Ianto the foster kitten

On Monday, we got a new foster. His story is REALLY sad, so get out your tissues. Oh, and “Ianto”? Yes, I was letting the boy name cats again. Yes, it’s after the Torchwood character. It’s better than naming them after dinosaurs, which is what he did with our first litter (Ptera-dactyl, Charlotte Bronte-saurus, and Anyankalosaurus–they are Ptera, Charlotte, and Anya, because I restrained him).

My friend Laurie was driving in the grocery store parking lot, when she noticed a cardboard box in the way. She didn’t want to damage her vehicle, so she avoided the box, then stopped her Jeep and went to move the box so other people wouldn’t be inconvenienced.

Within the box were three kittens, about 4 months old. One of them was dead. Laurie took one home, while another customer in the parking lot adopted the other. They were absolutely covered in fleas, which climbed up Laurie’s arm as she was pulling them out of the box. She took the little guy home, treated him for fleas, and tried to integrate him into her household. She would have loved to have kept him, because he’s really cute and playful, but her other cat just absolutely hated him.

So, when I emailed Laurie recently to ask her to buy stuff to support the rescue, letting her know that I was fostering and volunteering for them, she asked if I could help her by rehoming the little guy, whom she’d been calling George. I got permission from Robin, who is the rescue’s namesake, and Brian and I picked him up on Monday (and sold Laurie some of the cranberry sauce).

When we got him home, I gave him a distemper vaccination, wormed him, and gave him Advantage. Today, he got his FeLV and FIV test, which was negative for both (hooray!). He also got his new name, so that he would be more unique and memorable. Ianto is due for neutering on the 30th of March, and will be up for adoption very shortly after that.

He is an exceptionally pretty cat; he reminds me of a lynx-point Siamese or something. I am sickened and angry that his former owners didn’t even try to drop them off at a shelter, or somewhere they could get proper care before the sibling died. What kind of person does this?

Anyway, here are photos of Ianto:

By the way, if you are in the Capital Region of New York, and you are interested in adopting Ianto, or any other foster I’ve written about, please send me an email and we can discuss it.

If you are interested in helping to support the rescue with donations, you can do so via the Paypal link on the homepage here. Robin’s Nest has programs to help feral cats, low-cost spay/neuter clinics, and adopts out only cats that have been spayed or neutered. This all takes hard work and money, so they can use every bit of help you can spare. Also, I have set up in my Etsy shop (on the right) a way to purchase cranberry sauce, which is our current fundraiser. It’s delicious, and a great price.

Also, most of the cats I photographed for the petfinder page are actually adopted now! And, our foster Leonardo just found a home yesterday. Congratulations to them If you visit the page, check out Rosa’s photos; she was a willing and wonderful subject for me.

Good Fatty/Bad Fatty

Well, y’all, I covered that particular topic over a month ago, but it seems to be all the rage now. So let’s do this thing.

Dividing people in acceptable and unacceptable examples of their oppressed demographic is a time-honored tactic by oppressors. If you can get at least part of the group to turn its back on the rest, by way of convincing them that the oppression is somehow their own fault, and that it can be relieved by behaving in a particular way and alienating those who do not, well, doesn’t that seem a perfect strategy for not just getting as many of them to behave the way you want them to, but also to assist you in oppressing their own demographic?

This is a well-beaten path, and we need to look to the experiences of those who have gone before us in pursuit of human rights to guide us. Civil rights activists have long known that when oppressed persons engage in behaviors (such as “acting white”) to please their oppressors and mitigate their circumstances, the only thing that changes is the form of oppression. You are not truly free if you must behave in particular ways in order to avoid being abused.

We must also not fall into the trap of believing that those who abuse us have our best interests in mind, no matter what they claim. The abuse is easier to accept when we believe we deserve it, and abusers frequently try to convince their victims that the abuse is the victim’s fault, and they wouldn’t be abused, if only they would have done certain things. The truth is, abusers have no right to abuse, and they do so because it satisfies some desire or need in them–NOT because their victims deserve it. If the victims did not have a certain behavior or quality that the abuser focuses upon, there would be some other behavior or quality that the abuser would use an excuse.

