This is the original preface to my cat book, which doesn't seem to be going over very well with the agents. I thought I had to start with a dramatic scene, and then follow with some research explaining where I was going with the book. I guess this is a bad idea. I tried rewriting it, but then decided I didn't need it at all. So I post the rewritten preface here, and abandon it.
A Life in Cats
Preface
Going to the pet store is always hard. This evening it was harder because I’d been rebuffed trying to overmother my son and the cats in the store cages this evening were particularly pathetic. They seemed to all need a mother, and I was willing to serve.
(The original preface is actually a couple of pages of the overmothering incident. My son will be glad I chose to dump this.)
A cat rescue lifts me into another realm where I am noble and sacrificing. All my travails fall away, at least temporarily, as I pour out love and succor to yet another cat. I’m a nurturer, a problem-solver, a fixer, always wanting to wade in and right every disorder. It’s the classic breeding ground for cat hoarding. When things are broken – relationships, people, contraptions, hearts -- I can’t stand it until they’re fixed or replaced.
An older kitten in the rescue society’s cages caught my eye. Well, he’s cute. He’ll find a home soon, I smiled, but then….in the cage next to him was a huge, sleeping white cat, her shaved belly facing the glass, a gruesome surgical scar across it. Oh. my gosh, what happened to her?
The card on the cage said she had been rescued from the shelter – probably on execution day, which was the rescue club’s modus operandi. She had recently had kittens, but they all died. How could that happen? Why the scar? The urge to grab her out of the cage was enveloping me like a fog, so I quickly turned away, but there was another cat with a surgical scar. “Found injured and wandering loose at the Taco Bell,” his card said. Who is going to adopt these cats? Who has the heart for such cursed cats except me?
All the while, my husband stood at the counter, offering his credit card for the weekly $100 worth of supplies we couldn’t afford for the eight cats we already have.
It’ll be hours, maybe days before I can shake off the need to get all the cats I saw at the store. I have to be strong. But when everything else around me is falling apart, strong too often translates into what is easy, and that’s getting another cat.
This is how it begins. I am on the way. The typical animal hoarder is a middle-aged to elderly white female. They have a problem letting go of anything and cannot face the thought that an unwanted animal might be euthanized, or in my case, even adopted by people who won’t take proper care of them. Psychologists suspect many hoarders had chaotic childhoods and unstable parents. They look to animals for the unconditional love they still desire.
That would be me.
Hoarders need animals under their control, yet they don’t always have the best interests of the animals in mind when they can’t afford to medically care for every one of them.
There’s no cure for this. When cat hoarders are discovered, arrested, separated from their cats, treated and released, they start all over again. The recidivism rate is 100 percent, even with counseling!
(Here, thinking I had to justify the book's premise, I presented several case studies of cat hoarders. They were all pretty gruesome. Maybe that's why one of the agents who gave me the most attention ultimately said to come back when I had a funny book.)
One story that entranced me was about a professional woman in California who rented apartments and office space, and then filled them with cats. She had more than 600. She successfully argued her own case before the courts, and as soon as she was released, started hoarding again.
How do you end up with 600 cats? How does something like that begin? This is how.
(The next chapter was like a second first chapter, an overview of the madness we live in now with the cats. I've edited that chapter down, but now I'm wondering if I should just plunge in with the beginning of my life in cats and get on with it. In any case, by the time I finish this second editing of the entire book, I'm going to post it on Kindle.)
