New Underdog in Town

I’ve never been tempted to feel deprived or offended for whatever reason. There was never any reason. I was raised in comfort if not love, given a solid education if not street wisdom, and enjoyed the opportunity to travel beyond the iron curtain when it was still bolted down tightly. I have faced challenges and threats to my chosen lifestyle and to my health, but nothing I’ve experienced deserves to be called suffering, and none of my tribulations qualify as survival. Neither of the ethnicities in my heritage has been persecuted or wronged in any major way (although one has bitter if recent grievances against the other). My only remaining ground for complaint is that I am a woman, but as a tomboy I’ve ignored even this last opportunity. I have met with crassness but not discrimination, with wolf-whistles but not abuse. All in all, being a woman has never subjected me to anything a few well-chosen words couldn’t fix. So in a world that prizes so highly the process of survival and the healing of harms, I have almost reached my fiftieth birthday with nothing survived and no wounds that haven’t healed long ago. I have nothing to share with my fellow humans except my fictional stories that explore the labyrinths of the human mind, and the joie de vivre of a feral animal perfectly content with the absence of pain. But our Western intellectual tradition looks down on such simplistic happiness. “Better to be a man dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” taught the wise Socrates. I happen to agree with the verdict of corrupting the youth of Athens, although not for the same reasons as his fellow citizens had in mind. But let’s leave Socrates for now. Because for all my bitching about having no reason to feel offended, it turns out that I do have one reason.

       Poke me and I’ll defend myself and be done with it, but poke my fur child and I will raise a stink to high heaven. Ever since getting a rabbit for a pet I have been reminded of how fragile this animal’s position still is in our society. I am sick unto death of the buck-toothed idiotic grin of Easter bunny (hey, those are just overgrown incisors), as if this was the rabbit’s only useful application and as if it did anything to help its image during the rest of the year. It doesn’t, and only reinforces the stereotype of rabbits as fat little balls of fur born to be cuddled. (On a healthy rabbit that round rump is all muscle and no fat, and as a prey species most rabbits resent being picked up unless they’ve been accustomed to it since birth.)  People often condemn rabbits for the same faults (scratching, nipping, peeing on the floor or bed) that are readily forgiven in a dog or cat, and can give up on them with no attempt to understand or train them. The love rabbits give their people is not unconditional and must be earned. (For that matter, I’m still trying to understand what people mean when they claim that a dog’s love is unconditional. Does it mean you can be an a-hole and the dog will still love you? I’m not sure that’s such a great thing to aspire to.)  On pet owner forums not specifically dedicated to rabbits their owners are often ridiculed and mocked for doting on what is largely perceived as fodder for carnivores, plentiful and expendable. I have nothing in principle against raising rabbits for meat when it’s done humanely, although I would not eat them myself (I did on one occasion as a child, and it was delicious). It’s the contemptuous and dismissive attitude toward these animals that I mind. Yes, they breed with great ease, but their numbers do not make each animal any less valuable. One would think that for all the information available online for the asking, it would be easy to educate oneself on how to keep a rabbit, and keep it happy. The trouble is, much of the information is controversial. Many sources will tell new owners to feed rabbits pellets as a large part of their diet, but the reality is that pet rabbits have absolutely no need for them. This feed was designed for commercial meat rabbits who need to grow fast and do not usually reach an age where dental problems from insufficient roughage become apparent. A rabbit is amazingly similar to a horse: powerful in its muscles (and capable of a mighty kick), but fragile in its digestive, dental and respiratory health under the wrong conditions. And like the true herbivore that it is, it does not need any pellets let alone grains, although it might quite enjoy them like a kid enjoys potato chips.

    The veterinary profession has much catching up to do on this front. Currently rabbits are designated as “exotic” for the purpose of veterinary education and clinical practice, a label both outdated and silly given how common these animals are around the world. I am currently working on a pitch to Canadian veterinary schools to include rabbit medicine in the required curriculum rather than leaving it up to elective training, but such changes are neither easy nor swift. There is no insurance available to rabbits in Canada to cover the cost of veterinary bills. In the eyes of pet insurance companies, Canadian rabbits do not exist as pets. I’m tempted to say good riddance to insurance as it proves to be a headache to owners as often as a help, but in this case the principle bothers me. The choice should be available to those who might want it. On this count we are way behind the UK the US. Even in Australia, where rabbits are considered pests, the country’s Veterinary Association is calling for insurance to become available for the growing number kept as pets. But I try to look on the bright side even though I have long since drained my half-full glass of Chardonnay. Veterinary medicine is evolving constantly. It is hard to believe that small animal medicine did not even exist for most of the profession’s history, and was born little more than a century ago with doc’s quick look at Fido or Fluffy on his way to the barn. One day soon rabbits will join dogs and cats in the mainstream of pet ownership, but not without an effort on our part.    

