If you are an animal lover then there are few simple things you need to always remember – an animal eats, it looks cute and cuddly, and the same animal pukes and shits. You cannot conveniently ignore the last but vital part and call yourself an animal lover. If you love an animal? Then you better be ready to clean its shit too! It is part of the package.
Beautiful looking lovely cats migrated to our community a couple of years back and the residents loved them. They patted them, they fed them, and in the process they felt good about their own existence. And the shit part was left for the maids and domestic helpers to clean. The cats never visited our apartment because they loved humans – they came for a selfish reason, they came to hunt and in the process survive. What happens if they had not found enough food in the apartment? You think they would have stayed back because they loved getting patted by fucking humans? They surely would have left. Now what happens if you break the pattern and start feeding them regularly? By simple logic – the cats would leave their natural trait, stop hunting and depend upon humans for food – because it is easier to stay lazy than burning calories viz-a-viz hunting.
It is a scientific rule that – when food, shelter, and safe environment is provided to any animal (including humans) they will do nothing but reproduce. That is exactly what happened to these stray cats – they ate free food, fucked for free, and kept reproducing.
The kittens were cuter than the parents – they also got patted, got fed, and their shit was cleaned by the maids aka domestic helpers as usual. From a tiny clan of 10 they multiplied to 84 in no time. People were happy until cats started to show their wilder side because scientifically cats carry 95% per cent traits of a tiger!
Not all the kids are fond of cats, and once you show disinterest to any beast – they know it, and they don’t like it. Few cats scratched few children while they were playing – and now things were not cute anymore. No parent is going to like their children to be attacked by stray animals, when few others are breeding them to fill their own personal vacuum. The matter became a lot serious and like how matured people dealt with any grave situation in the 21st Century our people did the same. They started debating on Whatsapp, and finally a solution was found. Bloody neuter all the cats because it is ‘legally’ right to snatch the sexual lives of cats that generally have a life span of 25 years! Man has always loved to overpower whatever he could in nature. (Whether is it right ‘karmically’ to neuter animals just because humans are more powerful that them was of no interest to the literate modern society who extract their intelligence by reading daily newspapers).
The decision makers found the logistics for the neutering process – 84 cats, Rs 1500 per cat, with additional individual care to all the neutered cats for 15 days. The cost would run up to Rs 1,25,000! And there was complete silence for a few days because not all the problems of lives can be solved by chatting on Whatsapp or putting up posts on FB, Twitter or Instagram.
Few good samaritans got into the process of collecting funds for neutering the cats, few donated, few refused, and none could keep a gun on everyone to make the contribution compulsory. Slow, but it was happening – however there was a twist in the plot. One fine day a lot of cats started dying in the campus, and when tested by a Vet – the reason of deaths came to fore as ‘cat poisoning’. And in a matter of 15-20 days – the cat population reduced to less than a half.
And again the debate started on Whatsapp, and a complaint was lodged at the police station. A FIR was filed, and the case is under investigation to find who poisoned the cats.
I sometimes feel like a newborn baby in a striptease bar about how exactly humans think. When monkeys visit our apartment in summer season a clear instruction is given to the residents to avoid feeding them. And their existence is considered to be a menace by both animal lovers and animal haters and they both want to get rid of them. The logic of ‘Humans taking over animal’s ecosystem’ doesn’t work anymore. Wearing a bear suit was the last option that was decided to scare away monkeys. Is it just that an animal that attacks won’t be considered good, and an animal that will remain subdued to humans be considered good? An animal is an animal end of the day. A snake visited our apartment, and the shrubs were trimmed completely. Why not feed the snake and help them reproduce and then think of neutering them?
Human hypocrisy has no bounds…and yes, whenever there was a conflict between humans and animals it was always the humans who have won.