A LESSON IN MOTHERHOOD

Everyone knows that I love cats. I always have. There is just something about their indepence that awes me. We have two female cats and two male cats. Because we live in the country, we have a need for cats. It keeps the snake and rat population down. These felines are unspayed and unneutered. They are well fed well cared for animals in every other respect. Smudge is our main queen. Boy does she act like it. Her daughter, Sassy, became a mother for the first time last night.

In order to teach my own children about sex and motherhood, we keep the pregnant females in the house. To give those kittens every opportunity to survive and make it to adult hood. Sassy kept getting bigger and bigger. I was amazed. I thought this cat would burst. As I watched and rubbed her tummy throughout, I watched a cat come into her own. I watched her transform into the mother that her own mother was. Everytime another cat or dog came into our bedroom, she about tore my leg off. When the first kitten came out, it was automatic. She cleaned her kitten and cleaned herself up. She kept herself and her babies cleaned. She settled immediately into nursing her babies. What result was four glorious little orange tabbies. What I saw was immediate and unconditional love. It was such a natural site.

I thought about this well into the night and this morning. How can we as a society expect mothers to stop caring about their children? If you attempted to take those kittens from either one of my mother cats, they would take your dang hand off. Yet we do this to mothers all over this country. We don't allow them the opportunity to let their hormones to balance back out after a birth. Agencies and attorneys tell mothers that they will get over it. If my cats don't get over it, how can we expect human mothers to do the same? This ranch breeds horses and cattle. They are not intentionally separated at birth. In cattle, the whole herd takes care of the calves. We are fully functioning animal but yet we treat our own mothers and children like they are nothing. There is not an animal shelter in this country nor a ranch in this country that separates cats from kittens, dogs from puppies, cattle from calves nor horses from colts but we do this to human beings? Lord we need to change things.