When doing good doesn’t feel so great
In the latest litter we fostered there was a clear runt, a tiny watchful Yoda, all head and twitchy ears. She could run and jump and wrestle with the others, she just got tired more easily. After awhile she’d come back to sit on my lap while I typed, crouching on delicate paws and curling herself into a space the size of a child’s handprint.
Our job was to fatten her up like her three siblings. They’d all be adoptable in a month, as long as they reached two pounds. All four were eating canned food watered down to a gruel, and I’d been supplementing the littlest one’s diet with syringes of feline milk.
But it wasn’t enough. Yesterday morning she was lying on her side, immobile. I sped her to the vet wrapped in a blanket, but brought her home an hour later in a small box. When the kids came back from school I walked them to the tiny grave circled with stones. I explained “fading kitten syndrome,” the catch-all term used for the ones not robust enough to digest food well and fight germs.
The folks at the shelter where I foster say there’s one in every group; for each litter of, say, five kittens, about 3.5 make it to eight weeks old. But the statistics are lost on my younger boys. They had helped raise more than 10 litters and we’d never lost one. Standing under the tree looking down at the stone circle, that achievement seemed to wilt.
Why do it? I wondered, after we went back into the house to feed the remaining three. Really, why do it to ourselves? It’s nice to play a role in helping strays born in the bushes or pulled from horder homes become welll-socialized pets. And it’s certainly no hardship being able to play with these furry ping-pong balls for a few weeks. I’ve often felt like we had a secret; sshh, don’t tell anyone where they came from, or everyone would do it and there wouldn’t be enough for us. But even when it ends well, it ends sadly. I always have trouble saying goodbye.
Then there are the times it isn’t going well — are they eating enough, do they have a respiratory infection, is the pinkeye getting better? And the inevitable math: For every one that’s rescued, there are probably two that aren’t. Which can make fostering feel like a zero-sum game. Holding a plush undersized creature taking its last breaths can make a person wonder whether they really want to be a part of it. The Humane Society estimates that tens of thousands of families foster pets every year; if I decided it was too raw for us, the shelter surely had other foster families who’d fill the gap.
That same morning, the news broke that a shooter in Las Vegas had killed 58 people
and wounded 500 overnight. Mourning a kitten felt a little obscene against that backdrop of loss. Not to mention Puerto Rico, where 84 percent of the people still didn’t have power following Hurricane Maria, and 37 percent didn’t have clean water. It’s easy to let that zero-sum feeling leak through your firewalls and dampen your attitude, easy to feel ineffectual when a wave of bad news pummels one day, and then again the next. It erodes your sense that small things are worth doing, even if the small things are the only measure of difference in a zero-sum game.
And yet. Yesterday afternoon an email came from the new owner of Clyde and Flynn, two of the kittens from a litter born at our house in May. The boys are six months old and behave like drunken teens at a house party, and their new owner loves it.
One day I heard a strange creaking sound coming from the hallway, the woman who’d adopted them wrote in an email. There was a wooden clothes-drying rack and he’d climbed up and was and swinging from his front paws like a kid on a jungle gym. I’ve attached the video or you wouldn’t believe me. They are thriving, Nichole, and they just love people. I’m so fortunate that they had you and yours as their foster family.
