, something was wrong. When I went over to her I found that she couldn't bend her legs or close her eyes. She’d finally had a seizure.

She was dying but her heartbeat was strong so I knew this was going to take hours. So at two am I took her to an all night vet clinic about an hour away and had her euthanized. I told the late night vet that I had tired everything with her, perhaps too much.

Instead of going home like I should have I drove tearfully to the beach. I sat in the sand until the sun rose wondering if I had done more harm than good for DeeDee. This lead me to thinking that all of my work with animals was no more than torturing them. My heart hurt so much from the loss that I didn’t think I could stand letting it happen again.

I walked into the Wildlife Center that morning with every intention of quitting. I felt too burnt out, to hurt. When I stepped into the nursery the vet handed me the youngest bird I think I’ve ever held.

It was a Quaker Parrot no more than three days old. Although it had been born in the wild, Quaker Parrots are not native to Florida. When they come to the Center they are treated like an exotic pet (we handle exotic pet, not domestic ones). We raise them and then find them homes. For a moment I could help but think that it was happening all over again.

“It’s so young.” The vet said sadly. “I don’t think it’s going to live.”

“We’ll see about that.”

*********



Epilogue
The Quaker did survive, and for two months he was never far from my side. Birds grow quickly and in the end I found him a wonderful home. He began to speak at a very young age. He is nearly seven years old now and says over 30 phrases, and nine songs.


As for DeeDee: I hear you’re supposed to get nine chances at this thing called ‘life’, may your spirit find it’s new path and try to make a softer landing this time.