None of us deserves the poor treatment we get for being fat. Every single one of us deserves basic human rights and dignity. What we eat, how much we exercise, our vital stats? Those aren’t even a factor. Being a living, feeling being should be enough to warrant dignity. Don’t stand for any less.

Big Buts, Part Eight: Pee-yew?

“But Rio, fat people smell bad!”

I would not even dignify this with a response, except that I have heard this nonsese far too often to let it go.

First, I want to say that I have an extremely sensitive sense of smell. This is a blessing and a curse, depending on the situation, but it allows me to create exquisitely spiced dishes, among other great things. One of the curses of this sense of smell is that people with unpleasant odors are often more detectable to me than to those around me. So, let me give you my PERSONAL experiences with people and odor.

Looking back on my friends and acquaintances, I can honestly say that I cannot recall a smelly fat person in my circle, but I have had many, many unhygienic thin people. I’m not saying that thin people stink, but that body size does not determine odor.

S was a year ahead of me in collage. He was well over six feet tall, and probably only weighed about 120 pounds. S was very cute, and he had a huge crush on me. He might have stood a chance, but S was not acquainted with deodorant or toothpaste. Friends had tried many times to introduce him to the substances, both tactfully and directly, but it just never sunk in for very long. I’ll give S the benefit of the doubt and consider that he might have been allergic, but he remained single until an equally unhygienic girl of average size decided to date him. I’m glad that they found each other, but I hope I don’t have to be in a room with both of them ever again.

X and Y were both attractive young men of slender, but not skinny, build. X and Y seemed okay on the surface–they used deodorant, brushed their teeth, but when the clothes came off, intimacy revealed that both had some kind of aversion to washing their nether regions, especially in the rear. Despite being tactful, and eventually direct, neither would ever start washing their ass cracks during my time dating them. I mean, honestly, guys, dingleberries are for furry animals, not humans.

M was a young woman of average size. Because her parents never had decent hygiene (and her father was missing most of his teeth by the age of 50), she didn’t know any better. Her hair was always unwashed, hanging in greasy clumps. Her clothing was never washed either.

C was a very tall, thin girl with whom I went to university years ago. C was very sweet, but she had a tendency to wear very short skirts, and she never washed her nether regions. She smelled like a walking yeast infection, and so did her whole room. It was really hard to visit her sometimes, because the smell gave me a headache, but I wasn’t really prepared to talk to her about it.

T is a 350-pound woman. She take a shower, using soap on all of her parts. She uses a long-handled scrubber to get all the nooks and crannies. She washes her hair, brushes her teeth, and does her laundry regularly. At the end of a long workday where she has done physical labor, she gets onto the bus to go home. Because she’s worked all day, she’s somewhat grimy and sweaty, just like the lean guy sitting next to her. They both have a little bit of body odor, but because they are looking for the fat woman to be smelly, other people on the bus only notice that she smells a bit, shutting out the rest of the laborers whose bodies they aren’t conditioned to think of as “disgusting”.

This is a perception issue, one that does not resemble reality. Hygiene can be neglected in all types of people, especially those who did not have as much education (in M’s case), those who had weird religious aversions to touching themselves in certain places (X and Y), and people who don’t have their medical problems properly treated (C, for example). In some cases, there are people who cannot help their odors, either because of a medical condition that makes odors more prevalent, or because they have allergies to things like deodorant and certain soaps. There are also underprivileged people who do not have access to laundry facilities, a change of clothing, or shower facilities, especially if they are homeless.

So what I’m saying is, body size has nothing to do with a person’s odor, and a person’s odor does not determine their value as a human being anyway. If you’re on public transportation, going home after a work day, everyone is more likely to stink a bit, because they have been working and sweating all day. That’s life.

Hatred becomes violence

According to Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin, a survey indicated that 25% of fat men and 16% of fat women reported being hit or threatened because of their weight.

