Life and death of a Bangkok street cat

If you are sensitive related to the subject of death you shouldn't read this; this will be the only trigger warning.

A series of events related to a local Bangkok street cat has been troubling me lately, related to navigating the role I should play, and now to how it worked out.  A street cat has been visiting our house and our cats for years; it's about him, who I'll call Ei Dum (pronounced ee dum, more or less "the black one," after his color).  He's not the first; friendly and unfriendly cats have visited before.  One fought with another of our cats once, causing him to fall from roof space, and he later died from an injury from that.  Of course that haunts me to this day, not doing something differently to save him.  I didn't see that occur, and he seemed fine later, but he wasn't fine.

This cat hasn't exactly been a friend to our cats, but he's tolerated, not an enemy.  My son Keoni once said that he thought the cat thinks of himself as the husband to our oldest cat, Nong On, but that she doesn't see it that way.  Who knows what they think, or how they feel about a range of things.

He has been sick lately, not looking very good for the past two months that my wife and kids have been living back in the States.  I'm still living in Bangkok, working, watching the cats, and taking care of the house (just being here, tending the plants and making sure nothing goes wrong).  I fed Ei Dum; that's not how that went before for him.  The hope was that his health could return, or at least that he would be doing better at the end of his life.  

Over the past week or so his health has declined further, maybe rapidly, or maybe it's just that I've noticed it more.  His tongue sticks out, all the time, he walks rigidly, and even breathing seems to cost him effort.  For the first time he will lay around our house areas sleeping, where before he would just hang out a little, and then go back to wherever he spent more time.  It would have been nice if I could pick him up and take him to the vet, but he hissed at me even just walking near him, or even in the process of feeding him.  All that concerned me, since it all overlaps some with signs of rabies.  Him being sick was troubling, but our cats being in contact with a deadly disease is even more of a concern.

So I kept asking others for advice, if those symptoms sound troubling, and what my options might be.  I wanted to get him help.  If someone said that sounds a lot like rabies I would become alarmed, and if they said something else maybe that could be calming.  No one I asked seemed to have any clear thoughts on it, or likely judgement.

In the past we had a rat get in our house (that can happen; we live in a heavily vegetated garden space), and my wife called local animal control staff to remove him, from being trapped in our bathroom.  Anyone else might have trapped the rat, or sorted out a way to kill him, but as a Buddhist family taking part in killing any animals isn't accepted.  Then it's odd how that works out related to eating meat, being a cause for animal deaths every single day.  It's fine if someone else does the killing; that's part of their karma.

It's too easy a perspective, it seems to me, as someone originally from a rural area.  I raised pigs for consumption as a 10 year old, and hunted at 13.  Visiting a chicken farm at around the age of 23 was one input to deciding to not take any further part in that cycle, and I became a vegetarian, for 17 years.  Then eventually effects from not balancing nutrition caused me to drop it again.  I still don't eat much meat.

Anyway, back to that cat.  My wife helped me reach out to another animal control agency, and they set up plans to check on the cat, and then to make arrangements to get him.  That was complicated, since they visited when he was here to check, then when he wasn't to capture him, and then left a trap (a box version with a door that closes behind him).  It didn't work at first, but I reset the trap and caught him, and he was taken away today, to get medical care.

It's all good right, a happy ending, as much as there could be one?  That extra day of delay in capturing him allowed me plenty of time to think it all through, and to hang out with Ei Dum one last time, sitting out in the driveway.  We weren't so close; I never petted him, and couldn't have if I had wanted to.  But he seemed to visit to have a space he could feel safe in, and I can't help but feel that I've betrayed him, even though it was for the purpose of getting him medical attention.  Maybe it brings up feelings related to losing that other cat, who we loved, as we love our other cats.

The process for treating him is getting him medical care through a government vet, then he will be cured and released to a farm area to stay in, surely provided with food there.  He will never return, and I can't know if he did recover or not.  It's hard to not be pessimistic about his chances.  

Does he have rabies though; is it really a condition that's dangerous to our cats, or to me?  I'm not that worried about me being bitten; I was once bit by a local shop cat (named Happy), and had those shots about two years ago, and I could go through it again.  She had rabies shots prior but given that disease is deadly the doctor I consulted said that it's best to be on the safe side, and get the vaccination shots.  

