Sophie

It's funny how things just fall into place sometimes. My ex and I had been living with two litter-mates who'd just turned six. Tar and Monzo had been with us for five years and seemed to be spending more time lounging than moving. The apartment felt large and so we decided to adopt a cat to keep them company -- to provide someone new with a much-needed home and to maybe to liven up the household a little. My friend Tanya piped up one day that her dear friends Andre and Stacey were fostering a momma cat and her two surviving kittens for one of the local SPCA shelters. We agreed to go meet them. We watched a zany grey and white ball of fluff bouncing off everything around her, darting to and from the more stoic (and somewhat more oval) ball of white and black fluff we were told was her brother. She was weepy-eyed and it was suggested to us at some point that she wouldn't be considered adoptable if returned to the already-overcrowded shelter.


On our walk home, we weren't even a block away before we decided that there was no way we would end up not bringing both home. They spent the next dozen years known as "The Kittens". Zeus decided to shadow Tar and Sophie fell in love with Monzo. Since Tar usually shadowed me, Zeus followed suit; since Monzo pretty much adored my ex, Sophie ended up spending a bit more time with him more so than she did with me. Her first few years, most of our interaction involved my sending wads of paper down the long entrance hallway, watching her gallop full throttle and leap up and off of the walls in chase.

It's hard to write about Sophie without writing about Zeus. Their antics were the stuff of giggles and horror. I still remember the day I'd been in the kitchen preparing dinner and heard a loud crash in the living room. I ran out to find them tiny and immobile in the middle of it, having knocked over the tall and heavy decorative glass bottle I'd assessed as unbreakable. I quietly begged them - as if they understood my words -- to not budge as I gingerly stepped in to scoop them both up out of what seemed to be thousands of tiny shards of glass, ignoring the upstairs neighbour's frantic knock at the door in response to the loud smash. There was no way those little pink toes were going to end up bleeding on my watch.

Sophie's weepy eyes led to her soon developing a much closer relationship with her veterinarian than I would have liked. Surgery for fused tear ducts and then a diagnosis of eosinophilic granuloma complex led us to restrict her diet and to make lifestyle changes to eliminate scented products or any allergens we could possibly think of that might need to be considered. Periodic steroid injections led to the customary and necessary warnings of the side-effects of long-term steroid use. Still, Sophie and I perfected our game of catch, by which I'd lob wads of paper up at her as she perched on a kitty condo, eventually learning to catch them in flight between her paws and training me to throw more accurately in the process! When she wasn't catching wads of paper, she was burrowing beneath the blankets on the bed. We eventually nicknamed her "the lump" since sitting anywhere on the bed that wasn't an obviously completely flat surface invariably risked eliciting a startled "meowch!" from that spot.

When Sophie's favourite human moved on, she and I found ourselves reevaluating our previous relationship as she so obviously mourned an absence. When Monzo -- "her" cat -- died less than a year later, I was left with a sad girl who found herself burrowing beneath the covers more often than not. In no time, though, she seemed to decide that the "pay attention to me" way of proceeding worked for her. Visitors soon became familiar with the "pat-pat-pat" of her paw on their arms, laps, hands, shoulders -- whatever was within reach. If you said 'hello' to Sophie, you were inadvertently acquiescing to providing an evening's worth of scritches, plain and simple. Failure to fulfill your obligations would lead to a stream of chirps and grunts in protest and that gentle "pat-pat-pat" reminder, Sophie sitting beside you (im)patiently.

As the eosinophilic granuloma cleared up with treatment and management over the years, another immune system and allergy-related issue arose. Sophie developed asthma, requiring further medical intervention. I still remember going to the neighbourhood pharmacy to pick up her first inhalers and to set up her account, the pharmacist promptly informing me while shaking his head in disbelief that she was his first feline customer. He and his assistants came to know me by name as I went in every month or two to refill prescriptions.


Sophie eventually rekindled the kinship she and Zeus shared and they would frequently cuddle up to one another. Eventually, she even came to allow Sammy, who'd tried to befriend her from his first day in our home, to sidle up to her without hissing at him. But the asthma took its toll and after years of her steroid use's having left her a more portly kitty than most, her weight began to decrease -- and to continue decreasing. The complication of a severe and sudden bout of rhinitis and her worsening asthma left her losing more weight and sneezing what seemed constantly. A friend who visited in June ended up on the receiving end of a few streams of mucus, something I'd come to accept as being ordinary when interacting with Sophie, and deemed it gross. At that point, I'd been spending months cleaning "Sophie snot" off of things, including myself. It came with the territory and I loved her with all of my heart regardless.

