©2022 Tatyana Elmanovich

Our Pets and Our Love toward Them

Lately, I wrote a story about Freddie, the American wild cat with brownish silky coat, tender heart, and beautiful fluffy tail. It died in a Cat Vet after eating some canned food …It happened to come from a batch of made in China canned cat food. It turned out to be harmful causing water to collect in cats’ lungs.  I took Freddie to vets hoping they would pump excess water out of his body. In ten minutes a lady announced the demise of Freddie and added with resolute voice,  looking sternly straight in my eyes: – $700.00 – for extra service …  I was living the fourth year in the USA, and still had no idea how to protect myself from this kind of demands… I paid it by my credit card… for fast kill of my lovely pet.

Years passed, when the truth about Freddie’s death emerged in most surprising way. Soon another cat Puma found a way into my life. As long as we lived in our house with a garden and pool, things went its habitual way.  However, my circumstances, mainly age and health decline, forced me to move into a senior housing in Middle Wilshire. Puma and me, we went along well, but my heart, after the first infarct,/ seemed to rush toward another one.  And I asked Puma — as a medium who hear the dead, also our pets and wild small animals like quite talkative snakes, in spirit or in flesh bodies, intelligent squirrels, flowers – in other words, I asked Puma, if someone with the scythe will pick me up today or tomorrow, the administration of this house for elderly will throw you out of here on the streets.

 Puma saddened a bit, looked down, and meowed “Sure!”

–Now listen to me carefully, what would you prefer, go look for Mama in cat’s paradise, or walk again on the streets looking for balconies and open kitchen windows, and, finally, sticking your nose into hot meat souse on good-hearted Jane, my neighbor’s dining table. It was, how we met, and I took you into my apartment! During first three months you cried with the voice of human baby, if your plate was not filled with food – out of fear to wind up hungry again. What do you think, what we have to do?

– I go to Mama, she will never leave me without food. –Was the straight answer of my second cat Puma.

My heart condition was still so-and so… I called the professionals who put cats to sleep for good… Was my decision right or wrong? When the professionals came, sleepy Puma woke up with anxiety. Then he saw me, and calmed down and allowed them to inject that deadly stuff into him. 

Suddenly sharp sense of wrongdoing and betrayal arose in me, and it sits there up to the present day. Verbal logical agreements do not stick with animals, they live in now, in present moment, and I betrayed him…  The day will come, I will meet Puma’s spirit, and I learn that Puma remembered it well and his attitude toward me was completely different, yet, he understood why I put him to sleep, but he never forgave this to me…  He, the Thailand silvery aristocrat, so called “guest greeter” kept a little distance between us that he never crossed … Since that time, I did not belong to the league of his real friends, and it never changed! … The class division in a kind of species was there long before human showed up on the earth! Omi God is all I can say! 

In some years later, I happened to write about my first cat Freddie a story, and I noticed there a sentence that called for clarification. Spirit of Freddie was telling me:

-Puma would sit on that dump land years, if I would not find him and take to cat’s paradise. Puma. Thai monarchy guests’ greeter is not used to take care of himself!

Wait a minute, Freddie, I asked myself. – How did you find Puma sitting helplessly on dump land, if you died a decade earlier?

 – He woke up on that dump, where people who killed him, threw the corpse on dump believing it be done and dead …

 -My God, — said I. – But what you did on that dump? What did happen to you in that Cat Vet?  Did you wake up in cat paradise, or also on a dump? Did you spent years on dump, before you find Puma? Where you woke up?             

-Tata, do not ask me this, no, I did not wake up in cat paradise, I woke up in a garbage bin behind that Cat Vet back room amidst bloody, dirty med stuff. Let talk about something else. I was a young cat, I could live years, but they tied me so tight to the table that I did not want to live any more. I walked out from my body. Our common spirit picked me up and brought me to our spirit garden. How I found Puma? We have a special communication way. When Puma found himself in trouble, our common spirit, the same who brought me to cat’s paradise, called me up to come with him down to Los Angeles, and we found Puma, and we took care of him.

        I am telling this story, because I learned that two lovely cats died before their time being put asleep via professional injection and woke up in city garbage gathering spots. Isn’t it too much?

        I encouraged Freddie tell me more about finding himself  in Cat Vet’s garbage bin? His answer came in form of a clear color photo, rather a short video: the bin stood right behind the door, and something was moving there. These were two other cat, half alive, and half dead…they were meowing from pain… trying not to sank into heap of medical bloody bandages and rags… They were also tight too strongly to table and died there… like me!

      Maybe we have to think twice before we order a comfy sleeping injections for them, and maybe we have to think twenty times before we take one of small animals in our home, and demand of them to trust and love us?

 
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