If you are one of the people who is against Fat Acceptance because you believe it is unhealthy to be fat, I really want to know whether you think it is okay or not to hit and threaten fat people because of their size. I also want to know how many people think that the solution to being abused for being fat is for the abused person to lose weight.

I often hear people telling others to lose weight so that they can fit in better socially–to gain a spouse, to have more friends, to get a better job. Do these fatophobes realize that condemning fat people to a lower social status can and does result in real physical violence? Once you accept that a demographic is not worthy of basic human dignity, you accept that demographic’s inevitable mental and physical abuse. If you have ever vocally taunted a fat person, you bear some of the culpability when that person is eventually beaten by other hateful individuals, because you had a hand in fostering an environment of bigotry and hate.

There is no excuse for this. Change your attitude; don’t become involved in verbal abuse of other people, especially when those people are an oppressed group. Speak up when you see other people engaging in the abuse. An environment of hate is no good for anyone, not even for those in the privileged group. Base your self-worth on your positive qualities, not on your imagined superiority over others.

Another one back, after a month :(

Some of you might remember that Owl was returned to us after a month at his adoptive home. He’s weird, but he’s mostly doing okay here.

Clarence, who was Calvin’s brother. was returned by his adoptive family because they said he was unfriendly, refusing to be held or cuddled by them. They said he would hardly even allow them to touch him. Over a month ago, Clarence and his sister Chloe came to us so we could work with them and help them overcome their fear of people. Chloe adapted very well, but Clarence was a tough little nut to crack. We got him to come to us and curl up on our laps, though, and he purred for us a great deal. So I was overjoyed when he was adopted to the same family as his sister–they love each other very much. Unfortunately for the kitties, the family returned only Clarence and kept Chloe.

We got Clarence home tonight, and we are still reeling from the damage done by this savage, feral monster. The third-degree burns on our laps from his warm little body curled up on them, and the shattering of our eardrums from his horrific purring–which also gave us severe bruising from the vibrations–all necessitated a visit to the ER. When I attempted to clip his very dangerous, pointy talons (because, such a vicious creature’s scimitar-bladed paws could hardly be dismissed as having mere “claws”), Clarence’s calm acceptance of our ministrations was so terrifying that we both fainted dead away.

Or, maybe, he spent the whole evening cuddled on our laps while we watched DVDs and read books, getting traded back and forth when one of us had to get up. He’s not happy, but he was doing the best he could, I think.

On Brian’s lap:

On my lap:

Meanwhile, you want to see a cat that hates me right now, my sweet, angelic little Ptera needed a bath tonight due to some litterbox clumsiness. She didn’t utter a peep, but she broke free several times, sliding around on the bathroom floor and landing on her face. She also refused to make eye contact with me during and after. I look forward to being forgiven. She’d also climbed up on the bed prior to the bath, so we had to change the sheet. This all happened after we had retired for the evening, so that just made it all the more special. I did not do her the indignity of photographing her in her full drowned-rat glory, but I did snicker a bit between kisses and apologies while I dried her off.

Sunday Kitty Love

I took a ton of photos today at the adoption clinic. I wanted to have photos that really captured the cats’ personalities for the petfinder page. I know some of these aren’t my best work, but I was trying to be quick, and while I was in the middle of it, some people came in and crowded me out of the room for a while so they could put a ridiculous collar on Trump that looked like a tie, and take pictures of him. He was uncooperative, because he has some dignity.

Jeeves is a fairly serious cat:

Plum is sweet and playful:

Rosa is dignified and calm:

Karma is a bitch (not kidding):

Trump is VERY sweet and innocent. He’s gentle and cuddly–he is declawed on all four paws, and was picked up as a STRAY. He deserves better than that:

Animal compassion

A few years back, there was a wonderful story about some elephants that very deliberately and cunningly freed some antelope that had been captured and penned up by humans. I won’t rehash the whole thing, but the elephants waited until the humans were settling in for the night, circled the enclosure, and waited while the herd’s matriarch figured out the latches on the gate. They waited until every antelope was out, then walked away.