After an unfortunate mishap as a kitten while held -- and dropped -- by a friend, she was always a little wary of being picked up and held by strangers. Her compromise with those she trusted involved crawling up close against our throats, claws dug firmly into our shoulders. It was pressed into my throat with her claws firmly outstretched that she let me hold her and rock her for hours our last afternoon together. The rhinitis had returned and her asthma has been worsening over the months, regardless of the inhalers and steroids. Her weight had dropped more significantly and rapidly and the vet suspected that blood tests would show the onset of renal failure. So after a long series of bad days where eating seemed optional to her and wheezing was constant, on a day that somehow turned out to be a better one than we'd had in months, I cleaned Sophie's face with a cool damp cloth, combed her carefully-- which she'd always loved -- and held her closely, nestled against my neck and purring, rocking her and talking to her until the time came to take her to the vet's to follow through with the heartbreaking decision I'd been making all week. It's one I still regret now, because how can someone not regret making that decision, even if others assure you that it's the right one?


Two weeks ago my heart broke. I miss my girl, I do.

Exploiting Some Animals to Raise Money for Other Animals? No Thanks!

Welcome to Barbecue Season!

Summer is here (albeit not so much for you readers in the southern hemisphere). This means that on a nice day, each and every bike ride taken through a residential area of my small city's streets in the late afternoon or early evening brings with it an "opportunity" to get a noseful of the odour of animal parts being cooked on a multitude of eagerly fired-up backyard grills. I don't even have to travel that far to smell it, actually; I share a yard with neighbours, and over the summer months those same smells fill the air in and around my building at least once or twice a week.

Barbecue Season = $$

With barbecue season come fundraisers. After all, people like to be outside during the warmer months, right? What could be easier than grabbing a few bags of rolls, slapping a couple of cheap hot dogs on the grill, squirting them with some tasty condiments and handing them out on disposable paper plates? How about in a parking lot conveniently offered up by a local business hoping to churn up some good PR with those milling around the smiling volunteer wearing the apron and handing out mystery meat? My local paper features at least 2-3 of these a week in its "Community Events" calendar: Barbecued wieners and burgers for pee-wee baseball, for an all-girl bagpipe band, for some local group's project to build a well somewhere in some country wherever a well needs to be built... or for the local SPCA animal shelters.

Throughout the year, I periodically see notices in the paper of one or the other of the two SPCA shelters in my area holding food-based fundraisers. Some time ago, I joined the Facebook page for one of the local shelters -- the one through which I had adopted Zeus and Sophie over 10 years ago (and that's Sophie glaring at you off to the right). Over the winter, I received occasional announcements concerning its activities until one day I received an invitation to attend an all-you-can-eat spaghetti and meatballs dinner fundraiser (I think they called it a "spay-ghetti and no-balls" dinner). I posted on their Facebook wall, mentioning that I was vegan and asking if all of the spaghetti at their fundraiser came with meat-based sauce and if they would consider instead offering spaghetti with a vegan marinara sauce. One of the shelter's spokespeople responded saying that she wasn't really sure what was in the sauce, but said nothing beyond that. It wasn't an issue for her that they were selling food containing animal ingredients to raise money for other (obviously much more worthy) animals. As for the barbecues the SPCA shelters hold during warmer weather, the fare is hardly any different -- it's not vegan.

'Animal-Free' as Optional?

The topic came up again a few days ago when a local rat rescuer on Twitter tweeted about a Kindness Club barbecue being held in my city to raise money for its Spay/Neuter Assistance Program (SNAP). At this fund-raising barbecue, veggie burgers were included in the offerings, but as far as I know, so were the usual fund-raising mystery meats. The thing is that lumping in veggie burgers with the other animal-based food offerings doesn't change a thing, whether or not those veggie burgers were actually even vegan before they were taken out of the box. Why? Well, at the very least, they'd be cooked on a grill and served with utensils already covered in caked-on animal bits and animal fat. Even if they weren't, participating in an event where the flesh and secretions of animals are being sold to raise money to improve the lives of other animals means publicly condoning the message that some non-human animals' rights are more important than those of others. It also means condoning the lie that you need to exploit animals to feed humans. As an abolitionist vegan, I want to destroy the speciesist status quo -- not reinforce it.

But I Want to Help!

Some vegans might argue that attending such fund-raising events isn't problematic as long as no food is consumed, and that it can even be worthwhile since it ultimately "helps" some animals. The thing is that if you really just want to throw financial support at a specific cause, you can always -- at the very least -- write them a check. You don't need to participate in an event where there is animal exploitation to support that cause. If you do throw money at them, though, please use the opportunity to talk to them about speciesism and about the exploitation of other animals: Teach them that they don't need to exploit other animals to raise money. Want to do even more? Start up a vegan or animal rights group and hold a vegan bake sale -- or vegan barbecue -- and throw some of the money you make towards your local shelter or spay/neuter program and use your sale as an opportunity to educate the public (as well as the group or program receiving your donation) about veganism.

Make a Real Difference!

Don't be afraid to educate others! Make yours a clear and unequivocal message in this mess of mixed messages in the so-called animal movement. If you don't, then who will? And how will things ever change for non-human animals?