AN update on our little four-legged, stumpy-tailed roommate: Travis arrived on the morning of Tuesday the 9th, and not surprisingly, spent about half a day being freaked out. Think how you would feel if someone kidnapped you, threw you into a portable jail cell, and delivered you to an alien world. A few hours of me and the two youths being excessively kind to him convinced him to relax, and we only had to contend with one bathroom accident — he took a fat shit on the floor in daughter’s bedroom, but fortunately on the tile and not the carpet — for him to figure out what the litter box was about. Now he thinks he’s our landlord.
All of this was provoked by the appalling behavior of the Ateneo de Manila Law School administration towards the local cats and the volunteer group caring for them, as I explained in the last post. Coincidentally, the controversy over the community cats blew up at just about the same time as a much more publicly horrifying scandal involving Ateneo, the drowning deaths of two of the school’s varsity men’s basketball team players on June 8 during a team outing in the province of Aurora. That was the subject of The Manila Times editorial on Thursday, June 11 — and just about every other major media outlet as well as tens of millions of Filipinos online sounded off about it, too. I wrote about the connection between Ateneo’s dickishness in that scandal and the scandal with the law school campus cats for my Manila Times column for Sunday, June 14, which is tomorrow as I am making this post.
There are some bigger and more important concepts the experience so far has shed light on for me; one is the social and emotional impact of pets on people, and another is the legitimate effect the care of stray cats and dogs has on the sustainability of the urban environment. I’m a bit more comfortable with the latter, but either way, I will need to seek some views from experts, which I will be doing in the coming weeks in order to post some commentaries, either here or in my mainstream column. For now, we’re just happy Travis is here, and doing our best to make sure he’s happy, too.
Which, as things have developed, will almost certainly involve getting him a buddy within the next few days; since this has gone so well, and there are still so many cats who need homes, I’ve been discussing adopting another.
