Pets can literally save our lives

I have a dog in the house. He doesn’t live here, he just came to visit.

And I have a family of feral cats living in my back yard. The momma cat claimed squatters rights, having lived here before I moved in. She’s always around, living her feral life just outside my reach.

And, yes, I fed her, so now she owns me, as do her three almost-grown kittens.

I had a plan for the momma cat first. A spay-neuter clinic was coming to town, so I reserved a spot and started planning her capture.

I coaxed the kittens with cat food into a back room, then quickly closed them in. Then I set up a borrowed trap and, with tuna as my bait, rigged it up for her capture. If I could get her in that cage, I could take her to the clinic and have her spayed, and we’d all live happily ever after.

But, apparently, this wasn’t her first rodeo. For two days, whenever I set up the trap, she disappeared. When the clinic closed and I gave up, she returned.

I’m going to try again next month, when another spay-neuter clinic comes to town. I’m determined to give her a “retirement” from her childbearing years, then maybe she’ll be a happier feral yard cat after that.

• • •

Then came Melanchthon, a mid-sized Pointer of a dog named after one of the great leaders in the Protestant Reformation. Not surprisingly, he got his name from a Lutheran pastor who took him in, my friend LaVonne Johnson. She needed a dog sitter and, since I sometimes miss having one around, I volunteered.

Still, I think Melanchthon seems just too dignified for a canine, so I sorta corrupted his nickname into Lanky, which fits his build anyway and is easier to spell.

As I write this, Lanky is staying a few days with me, and he has met the cats. But only in a run, to a tree, where the felines claw up to safety and the canine is left sniffing and barking like a mad dog below.

I’ve been trying to referee the whole back-yard scene since Lanky’s arrival, and since he hasn’t had his nose cut open by a cat’s claw and the cats have won every chase up the tree, I figure we’re just one big, happy family.

• • •

Did you know that more than two-thirds of American households have pets? Mostly they’re dogs and cats, but we humans also keep horses, birds, freshwater fish, rabbits and a host of other domesticated critters, while spending upwards of $70 billion a year to take care of them.

Once upon a time, our pets had jobs to do — cats killed rodents in and around our homes, dogs helped us herd and protect livestock — but nowadays they’re mostly for companionship. Some of them have even graduated into the service professions, with dogs, horses and cats in particular going into therapy (for us humans, that is).

Nowadays it’s amazing what we’ve got dogs in particular doing for us. With an incredible sense of smell, we’ve trained them far beyond the drugs- and bomb-sniffing and human-rescuing dogs that law enforcement has come to depend on. Now they’ve entered the world of medical care. We have service and alert dogs that can detect and let humans know when there are chemical imbalances affecting their human companions. They are literally saving lives.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]