On August 18, 2015, Nora started her day without a name – and without a future. She had a pink paper band taped around her neck with her impound number – A1577589 at North Central Animal Shelter in Los Angeles. She weighed under a pound. She was about a month old. A tranquilizer, and some euthanasia solution had already been pulled up for her and she had already been entered as deceased into the shelter’s Chameleon computer system of electronic record keeping.
I knew none of this.
I think Nora might have had an idea. She sat upright in her cage, staring into my eyes with her tiny blue eyes, refusing to eat from the small metal bowl of fishy wet cat food with a hard crust forming on it that sat in her cage.
I had accepted a part time spay-neuter job for the City of Los Angeles barely three weeks prior and I had promised myself and the world that I would not take any more pets home from the Department of Animal Services.
On August 18,2015 , L.A. was still the height of kitten season. There were about two dozen kittens roughly Nora’s size in the medical room when I checked in that morning. Nora was not one of the ones I remembered. I went to the surgery to perform spays and neuters for the next several hours. One of the RVTs (Registered Veterinary Technician) frequently came into the surgery to borrow tranquilizer. “It’s a bump day,” she said, sadly. I found out that “bumps” were euthanasias. “Bump days” meant lots of them.
At the end of the day as I entered records into Chameleon of my spays and neuters, I noticed behind me, in a lower cage, the tiny kitten with the black and white head larger than her body. She looked like a bobble head toy.
“Cute little micro-cat,” I said to the RVT entering records next to me.
“She won’t be here when you go,” she said.
“That’s great! Did she get a home, or a foster?” I said.
“She won’t be here when you’re gone,” she said, again.
“Not here like “gone” gone?”
“Gone, like off the planet. Unless you want to foster her.”
I didn’t want to foster her. Or adopt another cat. We already had three cats, with special needs, a special needs dog, and four water turtles. But the next thing I knew, that little oreo-colored mouse was crawling out of a flimsy cardboard box made to hold syringes on the passenger seat of my car, and then it was climbing up my sock as if my calf were a tree trunk, while I pushed my foot down on the gas pedal to go faster down the ten freeway and get home to Santa Monica, twenty miles west of down town.
