FEEDING STRAY CATS

AND THE SINGLE MOM WELFARE PLAN

by Paul Ciotti

 

This is not really a story about cats. It's just that (for a while) it's going to seem that way. In fact, I'm writing about character and what happens to us as a nation when we misplace our sense of it. But to get there we first go through a story about a small tan female cat which showed up on our doorstep two years ago, pitiful, desperate and hungry.

 

As we had no animals at the time, we took her in and named her "Stray." As cats go, she was no rocket scientist and she had the personality of library paste, but we made her a member of the family, offered her our love and protection, bought her a flea collar, had her spayed and allowed her to sleep on our son's bed at night. Then one day a small grey male kitten showed up in our yard and, despite my misgivings, we added him to the family, too.

 

This new kitten unfortunately didn't know a litter box from the living room sofa, and pretty soon, we discovered, both cats were urinating between the couch cushions. At this point, they instantly became "outside" cats, still enjoying our love and protection but now living on the patio.

 

After a couple of months, a stray yellow cat showed up to share in the bounty of their outdoor food dish. We weren't thrilled, but we couldn't stop her since we couldn't catch her. And, in any case, it was no big deal. It sort of made us feel compassionate to care for so many little mouths. And in the grand scheme of things, what was one more cat to feed?

 

As it turned out, the new cat wasn't just one more cat. It was one more cat and four more kittens. Then those kittens had kittens so fast that multiple generations were flashing before our eyes. In the meantime our own two domesticated cats had both disappeared (eaten, I suspect, by the coyotes which tour our streets at night like wily boulevardiers). Now we were faced with a dilemma--feeding some 13 cats that weren't ours, that stayed outside, that not only couldn't be petted, but hissed at us when we came too near. It was obvious this story couldn't have a happy ending. But we couldn't stop feeding them--we didn't want the kittens to suffer.

 

When my wife would go out to feed the cats each morning and night, it looked like that Disney movie "101 Dalmations"--cats would be jumping off walls, out of trees, scurrying out from under bushes, running for the food dish.

 

And with the cats came fleas, on the patio, in our bedroom, our office, the living room. You could walk out on the patio, look down and find eight or ten fleas on your socks. biting your ankles, leaving little red marks on your back at night. My over-the-fence backyard neighbor told me the fleas had driven his son into the house in tears and he had to have his house sprayed at a cost of $107.

 

If this had happened in rural western Pennsylvania, my father simply would have reached for the .22 and solved the problem on the spot. But it's illegal to fire a gun in the city. And, in any case, I didn't want stray .22 shells ricocheting around the neighborhood. But most of all I was too much a softie to look these cats in their uncomprehending cat eyes and then turn around and shoot them too. Realizing that I had created a monster, I called the city animal shelter to ask if they could please do something.

 

"We'll come and get them if you can confine them," they said.

Confine them? I couldn't get within 10 feet of them!

"Or you could trap them," the shelter person helpfully volunteered.

Well, that was an idea. "Great," I said. "Do you have traps?"

"Yes, but we don't give them out."

"Could you come here and trap them yourself?"

"I'm sorry. We don't have the manpower to do that."

 

I had no choice. I took an old dresser apart and built my own cat trap. I made it extra long so that when the door same slamming down, it wouldn't hit the cat's tail. To my surprise, it worked amazingly well. Before long I was catching cats three at a time, driving them down to the animal shelter (which at first threatened to seize my trap for trapping without a permit). Emotionally it was a nasty business. The cats cried pitifully when they were caught. And the kittens, for their part, didn't know what end was up. I'd take them down to the shelter and leave them and feel like an executioner. We had started out not wanting to be cruel to one cat and the result was we ended up having to kill 13.

 

There's a moral to this story and it applies just as much to our current welfare system as it does to the world of fecund cats--being kind when you should be firm isn't commendable compassion. It's cruelty on the installment plan. Welfare has caused a massive illegitimacy problem in this country, but we don't have the strength of national character to do what we ought to have done right from the start--eliminate child support welfare payments altogether. And so, for fear the kids will suffer, we end up subsidizing teenage girls to have even more babies. And the result is everywhere apparent--one-quarter of all white kids and two-thirds of all black kids are now born to unmarried women or teenage girls (in Washington, D.C., the illegitimacy rate among teenage moms is 96%).

 

This is an insane policy that can only head to chaos, crime, graffiti, demoralization, decay and, sometime down the road, the eventual collapse of civilized society. You can't let kids raise themselves on the streets, carry guns, shoot people for crime of wearing the wrong color sneakers and think with a midnight basketball game or two that you will still end up with responsible caring adults. Teenage boys are loose cannons. Their hormones are running amok. They need firm guidance and clear structure. If there's no father around to take them in hand and induct them into mature male society they end up on the street, in gangs, hating themselves, hating each other and most of all hating us.

 

And "working with the kids" is no solution either. It's a dead-end thankless and nearly always futile proposition to try and turn around a hardened gang member. What are you to do with a generation so twisted that they even call their girlfriends "bitches?" Well, not much. They have no skills, no discipline and they're too angry to work anyway. The solution is to cut off the supply at the source--eliminate welfare and the abused and unwanted babies that result from it. It's good for the community; it teaches self-reliance and responsibility to both mothers and fathers. And in the long run, it's kindest to the babies, too.

 

Any time anyone suggests cutting off welfare, you always hear the same objection--what about the babies? Of course, no one wants to see babies suffer. But the point is, under the current welfare system, we have babies suffering all the time: babies being born with AIDS, cocaine addiction, raised in filth by moms who can't cope, and who, if they don't abandon or abuse them, still leave them with physical, emotional and mental disabilities. And even when a mom struggles nobly and fiercely against the odds and does it right, her child may very well be killed in a driveby shooting by the son of some mom who didn't struggle as she did and whose child went the other way.

 

If your goal is strictly to reduce what William Bennett calls the suffering child "body count," the kindest way may very well be to eliminate welfare altogether. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute estimates you could cut the illegitimacy rate 50% overnight if you cut off welfare in one fell swoop.

Starting right now, you begin to make announcements, hand out fliers, send speakers to the schools, mail brochures to the homes, run spots on radio and TV, all saying the same thing--after a certain date (say two years away) any woman who delivers a baby will not receive welfare for it! And equally important, any boy who fathers a child will know beyond any doubt that it's his legal responsibility to pay for it. In the meantime, you start a massive family planning program to educate kids about abstinence, responsibility and birth control.

 

If a girl gets pregnant anyway, you bring her into one of the many new family planning clinics you've established by borrowing against the massive savings that will inevitably result from the dismantling of the welfare state. You explain her abortion or adoption options. You offer her career counseling, education assistance, and, if she insists on having the baby anyway, you mobilize the vastly beefed up family law unit in the district attorney's office and go after this deadbeat dad who fathered a child and casually walked away. If the father has a job, you garnish his wages. If he drives a car, you take away his license until he agrees to pay child support. If the father neither has a job nor a car, you place the girl with her mother, her relatives, her church or her friends.

 

And if none of them can or will help and the girl still adamantly insists on having and raising her baby, well, now we're down to tough love. This is, after all, a democracy, and if she wants to have the baby, then that's absolutely her choice--you step aside, wish her well, and pray that God will help her because you've done everything you can. From this point forward, it's out of your hands.

 

--Paul Ciotti

Reposted by permission

---

Copyright © Larry Elder & Associates  - All rights reserved.
Send mail to Larry@larryelder.com
www.larryelder.com