There's a cat in my neighborhood that I call Gruddy. He's orange and white, with a mis-shaped head, like his skull slopes down one ear to the other, not quite a dent, but certainly something. He is filthy and his eyes are a misty yellow-green. I always see him at this house with boxes and old trash on the front porch, hand-lettered signs taped to the screen door. I sort of want to pet him, but in reality, I definitely would not. He's not into the idea, either. Every time I come around the corner of where he lives and he's there, he just sits and stares, intensely. Because he's so fucked up looking, I can't tell what the look means.
I've lived in more well-heeled neighborhoods and in those, you get well-loved, almost disturbingly friendly housecats that run off their porches and flop around under your hand and squawk when you crouch down to pet them. Up here there's an abandoned house on a lot where a whole colony of strays live. People leave tins of wet food down there and with what they can glean from rats and garbage, they maintain some sort of population. But they're a bunch of skinny, wormy, skiddish things. They stay pretty well hidden. A bunch of old, derelict property has been torn down around here, so their range has been shrinking. But as long as there's food, there will be kittens, tucked away in the grass and old car parts on that lot.
I was on a trip abroad with my family. I was reading Amy Hempel, coincidentally. We saw a spectrum of stray dogs (I think stray cats would just get eaten-we didn't see any) and everyone really responded sympathetically, although it was apparent that, where we were, there were different values at play on how to deal with animals. Where we were, I met one person who had a toy poodle as a pet. Mostly, you kept a dog in your courtyard for protection and ignored the packs that roamed the neighborhood. I never saw anyone being cruel to any of these dogs. Most were acclimated to people, too. These same places had mothers sleeping with babies on cardboard, on the sidewalk. People with fucked teeth and open wounds begging around the ATM, which was manned with guards holding semi-automatics. People we see at home, who became more vivid because we were not.
I think I recognized that you can pet a dog and have a more immediate, straightforward interaction than you could have with a person. You see a stray and have a clear concept of what it is. You never question a dog's values. I've been around too many drunk discussions about poor and homeless people, so I know the assumptions that get trotted out about how and why those people are the way they are. In this way, too, animals are entirely innocent, they make no choices, whereas people are not. You can openly empathize for the hard life of an animal, which is easy. Wrapping our heads around the sight and pervasiveness of human poverty is different. It requires rationalizing the continuation of an inequality that is central to the makeup of our society. We bemoan the kind of welfare we have to extend to people, giving pocket change, for example, and our solutions don't go beyond shelters. Sterilization, which we use on animals, seems like a sound solution for poor people if you're far enough from the problem.
I wonder what happened to Gruddy's head. Did something fall on it? Did it damage his brain? Does he go out into the neighborhood at night and stalk, like other cats or does he stay on the porch? If he got really sick, would his people take care of him? Why doesn't he clean himself? I mean it that I wouldn't pet him. And it's not about love or attachment. I've taken in strays before that I've given up (or they ran away). I talk to people I know and they assume that I'm naive, that I have a pulpy, gloppy heart with no goddamn sense. That it will leave me awash in the world, prime for the exploitation of meaner people, and worse off, possibly homeless, worthless. Because of what I don't seem to understand. This is not so. Gruddy doesn't want me to touch him and my hand would smell disgusting all the way home if I did. I am not blindly in love. I understand a great many things.
I've had so many chance encounters with people, with animals. Some were fucked up and will evade detection and capture. Others will not. I'm getting at the idea of a world where the life of animals and human animals is valued and where problems are deftly and (whatever this word means), humanely handled. Going further, a world where exclusion is not a given. The necessary path to which I would love to be gentle, but I know will not be and I am preparing my heart for that. And I don't want my sympathy to be appropriative. I want us all to stand behind the conviction that the forces meant to lock up or drug, to prolong the condition of or destroy the remainders in its human equations should watch their fucking backs, whether it's you or someone else they're coming after. That is they don't stop, we would make them. I would love a society that sets to work doing this, one that doesn't presently exist. So if I don't know where to place my love, I certainly know where to place my disgust.
If "humane" is a sentiment, how do we concretize a compassion that is divorced from mere pity?