I still pet that cat; if she bites me again I'll go through it again.  She lost her freedom through that event, the little she had; she now generally stays in a cage, instead of just on a leash outside the shop, although they sometimes relax that back to leashing her.  Then at night she is more free, staying in open spaces within the shop and their living area.  The cause for her to lash out against me had probably been fighting with street cats upsetting her, even though she had known me since she was a small kitten, and I usually visit with her several times every week.  Do I sound strange yet, forming these odd attachments?

Happy as a little girl

I don't know if Ei Dum has rabies.  Maybe not?  No one could ever make any informed comment about what it means when a cat's tongue sticks out for days, or his other symptoms.  My mother is a registered nurse and her input was "that doesn't sound good."  Right, but what does it mean? 

What do I learn from all this, beyond working through the uncertainty, and feeling that I betrayed him?  In retrospect I could have visited a private vet, one part of a university program, borrowed a cage, and brought him back to them, paying for his treatment.  So that, that in hindsight there had been a way to capture him and get him treated, just not a straightforward one, and not one I considered in time.  

Also everything is much more difficult when you can't communicate well in the language everyone else uses.  I can order at a restaurant, or eavesdrop on work meetings, when I already know parts of what is being said, but my Thai language skills fall short long before I can discuss the health issues experienced by a street cat.  I don't know how it would have went for a vet to treat a cat that isn't accustomed to people.

It feels like this situation is triggering underlying feelings about death, loss, risk of illness, and responsibility to others that I'm not able to deal with consciously.  I did fulfill responsibility to protect my cats, and if they might become infected and carry rabies--as someone suggested might happen if they had vaccination shots, as of course they did--then all of this could relate to protecting my children.  It still doesn't feel like I did all that I could do, or the clearly right things.  It will probably prove difficult to return Ei Dum to good health, and instead of dying here he will die elsewhere.

It's a short next step to add "not around people who loved or cared about him," but then who did?  Someone else in this soi (side alley street) must have been feeding him for him to have lived this long, and maybe they cared about him more than we did.  

I can speak some Thai but I couldn't ask around about him, and I'm not on close terms with any neighbors anyway, beyond those in two local shops who are not based within this side street.  All of the neighbors collected on that first day when animal control staff came to pick him up, and failed, so the word got out, and there was no mention of anyone "owning" that cat.

One more of many tangents:  there are different categories of unowned cats here.  One of our cats was from a neighbor's cat having kittens, one was a "temple cat," and the other was born in a vocational college, to a mother that was no one's pet cat.  People often feed stray animals here; it's part of the culture.

Myra has a sweet habit of holding your face when you hold her

awhile back; 16 years ago next month

So Ei Dum lived a free but somewhat solitary life of being tolerated by some local cats, and fed by a couple of different people, but probably never truly cared for.  It's no wonder that the one other street cat was so malicious, living like that, but Ei Dum was not mean-spirited.  I guess to connect an ill-fitting happy ending onto his sad tale someone did take steps to get him medical care when he clearly needed it, but it's hard to accept that as a summary of events.  There is a small chance he will go on to lead a better life, but even then he may hate that life.  Or love it, if it works out; he may find the broader care and acceptance he never could here.  I like to think he was friends with my cats, that he had been accepted, even though it can be hard to tell.  They really don't even get along with each other very well.

All of this reminds me of the time that local canal turtle found a way to visit us, which I wrote about in this blog.  I botched early decisions about how to care for that turtle (it lives on aquatic snails, not vegetables), and had no idea if a badly cracked shell would be a terminal condition for her if returned back in that canal, and then turned her over to an animal rescue agency.  I had thought it was "him," but they corrected that.  She is alive now in a pond in a rural area, I hope, and in her case that's a likelihood. 

Thai society can be brutally cold; a live and let live acceptance of karma can land in roughly the same place insensitive acceptance of random luck does back in the US.  When I was ordained as a Thai Buddhist monk a fellow monk's family adopted an entire litter of cute little puppies, who I visited, and I later came to find out that either all of them, or at least most of them, died of diseases present in that area, from parasite exposure and such.  Then some rescue takes a different form, and leads to a better outcome; our youngest cat was born a street cat living in a vocational college, and her mother was killed by a dog when she was about a month old.  It's a little awkward to type it out, but she is probably more loved than most people.

It feels forced but I want to end on a positive note. 

