Venustas in Mortem

living for a year and a half in a rural area with a sudden feral cat colony explosion on the property.

i moved in with my folks for a bit and at that time, one (1) stray cat mama had taken up residence on the property, but was too feral to let my mother anywhere near her. but especially after she brought three kittens around, mom fed her and the kittens in hopes they'd grow trusting enough she could catch for spay and neuter at the minimum. momcat stayed mean and hella wary, but the kittens would hang around a little nearer and play with my mom via long stick, but still wouldn't come close enough to touch or catch.

unfortunately, two of the three kittens were girls and started having kittens of their own before further progress was made, shortly after i moved in. and that was pretty much instant doom.

there were so many kittens. SO MANY. multiple litters. every time we turned around, more kittens.

we fed them. we hunted for and located the kittens every time anywhere on the property and would move them to a repurposed doghouse anytime a mama cat had them somewhere else, so that they could grow up human-socialized and we could spay/neuter them when they were old enough. (also it was a handy tactic to push the issue of the mamas getting more used to/trusting of us themselves. only really worked with one of them, though.)

and we watched them die.

we watched litter after litter of kittens never make it to the age they could be spayed or neutered. the moms stayed, for the longest time, too skittish to more than briefly touch, much less catch and crate for a vet visit.

it sounds like a silly joke to say i have kitten-related ptsd, but i absolutely do.

too many goddamn times i'd walk out of the garage and find the carport and gravel drive strewn with tiny bodies. others simply went missing, never to be found.

one in particular, i wish i hadn't found, and the visual literally haunts me still, almost a decade later.

i saw so many kittens die of snake bite, spider bite, wild dogs, birds of prey, hit by cars, respiratory illness, covered in fleas and eyes crusted with infection.

and we loved them all. scrimped for antibiotics if the vet could be convinced to give it to us despite our being unable to bring them in. bought flea collars and ointments. we cared for them and fed them and petted them and played with them, brushed their fur and cleaned up their little faces, put ice in their water in hot summer, rigged a heating lamp in their house in the winter.

and they died. horribly. that property is pocked with unmarked graves of kittens and cats.

all the best intentions, not enough resources, and it didn't matter anyways because the population went from three to almost twenty (at times, over thirty) in the blink of an eye.

they died and died and died. our hearts broke over and over again. the stress and anxiety wore us down like sandpaper. i think, by the end of it all, we managed to find less than 10 of them all homes, including batman the disabled kitten i found a home across the country through tumblr.

it was carnage and tragedy, frankly. and we were helpless.

it only ended because they started dying faster than they could be born, and because we finally caught the two remaining mom cats in traps and got them spayed.

the points about outdoor cats being invasive predators devastating to local wildlife populations is true and valid and important.

but i know cat people, and cat people who don't know better than to let cats outdoors. what matters to you is the cat itself, generally. the cat being happy and taken care of.

keeping cats outdoors, letting them outdoors, is not taking care of the cats. it's not protecting them. it's not giving them any happiness or invigoration that couldn't be provided to them as indoor-only pets with just a little research and effort.

they die. they get ill. they get hurt. they're at risk of predators, and cars, and disease, and carelessly cruel children and deliberately cruel adults. they're at risk of disappearing on you because someone else saw a cat outdoors and intervened to give it a better, safer life not in conflict with the local environment.

and if that offends and angers you that someone would just take a cat they saw roaming outdoors, even collared, and that it sounds like i'm endorsing that, i am, but not if you intervene and be that person yourself for your own cat.

if what matters to you is doing right by your cat because it's family and a living creature whose happiness and health and safety is important to you,

She stepped on a log which slid. She fell. The wood fell after her, and on her, and crushed the back half of her body.

My brother, who was 12 at the time, and literally couldn't remember a time when we didn't have Heather, found her after she dragged herself most of the way back to the house, dying, with just her forelegs, inch over agonizing inch. He screamed for Mom, and the two of them wrapped her broken body in a towel and took her to be put down.

He still can't talk about it. He's 40 now.

this little northern cardinal was discovered in massachusetts with two heads and three beaks.

It’s important to note that ethics are very complex, fluid and highly personal.

You can choose to follow the regulations set in place by a larger organisation, for example universities will have ethics committees to make sure that research done by the university falls in line with the ideals of the institution, it’s board, and what it aims to uphold and stand for.

Or, as is more common, you can set your own code of ethics based on your personal experience and knowledge. Your ethical stance will be influenced by your culture, religion, upbringing and education.

Whatever your beliefs, you need to recognise that your ethics are yours, and personal. You do not have to engage with or financially support people whose ethics don’t fall in line with yours. You don’t have to buy animal remains from hunters, trappers or fur farmers. You can actively seek out sources that fall in line with your ethics.

But if it is important to you, you need to explain what the criteria are. Rather than just saying ‘this is ethically sourced’ or ‘I want a thing that has been ethically sourced’ say what you really mean.

