Another death in the animal family has prompted a little more sadness, and a little more thinking about Death.
Last week, one of our two remaining kittens died. He became ill on Friday afternoon. He wasn’t moving very much, and his breathing was laboured. By Saturday lunchtime he was dead.
I did my best to get him to drink a little water, and I protected him from the unwanted attentions of his very energetic sister, who couldn’t understand why he was not playing the usual kitteny rough-and-tumble games with her (in which she most usually came off worst). By Saturday morning, his temperature had dropped, and I wrapped him in a small towel and held him close to my body to keep him warm. I was holding him like this when he gave one last wheezy little miaow, wriggled for a few seconds with wide eyes and sharp claws, and then gave up his four-week-old feline ghost.
We did not take him to the vet. The thought crossed my mind, and then the absurdity of it struck me.
Only a few weeks ago, we had taken two of our adult cats to be spayed, and one of them (currently going by the name of Big Cat) was heavily pregnant at the time. When we happened to be recounting this to Jean-Pierre (the farmer who did our fencing), he asked why we hadn’t waited until after she had given birth, when the procedure would have been considerably less costly. He seemed a little non-plussed by our concerns about what we would have done with even more kittens. As a practical farmer, used to the death of animals, it was fairly obvious what he would have done.
And yet, the line between him and us was very slim. We had chosen instead to end their lives before birth, (by possibly only a few hours) rather than after it. If they had been born, we would have ended up with a ridiculous number of kittens that might have grown to adulthood, and would have cost us even more to be sterilised. It is unlikely that we would have been able to find homes for them, as there are just so many (unsterilised) cats living wild and on farms around here.
But even the decision to have Big Cat spayed at that point had been a hard one for me. I had hoped and hoped that she might give birth before we took her to the vet at the appointed hour, even though I knew the outcome would have been impractical. It just didn’t seem right to be destroying new life so close to its emergence into this world.
There is, I believe, a meaningful difference between deliberately killing something, and allowing something to die, with as little suffering as possible, after one has taken all reasonable action within one’s power, to aid its chances of survival. The question then becomes one of deciding what constitutes “all reasonable action”. And as is the case in any moral dilemma, the issue is about where one chooses to draw the line.
In this case, we considered that the chances of the kitten’s survival were extremely slim, and that a trip to the vet would have been a stressful, and almost certainly futile course of action. So we took our cue from Mother Cat, who after a few fruitless attempts to encourage the sick kitten to suckle, left him alone, and devoted all of her maternal attention (and milk) to the remaining healthy kitten. If they had been in the wild, she would clearly have left him to die, and taken her healthy offspring to a new nest – just as she had when the first two kittens had died in the barn.
The natural world is not a soft and easy place. Nature can seem harsh, when judged by a human, ego-bound perspective. But in reality it is neither good nor bad. It just is the way it is.
So we did everything we reasonably could, and we tried to make the tiny, declining thing comfortable in its demise. And just as with Fatma, the moment of death came somehow suddenly and yet unremarkably. And apart from a wayward tear or two that dropped unbidden and meaningless onto the lifeless bundle of fur, the moment passed virtually unnoticed.
And Life Went On.
