you could make an au outta this

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

Obviously I'm mainly talking about animal xenofiction centering on dogs and cats, because getting fixed doesn't really come up for wild animals. And a lot of times it doesn't even come up even then, because stories about talking cats and dogs tend to be relegated to children's fiction, where the audience isn't going to care about it, authors might not be comfortable broaching the topic, and the Babies Ever After trope is a tried and true happy ending that, as a bonus, allows for possible sequels about the main characters' kids.

Almost all the examples I've seen where it does come up are cat stories: the Cutter in Warriors, Windflower in Tailchaser's Song, and the Hermanns in Felidae. And in all three of those examples it's played as unambiguously negative. Fear of getting fixed is part of what drives Rusty/Firepaw into the woods in Warriors, and meeting his neutered childhood friend is what confirms to him that he made the right decision. Windflower is a horrifying (arguably kinda transphobic? it was written in the 80s, your mileage may vary) cautionary tale of what happens to cats that get too close to humans and lose their "wild" side. Felidae takes the most neutral stance of these examples, but the Hermanns being neutered is a point of ridicule, and they're portrayed as pathetic toadies to the much stronger (unfixed, obviously) Kong.

And it's such an interesting moral quandary to me because spaying and neutering cats is, unambiguously, a good thing! Not just for humans who don't want to deal with unwanted kittens, not just for the environment that gets ravaged by strays over-hunting the local wildlife, but for the cats themselves too: unfixed cats are more aggressive, more unsociable, and more prone to illnesses and infections. But I can understand why fictional cats being happy about getting the snip might be a hard sell. Even the stories most devoted to portraying animal characters as nonhuman still need to have some level of anthropomorphism in order to engage the human audience. Readers put themselves in the shoes of the main characters, so they're not going to see themselves as the humans, they're going to see themselves as the cats, and because forced sterilization is a horrific violation when done to humans, it's probably going to be come off that way when it happens to animal characters.

Fiction tends to take it a little far, though. In Tailchaser's Song, getting neutered basically feminizes Windflower, but another character heavily implied to be spayed is shown to be completely uninterested in doing anything but walking from her food bowl to the couch and back again. Warriors similarly shows fixed cats like Smudge to be lazy and indolent and uninterested in doing anything but sleeping and eating. In both cases it's almost a lotus eater situation, where cats that rely fully on humans will have all their needs met and live in luxury and pampering, at the cost of being forcibly robbed of an "inner spark". Which is patently untrue in real life, as I'm sure many cat owners would know: spaying and neutering doesn't stop your cat from wanting to hunt and fight and play, that's why TNR is an imperfect harm reduction method that doesn't prevent strays from damaging local bird populations.

Anyway, what brought this on is that I found an example of cat-focused fiction that completely averts this trope. It's not mainstream like Warriors; it's a still fairly new webcomic called The Turning of Seasons that focuses on a cast of stray cats. At one point on a recent page, one of the cats mentions that "the Silver Cages" are back, implied to be TNR traps, and it's revealed through dialogue that fixed cats ("moon toms" and "moon mollies") have an established position in their cat society, as fighters, no less. It's the first time I've seen a cat story where getting fixed is portrayed as potentially desirable to the cats themselves, with main character Red's only reservation being that she might want kittens herself before she makes such a big decision. Instead of being this horrific atrocity because Humans Are Cthulhu, it's actually folded into the worldbuilding for how this stray cat society operates.