Call of the Cats: What I Learned about Life and Love from a Feral Colony by Andrew Bloomfield
My rating: 4/5 cats
if i learned one thing from this book, it is that i do not have what it takes to care for a feral cat colony, certainly not for the twenty years this guy did. i mean, i absolutely lack the financial resources to feed and handle medical care for a bunch of stranger-danger cats, since vet bills are insane, even when you are only caring for one little cat with one little cancer like i am,
but even more than that – i do not have the emotional fortitude to deal with the short lifespans of very cute things in the wild. reading about all the kittens disemboweled by coyotes or raccoons (and i never thought i would say this, but FUCK RACCOONS! FUCK THEIR WICKED LITTLE HANDS AND CAT-GOBBLING FACES! now i know what evie is always going on about), or cats who are shitty and neglectful mothers leaving their kittens to die, it’s enough to break your heart just reading about it, let alone becoming emotionally attached to a population so damn vulnerable. giving them names is just hubris.
if there’s TWO things i learned from this book, it is the difference between feral and stray cats, which are terms i’d always used interchangeably. strays are domesticated cats, abandoned to the streets like my maggie was so many years ago. when you move, it’s hard to fit this much cute in your u-haul:
worked out just fine for me!
ferals are straight-up wild beasties, “untamed and, for the most part, untamable” (although bloomfield had some luck in that area) who don’t do cute things like purr, approach for petting, or enjoy human company. i’d been calling the cats who wander all over my town ‘feral,’ but that’s totally not true. ours are friendly and approachable. not that i pet them anymore because – again – cancer cat who doesn’t need extra diseases compromising her immune system. i leave the occasional bowl of food out for them – i have been buying fancy expensive healthy cancer-curing food for maggie and she’s been on-and-off with it, so rather than letting it go to waste, i give it to the under-the-LIRR-cats, but they’re never around when i leave the food, so we have no relationship, which is for the best. i am like cat santa.
i lost any idea of ever being more than cat santa when i came to this sentence early on in the book: After watching, helpless, as a delicate white cat choked to death on a bone she had scavenged from a neighbor’s trash…, and i was like NOPE, I’M OUT! no falling in love with outside cats, ever!
we have quite a large stray cat population here in my neighborhood, little pockets of them scattered in various places, and there are plenty of cat-people who feed and care for them. several of these cats have marked off the grounds of the mormon church as their territory, and i see them every day, saying hello as i pass by on my way to the subway. a couple of weeks back i saw one of them – a large stripey cat – under a bush, face smooshed into the ground and clearly no longer alive, and it broke me a little bit. it broke me more when i called 311 to have someone come take it away so no one else had to get broken inside, and it was handled with an understandably businesslike and emotionless efficiency on their end that pissed me off, even as i acknowledged that my anger was irrational.
but so yeah – i commend this andrew bloomfield for doing what i never could, and taking on the thankless task of caring for these animals, through all the heartache of entire litters of kittens being devoured, of special favorites dying young or vanishing, fates unknown. for someone who wasn’t even a cat person before getting involved, whose own life was precarious, who went from living in his car to moving in with an ex-girlfriend and her sister, to the three of them becoming the benefactors of generations of wild cats living in their backyard, it’s even more laudable.
despite what i’ve mentioned above, this book isn’t a total downer – there are so many stories that are uplifting – sympathetic bill-slashing vets, kittens on the verge of death rallying under his care, cats believed to be dead returning to the colony years later, and despite their wild animal status, so many instances that demonstrate an understanding – a communication between human and cat that is downright spooky:
At least a dozen times…whenever a cat we cared for escaped or was missing from the colony, we would ask the others for help. Usually within hours, they would bring us the missing cat, though sometimes it took as long as a day.
and the incident that made him commit to the colony beyond simply leaving food for them – i mean, this is like a friggin’ disney movie:
The dead kitten at my feet was a stunning mix of tortoiseshell and tabby markings, patches of chocolate and cinnamon melded with royal-orange stripes down her legs that would’ve made her lion ancestors proud. Just the day before, I’d observed this little sprite dancing with joy in the backyard, spinning and leaping in air, the enthusiasm of life surging through her tiny body. As my gaze lifted from the lifeless creature, I saw eight feral cats looking up at me. They sat on their haunches in a perfect semicircle, each so quiet and perfectly positioned it seemed as if someone had hand-placed them.
I recognized these cats: there was Caliby, Snow White, Crazy Calico, Shadow, Beige, Juniorette, Baby Gray, and Marble. Two males and the rest females, ranging in color and appearance from pitch black to Siamese. I was stunned that they were out in the open and not fleeing from my presence. More significantly, each cat stared me dead in the eye. As I turned my head to look at each animal, it would fiercely hold my gaze. This feral cats did not do.
there’s a heavily spiritual slant throughout this book – quotes and passages from texts and values culled from a number of religions – buddhism, hinduism, kabbalah, etc and some assorted, unaffiliated new agey stuff, none of which overlaps in the venn diagram of me and my personal beliefs or interests, but this is as much his story as it is the story of “his” cats, and it doesn’t seem out of place alongside all of the non-cat stories about his life. maybe a little distractingly off-topic sometimes, because i’m just here for the cats, but it’s such a big part of who he is, and you kind of need to be zen to deal with all the kitten death, so it didn’t bother me too much. plus, some of it is surprisingly fierce:
One spiritual teacher I met described desire as hunger – chewing on the bone of life, pursuing everything we think will give us satisfaction. But actually the meat from the bone is long gone, and what we’re really tasting is our own blood from the shards of bone as they cut into our gums.
apart from that, and his overuse and imprecise application of the word “decimate,” it’s a really enjoyable book. all of the cat stories are excellent, even the heartbreaking ones, and it was nice to see how even a non-cat person can fall under their spell and become their slaves like the rest of us.
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quick review for now, more to come.
everything about this author’s experiences with “his” cats = 5 stars
everything that falls into the category of “learning facts about cats and the relationship between people and cats through history” = 4 stars, but only because i’d already been spoiled by the excellent The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World.
everything else – the astrology, religion & spirituality, hollywood, etc etc = three stars. “just the cats, man,” sez me.
and the photography = two stars, with one of those stars being just for the fact that they are cats. i totally understand that it is cost-prohibitive to include color photos, especially if you’re supporting a million feral cats, but even black and white photos can be pleasing to the eye. just not these particular ones. the resolution is so… weird:
it makes the cats look cartoony.
and i don’t even know what’s going on here, with those white-cutout negative space patches:
what is this even?
but it’s overall a great book, and i will blab about how great it is soon.
