A Plague of Kittens

I just read another of those articles explaining that an unspayed feline can produce (blah-blah-blah) kittens in (blah-blah) generations, and I had to laugh.

Years ago, when TNR programs were non-existent, I casually fed a colony of feral cats on my doorstep, giving them kitchen scraps and the food left over from my indoor pets. And, yes, they produced massive amounts of kittens. But here is the salient fact: those kittens did not live. Over all the years—about a decade—that I (and countless mice, moles and birds) provided nourishment for those stray animals, only one of them, the colony matriarch, lived. A lovely little calico who resisted being brought indoors, despite my best efforts to provide her a home, CallieCoCo produced an endless stream of both her own kittens and daughters who provided more youngsters for the clowder. Usually born at the start of each spring, and despite having a steady source of food outside of their own hunting, each year by the autumn no more than one or two of the youngsters survived. They fell victim to cars, to hawks and owls, to illness, and (horribly) to the neighborhood’s future serial killers practicing their skills. And those who survived the summer usually perished in the winter.

Finally, when the venerable matriarch herself passed, the clowder died off within a few months. Without her guidance, the colony could not survive. To the dismay of the local homeowners, the moles and mice returned to the area in droves. But the predicted plague of kittens never happened.

I had much the same Spockian “Where’s the logic?” reaction another time, in the 1980s when AIDS was at its height worldwide, as I read about the poorest regions of India. On two different pages of our local Sunday paper, two separate articles had been printed: one discussing the high birth rate of the poor throughout India (at the time, a totally destitute country, with years yet to come before technology brought pockets of prosperity) and the shocking implications for overpopulation; the other just as earnestly delineating the horrific ravages of AIDS upon the area, and the resulting gruesomely high death rate among the neediest population. Now look, I thought, switching back and forth between the pages of the newspaper, comparing the two articles, you can’t have it both ways. Either the poor will reproduce without limit, until the population is stacked up like cordwood—or they will die off in an uncountable numbers as a result of AIDS. Each a dreadful and agonizing possibility, I thought, but one or the other; you can’t have it both ways.

Or, more likely, the high death rate from the plague of AIDS among the poor would counter the exceptionally high birth rate, balancing the two—because that is the way that Nature has, cruelly but effectively, kept things in check for uncounted millennia. High population—enter bubonic plague. High population—enter typhus and typhoid, war, natural disaster, famine, pneumonic plague, anthrax, ebola.

I sometimes try apply this logical thought process to the science of global warming. Don’t misunderstand me: I absolutely do believe that the human race has added disproportionately and frighteningly to the earth’s overall temperature, and, if unchecked, will continue to do so, with unspeakable results. But I also know that we have measured the earth’s temperature for only a few hundred years out of countless millennia, and that there have been cycles of warmth/coolness throughout; i.e., the mini-Ice Age of medieval times.  I know that it is these cycles to which those who resist a belief in global warming refer.  Then, however–logically–I remind myself that all of these previous cycles were the result of natural phenomena, such as volcanic eruptions and comet strikes, or perhaps even dinosaur farts, and that those cycles did totally destroy existing fauna and flora, completely revamping the face of the Earth.  I wonder then—logically—how much we really know about the earth’s temperature cycles, and the damage we are doing, have already done, to the ecosystem…if it can even be corrected, or if we have pushed matters so far that we now must let the chips fall where they may and, like the dinosaurs,  watch as the very environment that once nurtured our evolution perishes, and us along with it. And, in terror, I very much fear that this latter scenario is true.

I think back to the vision of myself, watching playful kittens who never quite managed to survive, let alone overrun the neighborhood—switching back and forth between the pages of a newspaper with two contradictory articles—sitting through school lessons, learning about both the sweltering heat of Mesozoic mornings and the vast fields of ice that once lay across the Great Plains…and I wonder, really wonder, how much we, sure and certain in our superiority and our reliance upon self-proclaimed “leaders” who really need to pull their heads out of their behinds—well, I wonder how much we actually know of all that we think we know.