Tuggles, a beautiful grey calico, wants nothing more than to play and be loved on constantly. Pawing at the glass, she sits, patiently waiting, looking at all who walk past. As soon as you make eye contact with this pretty kitty your heart will belong to her. She has deep blue eyes and sits tall waiting for someone to enter her area. Tuggles will instantly make you feel welcome to come in and love on her. After you introduce yourself to her, letting her smell your hand, she takes an immediate liking to you. She will come brush against your legs begging for you to bend down. As soon as you lean down to pet her, all reservations go to the wind as she embraces your touch. Oh boy, does she love to purr! Her soft fur and loving demeanor makes for the perfect cuddle companion. Once in your lap, you will never want this genuine beauty to leave.
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| Tuggles! |
I wish we knew her story of how she got to Austin Pets Alive. If only she could communicate to us how she is feeling or how she is doing. She seems to be doing just fine, but could be better with the help of a companion. I wonder what her life was like before she got here, if she had an owner or if she grew up with her family. I wonder if someone found her or if someone left her. I wonder if she suffered a trauma and if so how she keeps such a seemingly peppy outlook. I wonder how long she has been waiting. All these things I wondered about made me begin to imagine what her life was like before. This is my version of Tuggles story through her eyes:
A year ago I was living in a dark place with my mother, brothers, and sisters. We ate out of a big green box when it was dark outside. We would climb into it, and there would be many foods to choose from. Mother said to be careful to not eat things that aren’t food. Once I ate something that mother called a diaper and I got really sick. Then I understood what she warned us about. I was much pickier after that day. Mother told me that we prowl at night, like wild cats, so that “they” wouldn’t catch us. Regardless of that precaution, sometimes we came across “them”— the two-legged creatures. Some of them made clicking sounds to us and extended their arms towards us. Mother said to not go near them because they are evil. Every time she saw a two-legged she told us the story about how they took Papa. I can’t remember just how many times I heard that story. Still, I didn’t really understand why “they” were evil. I don’t know why, but I longed to be held by those creatures. It’s something deep inside their eyes when they looked at me as I looked yearningly back at them. Against mother’s advice, I wanted them to catch me. I always scampered away slower than the others because, oddly enough, I was not afraid. I mean, I wasn’t afraid of most of them.
After a while, I got bigger. I got fatter from the food in the big green box. I was half-the size of mother. It was getting hotter outside, and the dark place we called home kept us cool. One day, a two-legged ran fast and hard towards me. I looked in its eyes and this creature showed no comfort. I saw what mother warned us to fear. Everyone ran away, but I was still eating deep in the box. Suddenly, I felt two strange paws latch onto me and pull me out, up, and away from the food and away from my family. Squinting in the sunlight, I tried to smell the creature. As I leaned to press my cool wet nose against the creature’s furless body, it dropped me. I looked up in confusion and it started yelling at me and shoved me aside with one of its two long legs. I saw no love in its eyes. I tried to retreat back to my home, the cave where the rain collected for us to drink, but the unusual paws picked me up once more and dangled me by the skin of my neck. It held me away from its body, as far as the paw could stretch. Soon enough, we reached a strange looking thing with circles on the bottom instead of feet. It was an oddly shaped box, one I had seen many times before whizzing past our home. A few of them had almost crushed me in the past. Mother told us to always fear the box on four circles. I tried to scramble away, but the creature shoved me into a small box inside the box on four circles. This box was nothing like the food one; it was small and cramped with no food inside. Then everything went black.
Trying to figure out where I was, I began to meow, calling out for my mother, my brothers, and my sisters. Meowing, and meowing, and meowing. Mother where are you? Mother where am I? I felt a sharp smack on the box I was inside of. The hit kind of hurt, and it scared me, so I meowed louder, which was followed by more harsh blows. My ears began to ring. I longed to go back to my home with my family and my freedom. I began scratching furiously at the box in desperation. I’m scared, I thought, but actually I was terrified. In response to my cries and whole-heated attempt to escape, the box (with me inside) was pushed from where it put us to somewhere below. My stomach dropped in midair until I was once again on solid ground. The floor was still slightly moving and humming. Out of sheer exhaustion, everything went black once more as I closed my eyes and dreamed of the good ol’ days with my mother, brothers, and sisters, wondering why I ever wanted to be caught.
