…… Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum / The cat stretching her black body from the pillow

The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture / Then laps the bowl clean

Then wants to go out into the world, / where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn, then sits, perfectly still, in the grass….  (From Morning by Mary Oliver)

I spent most of Sunday (yesterday) on the computer and doing things around the house. Then I felt I should do something relaxing before the day ended and decided to go for a late brisk walk by the sea. When we got back after an hour or two a familiar yet shocking scene awaited us outside our house. One of our kittens had been killed and left outside the gate. How many animal cruelties had I suffered? How many more I gasped? I felt anger and sadness and I cried in the street as I witnessed this irrational suffering inflicted upon innocent creatures. I realised that I should have expected something like that happening, but still there was not much I could have done for cats and kittens come and go as they please. They climb fences and walls and slip under gates and vanish up trees. One minute they’re here and the next they’re gone. As Michael Rosen writes in a short children’s story about a ginger cat, ‘They have me to tickle, I have their laps. Other times I am nowhere and everywhere’. And that’s how it is.’

A couple of weeks prior to this incident I had put a little poster on our letter box saying that we were giving away kittens to anyone interested. A few days later someone left us a very young malnourished kitten. I thought it was bad or sick humor; still I adopted the kitten, called her Orphan, wondering what I would do with all these kitties. And then a few days later someone took the bag of cat sand that was in the garden. I didn’t pay much attention and though I had suffered harassment and pet and amimal cruelty before I did not see this coming. Once I got into the house I wondered about the profile of individuals or groups… that do these kinds of acts and I googled similar stories and scientific articles and research on animal cruelty, psychopathology, relevant disorders and sociopathic behaviours and considered posting a photo of this and the previous kitten we had found amputated and plenty of references to articles. However, as I calmed down I had second thoughts as I considered the strong impact that images leave on us. I eventually decided to stay with my emotions, go to bed and process the incident through drawing the following days and then post that instead. So, this drawing today is the product of this process.

Finally, I will end with two quotes: one from The Dalai Lama’s Cat, by David Michie: “Surely you’re not saying that the life of a human and the life of an animal are of the same value?’ he ventured…. ‘As humans we have much greater potential, of course,’ His Holiness replied. ‘But the way we all want very much to stay alive, the way we cling to our particular experience of consciousness-in this way human and animal are equal.”                    And another from Father Gregory Boyle’s book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, ‘Kindness is the only strength there is’