Ei Dum may yet live, and truly thrive, offered a new hope through medical intervention.  I had no choice but to get him that chance, especially after what happened to Ju Tai.  I'll live with second guessing if I did my absolute best, but it will be better than living with that other kind of feeling of awful responsibility.

There is no chance of a next chapter to this story, but that part reminds me of something else too.  When I dropped off that turtle to the rescue agency--odd there even is a turtle rescue agency, right?--the premise was that you can't visit the turtle, that it's a wild animal, that you have no connection to, and will never see it again.  My wife was out of town that weekend and when she came back we went there and visited her, so she could say goodbye.  One nice part of Thai culture is that people treat others as people, and if the rules and formal process need to be thrown in the bin once in awhile to do the right thing then so it goes.  

If my wife was here we'd go visit that cat this weekend, but without her here maybe not.

A visit from a wild Thai turtle

 

A strange thing happened over the last few days that I'll pass on:  a relatively "wild" turtle visited us.  He lived at our house for a few days (not captive, but in the yard and garden areas), then I took him to a recovery program animal hospital for a checkup and relocation to a reserve.  He really could be female, that's just how I think of him.  It turned out that he is "Thai," a variety that is found in neighboring countries but centered in Thailand for distribution with a Thai city as part of his name (Malayemys Khoratensis).  This some may find interesting:  Integrative Taxonomy of Southeast Asian Snail-Eating Turtles

Morphological differences in shell characteristics and head colouration patterns of Malayemys khoratensis (orange), Malayemys macrocephala (blue), Malayemys subtrijuga (green).

Turtles aren't so unusual where we live.  A lot of turtles, fish, and water monitor lizards live in a canal not far from our house (maybe 80 meters away, so not that close either).  They tend to not leave that water area.  We first met him when we returned to the house late on a Sunday, when he became jammed in the gate mechanism, from trying to crawl through a very narrow passageway.  We put him in a small tub to take to the vet for a checkup, since he looked a little roughed up by that, with his shell notched and scratched.  He made it out of that shallow tub; he's not bad at climbing.  Then I kept seeing him over the next couple of days but he looked fine, seemingly moving quite well for a turtle.

he wasn't into being fed

That led to me asking around in online groups about what to do with him.  The idea of just letting him live at the house sounded appealing, but that's only if it seemed a suitable environment for him, and we didn't know what he would eat.  I kept offering him food, giving him vegetables, tomkatsu, dried fish, and cat food, but it was hard to know if he was eating any of it, especially since he wasn't in any confined area.  The house, yards, and gardens are fenced, so he probably couldn't leave, but he wasn't really in captivity either.  He had walked in on his own but it wasn't easy to walk back out.

That led to a critical finding and twist:  he's an aquatic turtle that eats only aquatic snails, so he was starving to death.  The race was on to find him again and get him safely relocated.  Then I was also concerned that maybe the scratches on his shell weren't so minor; I wouldn't be a good judge of that.  A friend who had turtles before mentioned that he could get an infection after returning to the water if his shell integrity wasn't complete.  I reached out to three different turtle experts online, but in the end someone needed to get a look at him to make a complete call.  I took him to the local (Bangkok) Chulalongkorn Aquatic Animal Disease Research Center, or VMARC.

In the end it turned out that he was fine.  They were going to give him a complete checkup, get him fed and re-hydrated, and put him through a de-worming treatment, then release him at a reserve outside the city.  That seemed sad, that he wouldn't return to his home canal.  But then the water being a bit dirty there had caused him an earlier case of shell rot, and the road beside that canal was a significant risk to him, and those water monitor lizards eat turtles.  It was for the best.

his original home, where go to feed bread to the fish and birds

In finding him stuck in the gate, and then stuck in a house fence, I had rescued him twice in just over 3 days.  This wasn't the right place for him, even though he did come to the right place to be relocated.  

saying goodbye to "turtely," he never did get a name

The turtle experts seemed a bit suspicious of us seemingly attempting to detain a wild animal as a pet, but then he hadn't been invited any more than the squirrels who live here, who keep eating the mangoes and papaya.  It just took time to figure out what to do with him; 3 days, then on a fourth he was off to that animal rescue center.  My first guess was that he was from that canal, of course, but I couldn't even be sure that he was an aquatic turtle.  The part about him only eating aquatic snails I didn't expect.  If you Google search what turtles eat, as I did, a number of references come up that tend to not even mention that in the range of possibilities.  Most turtles seem to be omnivores, from those sources; they eat whatever they feel like eating.  There are lots of snails in our yard but it seems likely that he wouldn't eat those.