There are many tales of elephants doing compassionate things like this. One story describes an elephant that was trained to place logs into holes for building a structure; the elephant balked at one point, and the mahout giving commands discovered that the elephant was avoiding harming a sleeping dog. There are plenty of stories of elephants being kind toward injured or helpless humans. They are also exceptionally compassionate toward one another, and become deeply grief-stricken when one of their herd dies, visiting the bones for years after the death.

They aren’t perfect, of course. Elephants that have been treated badly by people sometimes snap and cause injury or death. They are fiercely protective of their young, and have no problem stomping someone who messes with a calf. Most cases of “killer” elephants that I have seen involve stressed out, abused, or sick animals, though–elephants treated respectfully are generally much kinder toward our species.

So why am I bringing up elephant altruism? The main reason today is that I want to point out that they make us look like savages. Yes, some of our kind help other species, some of us treat each other kindly, but there is a disturbingly high number of cruel people as well. When we spew hate at members of our own species over something as trivial as how fat they are (and that’s just one example), I have to wonder why so many of us believe that humans are better or more important than species that display a greater level of compassion–not just toward their OWN kind, even, but toward other species, even ours!

But then, I remember that the elephants who don’t behave this way are usually sick, abused, or protecting their young. The tremendous pressure our society puts on people to look and act a certain way can create insane amounts of stress. I can only explain some of the disturbing, hateful things said and done by fatophobes as the result of a mind that has been badly damaged by the cognitive dissonance that occurs when the messages being programmed into the populace’s brains are at odds with what they perceive to be true.

Let me take a moment here to explain what I mean. For whatever reason, we are being endlessly told that food is a poison, that people eat because they are mentally ill, not because their bodies need fuel, and that death is right around the corner unless we lose 15 more pounds (and then it’s fifteen more after that, and after that, too). What we perceive, however, is that “bad” foods aren’t causing us to die, that we eat because we are actually hungry, that our bodies are run down and less functional when we don’t eat enough, and that the never-ending demand that we becoming thinner and thinner can never resemble the reality of our bodies’ autonomic management of our weight and metabolism. Some of us see the naked emperor and decide to live in reality. Those who have thoroughly bought into the myths, though, have too much invested in the fantasy of being thin, and thus cannot tolerate anything that rattles the foundation of their fantasy. They’re stressed out, they’re sick, and they react accordingly.

It’s still no excuse.

An elephant that acts this way is frequently a prisoner of its abusers. Zoo and circus elephants snap and kill a keeper or trainer. People who have invested themselves in the fantasy of being thin, however, have a bit more choice. It’s an uncomfortable choice, sure; it’s hard to accept that the system that gives privilege to thin people is wrong. For thin people, they stand to lose all that they have acquired through that privilege. For others, they lose the (albeit misguided) hope that all they have to do is lose weight, and they will become a privileged member of society. They lose the idea that they have control over their status–or they lose an excuse for not developing themselves in other ways. I really do understand that it is hard, but come on already–it isn’t doing you or anyone else any good. Try to be at least as good a person as the average elephant, would you?

Big Buts, Part Seven: Do I Hate Thin People?

“But Rio, why do you hate thin people so much?”

…

I get this a lot. I really do not understand it. I challenge anyone to look through my blog and find anything saying that I hate thin people, or that they suck, or anything of the sort.

I believe in fat acceptance. Accepting fat people does not mean that you then hate thin people. I can’t imagine how someone would believe otherwise, unless they’re the type that, when they lose one outlet for their hatred and venom, they must immediately transfer it to another target. Being a feminist does not mean someone hates men*, it means that they want women to be treated like human beings, equal to men. You don’t have to sacrifice one group to give another group rights and respect! As a fat person, I want to be treated as respectfully as a thin person is treated in our society. As a woman, I want the same rights and respect as a man.

Imagine this:
Two people, Casey and Dana. Casey is standing up on a platform, while Dana is down below. Casey has access to a bunch of rocks to throw at Dana, while Dana has none, and would not have the strength to throw them high enough to hit Casey anyway. Now, there are several options we could take here:

- Dana climbs up to the platform where Casey is, and knocks Casey off the platform, switching their roles. Now Dana is privileged, while Casey is not. This results in an endless struggle where the two switch places in a cycle of vengeance.