Whether it be roadkill, found dead of unknown but assumed natural causes, not killed specifically for its hide/head/whatever, killed as an invasive pest species, hunted legally, farmed according to the regulations for animal welfare as designated by x resource, etc etc

I guarantee that my ethics are different from many of yours. I know that a 'natural’ death can be much slower and more traumatic than a bullet, I know that almost any animal that can legally be hunted in my country is an invasive pest species, I know that fur/meat/dairy/etc farmers have to keep their animals well looked after to ensure the highest quality product and that the laws and regulations in my country encourage these practices. My ethics make me comfortable sourcing animals from those types of locations, and further researching any I may be doubtful about.

instagram users: try this flat tummy tea

tumblr users: 

(Click to make it legible, hopefully)

I found this MBTA infographic I made for an environmental biology class ages ago, so I figured I may as well share it, before I forgot about it again.

The MBTA is probably the hardest federal wildlife protection law to convince people to follow in modern times. Nobody quibbles over the Endangered Species Act and the restrictions it imposes, but telling people shouldn’t be taking home bird bits they find in the woods ends up being incredibly contentious. I get it: it can seem pretty extreme to say nobody can have pieces of protected birds that they found on the ground or that died naturally. But there’s still actually really good reasons to respect the full breadth of the MBTA’s restrictions.

The MBTA was originally enacted to prevent unsustainable hunting practices because, as @rotreat noted, even huge populations were being decimated without federal protection. For things like this:

The provision against owning parts of restricted species - even found bits - was included to prevent people passing off poaching as lucky acquisitions. And it worked: the snowy egret, which was almost extinct at the time the law was passed, made a dramatic recovery once possession of it’s beautiful feathers were outlawed; the trumpeter swan population, which was down to 70 individuals in the continental United States, was able to recover to a population of “least concern” today due to the cessation of hunting and the introduction of new birds from an Alaskan population. 

Poaching birds may sound like an old-timey problem, but it’s actually still a current one; I’ve personally come across people selling perfect and undamaged songbird parts en mass, and they got really angry when I asked to see the requisite paperwork before claiming they were all “found” specimens. People like @kaijutegu who work under an MBTA permit can corroborate the fact that it’s still a genuine issue - even just the frequency with which things made from protected species show up on Etsy and Craigslist is a pretty reasonable indicator. When someone picks up found feathers or bird bones, there’s no way for the people in charge of enforcing wildlife law to tell you haven’t poached them; and the more people ignore the law and normalize keeping found bird bits, the easier it is for the actual poachers to hide their actions. 

This all makes good sense when you’re sitting here reading it, but I know feels less relevant when you’re looking at a perfect feather or a really cool skull on the ground in front of you. It’s hard to see why taking just one wouldn’t hurt. You know you’re not a poacher, and you know you’re being ethical about what you collect, right?

What’s important to keep in mind is that ethical collecting is perfectly good, but the currently regulations are in place to make sure we aren’t taking so much that we hurt the ecosystem - and if you feel that just you taking something won’t overdo it, you are one of many people who may have the same thought. Those feathers and those small bird carcasses are actually really crucial to the continued health of the ecosystem, and when we take them away because we think they’re pretty, we do damage we don’t intend. Shed feathers are important nesting material for other birds; in absence of dropped feathers birds are more likely to use plastic or other anthropogenic waste to build their nests, which raises chick mortality rates due to ingestion or entanglement. Unused feathers become food for beetles and moths, or decay and help replenish the soil by providing large amounts of nitrogen. Bird carcasses are great sources of food for scavengers and insects, and their tiny, crunchable bones provide easy access to calcium for all sorts of species. When undisturbed by human collection - even in areas with no naturally occurring scavengers - dead birds will be gone in days, having been fully utilized by all the other inhabitants of that ecosystem. When people keep the cool bird bits they find, they’re removing that resource from the animals that might depend on it. If everyone decides keeping one little specimen won’t hurt because it’s just them, very quickly, there won’t be anything left - and when we remove the resources animals need from their habitat to that degree, we force them to rely on less suitable and sometimes even dangerous replacements.

Even though the MBTA can feel older and less relevant than other federal wildlife laws (after all, it was written because of passenger pigeons), it really is still a law whose restrictions are worth following. The birds covered by the MBTA are still absolutely in need of protection. Habitat destruction for recreation or profit, loss of habitat to invasive species, pollution, and now climate change all threaten migratory bird species in modern North America. The last thing these birds need is more threats to their survival, and even small things like the removal of nesting material or increase desirability to the people who are willing to actually poach them can do a lot of damage. Pressure from things like taking found bird parts occurs in infinitesimally small amounts - to where you, as a person playing a role in it, probably won’t perceive it happening - but a million incremental increases still cumulatively have a lot of impact. 

I understand how tempting it is to keep bird parts - they’re beautiful - but please, just take a photo, and then put them back. If you love the birds they came from, the best thing you can do for them is to make a choice to not perpetuate threats to those species. Each person who chooses to take a feather or a bone is contributing to the struggles migratory birds face, but every person who chooses to admire found parts in-situ and leave them be is not just adhering to federal law -  you’re actively facilitating the continued survival of irreplaceable bird populations. 

Snowy egret chicks, like these dudes here, thank you. 

(Photo Credit: Barbara Woodmansee)

For more information on the origins of the MBTA and why it’s an international treaty, here’s a great article from the American Bird Conservancy. 

Here’s a long-form essay about the extinction of passenger pigeons and why it spurred legislation like the MBTA.