Just back from taking the injured and clearly moribund feral “Coony” up the road for that “last campaign.” :- He’d given up on being feral today. I saw from him that gesture of predator defeat where the animal puts its head down with its haunches up. I felt the burden of being human. So I gave him some pets, seeing as how he’d now accept them, and offered him a last meal (refused – the cat was starving itself or unable to swallow, or some such), and picked him up and put him in the pheromone-treated carrier.

I don’t know about any of this. Is it right to consider this ‘good behavior’ on my part? It was a matter of convenience, certainly. I’m about to have a lot of machinery in the yard digging a three foot trench and putting in a new water line. I couldn’t see Coony surviving that. Also, when he died, I’d have a corpse which I’d have to transport for cremation. Suffering? I don’t know. Yesterday, I watched him as he moved out in the open, still trying to do his rounds. I saw him out peering with his new one-eyed gaze at what once was the vast expanse of his territory: the car wash, the streets, the restaurant, the parking lots, the hiding places, the others- both prey and predators – still out there engaged in the battles for survival. I knew it was just a memory for him. It was all over.

Suffering? I don’t know. He had a golden, mild, beautiful last day yesterday. Today, he took his first and last car ride to be detained briefly in a cage, no longer in his life, to be injected with death. He never knew what hit him. The other way would have been starvation. (That was Amethyst’s way. She “tasted the whole of it.”) I still don’t know. But the burden for me this day as the “humanitarian,” the human burden – was that I made the decision and acted.

The sorrows of being a grown-up.