Dusk was setting in; cold and wet, the kind of cold that only makes your bones ache. A single mother was bathing her young children before putting them to bed at night. Their stomachs were full and their eyelids were starting to feel heavy as he hurried to dry them so they wouldn’t get cold while she was gone. She had to go to work and there was no one to call to keep her babies safe while she made a living for the four of them.
It didn’t use to be that bad. The neighborhood was a safe place when he was born here, but now, three children later, a lot more people had moved in and they weren’t good neighbors. Some of them were downright evil and he set out to try to make himself invisible when he saw one of them coming.
Usually the bad guys were pretty easy to spot. They were obscene, smelled of alcohol and cigarettes and drove noisy trucks with beds full of dogs howling and chained. As long as she stayed in the shadows, they were generally too drunk to notice her. As she quietly sang a lullaby to her babies, she shuddered at the thought of what would happen if one of these barbarians found her children alone. I couldn’t think of that; he had work to do and he had to focus on work. The family was counting on her.
When the last of the little ones fell asleep, she stepped out into the moonlit cold. She was still trying to get rid of the horrible scenes her imagination had just conjured up when she stepped on a twig, drawing his attention to the moment. When he looked up, he discovered that he had also caught someone else’s attention. She froze, hope against hope they hadn’t noticed her, but he was close enough to see in her eyes that she had made a fatal mistake.
His mind raced as he assessed the gravity of the situation: it was great. He towered over her and she could smell the beer on his breath. He didn’t have to see the gun pointed at her to feel his disrespect for life. She knew her kind and had witnessed the arrogant way they extinguished lives in their lust for blood. They killed innocent and unarmed people to prove that they were men. It was too close. If she ran, he would find the children. Her love, the love of a mother, would not even think of saving herself and leaving her little ones in the hands of such a perverted mind.
But what could she do? Maybe I could get out of this with a bluff. He had learned enough about these types of men to know that they are all cowards at heart. If he could seem fierce enough, maybe he would run away. If he did, she resolved to house or not to house, pack up her brood and leave town in the next instant.
With all the courage he could muster, he lifted his slender 100-pound frame to look as commanding as he could and screamed, in a blood-chilling sound, his threats of what he would do if he got one step closer. .
Laughing at her pathetic attempt to dissuade him, she shot him point-blank. The impact at such close range spun her around and he fired again, killing her on the spot. He didn’t see a single mother doing her best to raise a family in a hostile world.
All he saw was the trophy that his head would hang on his wall.
Drawing his knife to separate his head of golden hair from his mangled, bleeding body, he barely heard the meow through his joyous stupor.
The shots had awakened her three sleeping kittens. Their eyes weren’t fully open yet, because they were less than two weeks old and could barely focus on the scene. What a horrible sight to be one of the first these innocent youths would see! Anyone who thought correctly would be horrified to consider the horror these little ones must have been experiencing, but the hunter thought nothing of it.
In fact, he was even happier at the idea of being able to raid this nest. His pea-sized Neanderthal brain was pondering how cool it would be to have three mountain lions on leashes. I would raise them with the dogs; maybe he would drown some of the bitch puppies so she could feed him her little treats. So wouldn’t he be the center of attention? Women would probably do anything for him just to get a chance to pet their new cougar cubs. He would be the envy of his drinking buddies when he had the biggest and baddest pets in town.
She would have been singing all the way home with her new pets in a bag and her mother’s head in the back seat if it weren’t for one of the babies crying hysterically. He stopped and, in the drizzle, the freezing rain threw the crybaby to the side of the road near a country house.
The next day, she had sobered up enough to realize that raising two mountain lion cubs was not as easy as raising a couple of hunting dogs. The babies cried incessantly for their mother. They refused to eat. They were sick with pain and fear and did not want to be part of this man and the lifestyle he had envisioned. Being the coward his mother had thought him to be, he asked a relative to turn the cubs over to the Idaho Game and Fish Department. He claimed that he had killed the nursing mother in self-defense and no charges were brought.
Just the night before, officers received a call from a man who found a baby cougar screaming on his porch. When he asked what he should do for the kitten, the officers told him to leave it outside to die. Unwilling to treat any living creature with such cruelty, the man took the baby in and tried to offer him food and comfort to no avail.