It makes you think through pet experience in general.  Of course you can tell if a cat or a dog is having a positive life experience (less so for cats, maybe), but for a pet like a turtle who knows.  Or a pet lizard or snake that you keep at home, and so on.  How would you know how happy and fulfilled they feel?  That turtle was either exploring to find food, just looking around, or panicked about getting out to support his immediate survival, and in retrospect probably the third.  He was "wild," but a turtle bred to be a pet might not be so different, beyond being a type that can eat turtle food or whatever else, vegetables and such.

We feel an attachment to the small lizards living in our house of their own accord, a theme that was also common in Hawaii (house geckos).  It's odd even considering if all really goes well for them, if they are happy, or even well-fed.  There are some insects around in the house, just maybe not enough to make for ideal conditions, and we don't try to make the insect populations thrive.

I loved swimming with the sea turtles in a swim lane in Hawaii, when I lived there during grad school.  There was no interacting with them, really, but I would swim underwater a lot of the time to check out them and the fish and coral.  Kind of a tangent, but I changed underwater swim stroke based on learning from how they did it, their slower swimming version using one flipper at a time.

there is a flag out past those reef areas to swim to, along a lane of sorts

what those looked like (photo credit)

I would like to thank Peter Brakels of the Natural Laos group for covering feedback on status so completely and quickly, which really led to speeding up resolution.  The Reptiles and Amphibians of Thailand page was an interesting reference, and they responded quickly with good advice too, but Peter helped specify exactly what that turtle was, and the critical problem with him staying in someone's yard, and where he needed to be instead.  It was great that the Chulalongkorn program was so ideal for resolving this issue, even helpful about talking through the concerns and doing an initial review of that turtle's health status through photo images.  It all worked out.  I could've just put him back in the canal but I always would've wondered if he really was fine.  And he probably would've been, based on what a specialist vet review turned up.  His shell was beat up but he was ok.

visiting a sea turtle rescue program center in Bang Saen, with a favorite cousin

It's just in my own mind, for sure, but I felt like beyond me freaking him out he might have had the sense that I really was doing my best to help him.  I think the staff at that rescue center thought it was a little strange that I had just knew that turtle for a few days and then kept asking about what would happen to him, and took a couple minutes to say goodbye to him.  On the car ride to the vet I had put him in the passenger's seat and talked through how it was all going to work out, and he really seemed to calm down, probably more from being tired of crawling laps in the cat's box, and having a rough day.  It was great having a chance to meet him, just unfortunate that it all ended up being so stressful for him.

more on that VMARC related program, but all in Thai

Later status update:

Once you turn in a turtle in to a wild animal recovery program like that one that's it, you don't go back for a visit and check on him or her.  But of course that's what we did, since Eye--my wife--was out of town when I took "him" there.  It turned out that she is female; I was mis-gendering her the whole time.  She's fine, just not exactly stress-free and happy, given the week she's had.

The vet and admin staff were nice to make an exception about visitation, after my wife explained those circumstances, and her concern.  It turned out that she's 4 or 5 years old, nearly completely mature, but a bit roughed up from prior experiences.  She can live to be 30 or so, if life gets easier for her, as it should.  That vet said that at least some of the shell damage occurred prior to it getting caught in that gate opening mechanism, if not all of it, since it has healed.  I really thought that notch was from that, but maybe not.

We asked about her diet, if she's eating ok, and they have been feeding her but she's not eating much yet, due to the stress and transition.  At least she should be on the path to re-adjusting, and they should be able to get her stable and healthy before re-release into a reserve.

I want to offer a guess about whether she recognized us, and how she reacted (really me; I spent a few days talking to her, kind of sporadically since I would only see her out walking a couple times a day, and hidden for the rest).  It's probably a stupid thing to talk about; I can't "read" a turtle, and if she could recognize me it would remind her of awful experiences.  She did put her head out and look around a good bit while we talked to the vet though, which I took as affirmation that she wasn't so uncomfortable.  Of course I talked to her, and told her everything would be fine, and that she needed to relax and to eat.  I suppose all of that was more for me than her.

This time I never will see her again.  I'm happy that we crossed paths so that she could move on to a better place for her, and to where turtle specialists could make sure that she is fine during the transition.