After what seemed like days had passed, my box was opened. I squinted into the light that seemed brighter than the sun. The light seemed so close to me. There was a two-legged looking at me lovingly. It had long hair and spoke sweetly to me and I wasn’t as afraid anymore. She stroked me and cooed in my direction. I was just starting to warm up to the two-leggeds again when a different set of paws took me out of the box. Next thing I knew, I was being poked and prodded by sharp objects. Immediately I began to panic, meowing frantically for help. What were the two-leggeds doing to me? Where are the others? Quickly thereafter the longhaired two-legged returned to calm me and pet me. She looked deep into my eyes and told me that now I was safe. Safe? Safely away from my family and my home and everything I knew. She then placed me in a smallish room with glass on three sides. There I met my new roommates, all three of them.
I have only been here for a few weeks, but I am already lonely. The two-leggeds have stopped playing with me as often and I haven’t seen the nice longhaired creature that helped me when I first got here. Two-leggeds pass the window all day long. Some look at me, some don’t. Some are brave enough to open the door and enter into our temporary home. At least I hope it is temporary. Yesterday Bunko, one of my roommates, was taken away by a longhaired two-legged who was very short and close to the ground. It picked Bunko up and held him close until Bunko began to purr. That is the first time I heard him happy since I got here. Since that day, every day I stare at the glass waiting for a two-legged to save me too. I see them watching me through the glass. I’m watching them too.
Tuggles touched me in a special way as we shared a sort of unspoken connection. I did not want to leave her. "I had forgotten the depth of feeling one could see in [animal's] eyes."[i] I wanted to take her home, but my residency wouldn’t allow it. This project, first introduced at the beginning of the semester, is a main reason I decided to take this class. The idea of visiting an animal in the community and helping it get adopted was not only immediately appealing, but also potentially morally satisfying. The curriculum at UT largely ignores the heart and focuses mainly on the head. "We're thinking too much about educating the mind, and forgetting about the heart and soul.”[ii] Thus, I embraced this rare opportunity to utilize both my head and my heart with open arms.
My main worry was that I would want to adopt all of the animals and never want to leave. I feared that I would fall in love with these adorable helpless creatures, but I decided it was worth the potential heartbreak even if I could not save them all. Even if I could save only a few, it would be valuable because "love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart."[iii] I yearned to help this wonderfully compassionate organization, but I mainly yearned to help the many animals find caring homes. So, I started telling everyone I knew about APA hoping that, in turn, that they would tell everyone they knew. Dreaming, that by word of mouth people’s awareness would be heightened and animals would be saved. I thought that by shattering people’s ignorance that their apathy would also dissipate and be replaced with compassion. I was met with futile resistance, as many people did not want to know and did not want to care. It was then that I was reminded, "apathy [often] prevails over caring."[iv] Apathy is easily achieved through conditioned indifference, lacking interest or concern to make denial easier later. So that in hindsight we can guiltlessly ask ourselves, "how could we have let that happen?"[v]
This quest for feeling is hindered by fear. Such an intense and selfish fear of vulnerability trumped much compassion. The excuses for maintaining apathy seem foolish and cowardly. People rationalize their choice of not utilizing their feelings because "knowledge [can be] so overwhelming," and it might be "futile to care" when in actuality they are simply afraid and caught up in the "war against compassion."[vi] I thought if I could spread the information that sympathy would be contagious, and then people would tune in to their sympathetic imagination. Sympathetic imagination is the ability of a person to penetrate the barrier which space puts between him and his object, and, by actually entering into the object, so to speak, to secure a momentary but complete identification with it. It is crucial to care about other creatures, even if it does not affect one’s personal life directly by doing so because "compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”[vii] It is a work in progress, but I feel that it is a step in the right direction. It has been said, "no good thing can be done by any man alone.”[viii] This project created a group of us dedicated to making a change. This class, with "our [newly] heightened consciousness"[ix] can continue to make the world a better place for all its inhabitants.
[ii] Saunders, Marshall Beautiful Joe (Philadelphia: Charles H. Banes, 1893) 168.
[iii] Irving, Washington
[iv] Adams, Carol J. The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics “The War on Compassion” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 33.
[v] Ibid. 31
[vi] Ibid. 31-33
[vii] Schopenhauer, Arthur
[viii] Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1961)
[ix] Speigel, Marjorie The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery 2nd edition (New York: Mirror Books, 1996) 13.
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With: 2123
Without: 1963
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