- Casey climbs down to where Dana is, sacrificing privilege to gain equal footing. This doesn’t benefit Dana that much, except that Casey isn’t throwing rocks, but because Casey resents being lowered to Dana’s situation, there are fistfights and discord between them.

- Casey lowers a rope and helps Dana up to the platform, putting them both on equal footing. This DOES benefit Dana, of course, and Casey has to sacrifice very little to do this–and may even benefit from Dana’s experience, ideas, and companionship.

It is not necessary to tear down one group of people in order to put a less privileged one on equal footing. What we DO have to sacrifice in order to do this, though, is the idea that we need to have someone beneath us in order to feel important. Finding your self-worth is pretty hard, and we are unfortunately taught the dirty shortcut of ranking ourselves over someone else. Dehumanizing other people, however, is harmful to everyone involved in the long run–when you throw rocks at someone (metaphorically or literally), you create a cycle of hatred and vengeance that can be very difficult to break. Admitting that you were wrong in the way you treated someone is really, really tough, but it’s absolutely necessary if you want to find your true self-worth, which is independent from someone else being inferior to you.

So, in short, no, I don’t hate thin people. Thin people who read my writings and believe otherwise may want to examine why they are reacting this way; I believe that it is probably because I’m refusing to acknowledge their “superior” status. That’s really uncomfortable, obviously. It probably stings a bit when I say things like, “Yes, you have worked really hard to become thin, but that doesn’t actually mean anything to me,” especially when those who have lost a lot of weight are accustomed to high praise from just about everyone else. There’s also the upsetting idea that putting a lot of effort into something doesn’t make that something valuable to everyone else. What you did to lose weight was for your own benefit; it is not some kind of heroic, humanitarian task, no matter how much people piss and moan about health care costs.

On a final note, I want to mention that, if I hated thin people, I wouldn’t have married one. In my social life, I don’t treat thin friends any differently from fat friends. I don’t tell thin people to eat more, to gain weight, or anything of the sort–because a person’s body size is none of my business. No, I don’t hate thin people. No, I don’t want you to go and gain weight if you’re thin. I just don’t think your body size has anything to do with your value as a human being, and I won’t accept it when others behave as if it does.

*This does NOT mean that there are no feminists who hate men; it means that hating men is not a requirement of feminism.

She Dances On The Sand Postcards

My postcards have arrived! I have mailed them out to everyone who has so far donated or made a purchase, but I have lots more. I will send one to anyone who donates $2 or more (on the right), as long as you provide your mailing address in the paypal info.

They are really cute; I have two styles, and I’ll send both if you like!

Cranberry Sauce for Kitties!

I have been volunteering for a local cat rescue, Robin’s Nest Rescued Cat Adoptions. I help staff adoption clinics and spay/neuter clinics, and I also foster cats. Every cat that is adopted from Robin’s Nest is spayed or neutered, treated for fleas, de-wormed, and given a rabies vaccination (if they are over 3 pounds) and their initial distemper vaccinations.

All of this veterinary care takes money–money that is only partially covered by the very low adoption fee ($80.00). We rely on the kindness of others to help with the rest, including cats who need more than just basic care, cleaning supplies, and all kinds of things like that.

So, I’m pestering you, because we have a huge pile of donated Wild Thymes cranberry sauce to sell. It normally goes for $5.99 on the Wild Thymes website, but we are selling it $3/jar, or 2/$5.00. It is absolutely delicious, and I can provide local folks with a taste before they decide to buy. If you are not local, I have made purchasing easier via my Etsy shop:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=10200927

If you’re just interested in making a donation without purchasing anything, you can find a donation link on the Robin’s Nest website:
http://nest.petfinder.org

Also, if you visit the “Cats for adoption” link on the site, you can see my current foster kitties, Salvador, Ansel, and Leonardo! They are fabulous boys, and I love them to bits.