what I am most grateful for in all the world…

…is also what I am most envious of, and that is our cats’ unshakable certitude that their perfect happiness among us will never ever end.

maddy at our taft hill road rental house

what’s this I hear about another goddamn wolf hunt?

sonomabitch.

they call the department “Wildlife Management.” since when did fucking wildlife need management? how the hell did the wilderness and all those wild animals ever get along without our goddamn ‘management’? such utter and total bullshit.

I was at a book reading / signing in a CSU auditorium one night as the local independent bookstore’s representative selling books for an author by the name of Rick Macintyre. he used to be a head ranger at yellowstone national park. he’s written extensively about wolves, in particular ‘A Society Of Wolves.’ the reading was attended by about a hundred undergrads, some of whom were my students, who all shared a love of animals and wolves in particular. ranger Rick started the lecture with an anecdote about how the biggest threat to hikers in yellowstone aren’t wolves or bears, but wild packs of poodles. pretty much from there on he had the audience eating out of his hand. the lecture culminated with the recounting of the saga of yellowstone’s first reintroduced pack of grey wolves and the horrifying end of the lead female who was shot and killed by a rancher who’d then tried to hide the evidence of her body but kept her head in a shed. he was tried and convicted and fined, but that was as far as it could go as is always the case in those sorts of cases. and he had half the audience bawling their eyes out, including me. and they came up to my sad ass afterwards to swarm my table to buy all the books I’d brought with me for the reading to get signed by ranger Rick before he took off, and I’m trying to take payments and write out receipts with snot running down my face, and practically everybody’s crying, and it’s fucking chaos but it’s great somehow.

I don’t know the facts on the ground. but I do know that fucking wildlife management, ranchers, hunters and generic assholes just can’t ever just leave animals be. they can’t just leave them be. it’s not in ’em, like, genetically or some shit. and it fucks me all up to see headlines like this, but I won’t read the story. too damn painful and angrifying, which I’m supposing is what a lotta blogs are all about. that, and to simply say, ‘I’m here, I’m still here, I was here’ etc. that’s pretty much what this here’s about, once I get to chronicling all our cats’ lives with us over the years. same deal with all the damn YouTube cat videos I’ve been uploading. to just serve as testimony, after we’re long gone I suppose, that we were here and that we loved each other, me Lauren and our little family in the woods over the years. but before I get back to doing that, I just had to jot a few things down of my memories of ranger Rick and that night on campus in fort collins when he had all us bleeding hearts crying our eyes out for a couple packs of wolves trying their damnedest to make their way in the fucked up world as it is. some things never change.

okay! properly sloshed and soooo ready for bed at 8:15 pm…

blue on her blankey doing battle

my favorite pic of blue of all time – on her favorite blanket, biting lauren’s hand.

you know what I love? I love seeing old black-and-white movies and seeing scenes with dogs, cats, horses, other animals, who happen to be in the scene with the actors at the same time. maybe they’re interacting with the actors, maybe they’re incidental to the environment, whatever. but I know that that dog or cat or horse meant something to somebody, maybe not just the animal wrangler on set but other people maybe not necessarily connected with old hollywood; that they had a name, a unique personality with his or her own proclivities, and I like to imagine a pretty decent life. unless they had the misfortune of having to play stunt horses in westerns. that would’ve been horrifying. but the dogs and cats probably had good and happy lives, with people who cared for them and looked after their well being. but still, animal welfare wasn’t what it is now. and I like to think years from now animal rights and animal welfare, and just our awareness and respect of the human animal bond, will be even better than it is today.

blue and me in colorado