Leave your gonads at the door.

Last week I said to my employer that I miss doing surgery (business has been much slower than usual lately), and the next day they called the new branch of the SPCA - conveniently located almost across the highway - to bring in cats in desperate need of sterilization. The SPCA is inundated with cats. We are not the cheapest clinic in the area, probably the most expensive after the emergency hospital, but we have a discount policy for the SPCA as well as for our clients: the "public service discount," meaning that spay and neuter are for the public's benefit and not just the owner's and the animal's. I will give these cats a chance at longer lives in people's homes, as they have no future unless they are spayed and neutered. Spaying and neutering has become the standard of veterinary care in the New World, so much so that people and vets who fail to do it are looked down upon as morally lacking. Of course, an exception is made for breeders - those who breed more or less healthy animals in good conditions.

The standard of care is a curious concept. It is supposed to be determined by the patient's best interests in terms of health and welfare. Our society does not accept packs of feral dogs or colonies of feral cats sharing living space with people - this is considered barbaric, unsanitary, and unsafe. But another way to look at them is no-kill shelters under the open sky, and this is how it works in many countries and communities where these animals are trapped, sterilized and vaccinated, and released. Not all of them, of course. Many continue to multiply, so the arrangement is far from perfect. Moscow has many colonies of feral cats who live in basements of apartment buildings (the city has no private homes, these are all brand-new and on the outskirts). They access the basements through small ground-level ventilation holes and live in safety and warmth by the hot-water pipes, taking care of any incipient rodent problem in the building. Packs of dogs live in the city parks and take shelter in subway entrances. The animals are fed by self-appointed caretakers. They are much smaller and thinner than the animals we are used to seeing in North America - they do not eat as much food and do not grow as big. Aggression is not an issue if the animals are not deliberately bothered by stupid or cruel people. But Russia is not a culture where the stupid are protected from themselves. The animals have each other's companionship, something shelter animals do not have even if they are fortunate to spend only a short time there before finding a home. In a shelter they smell and hear each other, but cannot interact, which I imagine contributes to considerable anxiety and stress. So there is no reason to think that these feral animals suffer any more, or even nearly as much, as millions of shelter animals awaiting adoption - or death. It is another culture's acceptance of the fact that some animals will never live in homes with humans, that this is an acceptable albeit imperfect way to live, and is no reason to destroy the animals.

What about health as a criterion of standard of care? We are taught in veterinary school that spaying and neutering are beneficial for the animal's health. Spaying a dog before her first heat pretty much protects her from breast cancer; after the first heat her risk of this disease increases but is still not very high if she is spayed before the second heat. After that, a spay is protecting her from pyometra and ovarian cancer but no longer from breast cancer. Dogs who are not neutered are at risk of developing prostatic hyperplasia that is often bad enough to squeeze the urethra shut so the dog can't pee. And there are, of course, behavioural issues that hormones contribute to - but habit and training have as much to do with this as hormones. We are also taught that a neutered male dog is more likely to develop cancer of the prostate than an intact one, but this latter piece of information is rarely if ever shared with owners when we discuss reasons for neuter. Stories of testicular cancer, urethral obstruction from prostatic hyperplasia, perianal tumours, and dogs getting hit by cars while seeking a date, are the usual fare dished out to owners in preparation for neuter. Cats may be a slightly different story. Spaying a cat has roughly the same benefits as spaying a dog, and neutering a male averts spraying and roaming. Recently I had the satisfaction but also the challenge of spaying an 8 year-old cat who had never had a litter. Her uterus was warped and her ovaries fragile as butter, tearing with the slightest pull - all that hormonal influence over the years! A confined tomcat makes a very unhappy animal indeed (which is quite different from a male dog kept from mating), while letting him outside guarantees that he will sow his seed and populate the world with more kittens. I don't know of any increased health risks for neutered cats compared to intact ones. Urethral obstruction is a frequent condition in neutered males fed dry diets, but we don't know how this compares to tomcats and whether they are at risk too - they don't stick around to be observed, or to survive when afflicted. All spayed and neutered animals have a tendency to put on weight much easier than intact animals, but - look at our human population. Obesity has more to do with how much a body, animal or human, is eating than with presence or absence of gonads.

So, what is it that really determines the standard of care - health, or demographics?