In order to save the baby’s life, the kind farmer contacted the press with the story and once the news broke that the cub must die, the Department of Fish and Game decided to pick up the kitten and place him already His two brothers, who came from the hunter’s family, with Mady Rothchild, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator who works with the Association for Animals in Distress. Now they were his problem and to make matters worse, he was ordered to find a zoo that would accept them or they would have to be killed because big cats cannot return to the wild in Idaho once they have been manipulated by humans. It could make hunting a dangerous sport if the hunted were not afraid of the hunter.
With twenty years of experience rescuing wild animals and returning them to their rightful home, Mady did not like the alternatives presented to her. She knew the dirty little secrets that zoos kept from the public and knew that if these brothers went to a zoo they would be used, separated and raised for more babies who would live their lives in prison cells. When they no longer attracted a paying crowd, they were sold out the back door to brokers who sold them at auction to backyard breeders and canned hunts.
It is legal to kill a cougar in a cage in the US and call it a sport hunting. It is the only way most hunters could hang a big cat head on their walls and they have fought fiercely to protect their right to do so in the name of freedom. They don’t get much opposition from the public, because in most states the Fish and Game departments are staffed by hunters, so there is a code of silence that is difficult to break. Zoos, an industry that claims to be the ark of the future, don’t want to talk about it either. No one would support a zoo if they knew what happened to the babies last year and the babies pay all the wages.
Mady went online to see if there was any alternative to zoos or death for these little ones. He found Big Cat Rescue online and showed a slideshow contrasting the legacy these magnificent animals were born to inherit and the pitiful prisons they are confined to when man intervenes. He concluded that there are worse things than death and sending these cougar cubs to a zoo was one of them. But how could he take the lives of these newborns when they had already endured so much? He called and emailed the shrine with his story.
Scott Lope is the operations manager for Big Cat Rescue and knows that keeping all 150 big cats in the sanctuary is the main task. He knows that hundreds of big cats are turned away each year because there simply isn’t enough space and not enough resources to commit to lifelong care. You know the only way to stop the onslaught of unwanted exotic cats is to change the laws so that breeding and treatment stop. He knows that every cat that is rejected was a victim and deserved shelter and he knows that the fate that awaits them outside our doors will be tragic, so he reaches out to the founder, Carole Baskin and the president, Jamie Veronica and asks them to consider the situation.
It would seem that agreeing to take them would be an easy choice; They’re cute, they’re small, and no one wants to be the one to say, “Go ahead and kill them.” But it is never that simple. How do you choose them over any other? When your main goal is to stop the onslaught of cats at the front door, how can you divert time and resources to build them an enclosure suitable for three adult mountain lions? When the plan is to stop the breeding and sale of big cats so that twenty years from now there will be no need for a place like Big Cat Rescue, how do you commit to providing lifelong care for cats that could live as long as Scratch? 28-year-old cougar?
And the quality of life of kittens? While life in Big Cat Rescue would far exceed the quality of life in any zoo, it is still life in a cage for animals that have been selectively bred, through survival of the fittest, for life in the wild. They would be paying the ultimate price for this choice and Mady and Carole struggled with this aspect because they both wanted the best for the individual cats and the best for the species, when they are usually mutually exclusive propositions.
During the emailed conversations between Mady and Carole, their lives continued on the same old paths. Mady was pulling pets and wild animals out of steel-jawed traps and treating their mangled bodies. Carole was dealing with a collection of 38 cats destroyed by the hurricane in Miami, and an owner who had ended up with a collapsed lung from trying to do all the cleaning alone. His cats hadn’t eaten in a week, he had run out of food, no one knew if he was going to survive, or if there was power to run a freezer or wells, or if the cats had escaped when all the trees crashed. in their cages. .Life as usual for those left to clean up the mess caused by the irresponsible.
The fate of the cubs was decided for them and while this is not how it should have been, it was a decision he had to make for them due to the actions of others. Mady and Carole believed that if these adorable blue-eyed orphans could make enough people stop for a minute and THINK, then maybe the kittens would have chosen this path to save their cousins from a similar fate. Her story would be told and her mother’s death would not have been in vain.
