“Santa” Janowitz

Adopted 12 December 2010 in Houston,  TX – died 28 June 2023 in Fayetteville, AR
 
An animal trainer at the Houston SPCA once asked me to “borrow” the dog I was taking for a walk. “She looks non reactive and I’d like to use her a few minutes to train some aggressive dogs,” he said to my horror. Adding implausibly that the exercise would not endanger or frighten her but it would benefit the other dogs. “Johnson” had been through more than any animal should endure but on that “expert’s” word and hoping to help other homeless Dogs I handed her over. He walked her on the leash in front of some overreactive dogs who barked at her ferociouly, but she looked at them without barking back or acting afraid. On the second pass, the the barking was less enthusiastic and by the third some Dogs didn't bark at all. The "bait" Dog remained unperturbed. “Non reactive?” She was a saint! I thought.
 
All the more remarkable considering her background which, like all cruelty cases, was not devulged. As a volunteer, however, I had “contacts” like Cynthia who, witholding names (to my disappointment), told me that a case of criminal neglect was called in. As in "Houston Cops," on 22 October 2010, investigators went to the address with Constable Christine Kendrick and seized three Dogs. All had been confined in darkness, without access to water or food, living in their own feces, clearly destined to die by starvation. One was already dead, the other died on arrival at HSPCA, and "Johnson" was barely alive. Normally, in her condition she would have been euthanized to spare further suffering, but she had to serve as “evidence” for the arraignment and court case. Unable to eat on her own anymore, Johnson clung to life thanks to fluids and soft food intubation. The crime had occurred within Houston city limits.

Because the SPCA clinic provides no long-term care, cages are few and too small for a large dog to stand and walk, Johnson was placed on the adoption line on 16 November, woefully too soon.
 
And there I met her while lookin for Dogs to walk: a black skeleton standing in the center of her kennel and shaking like a leaf. Her eyes anticipating more evil to come. As a volunteer I had seen the outcome of human cruelty and stupidity on many other beings; sights I’ll never unsee, and Johnson was among the worst. She needed an advocate – me. 
 
Sunshine and exercise were as essential to her recovery as food. I walked into the pen and she remained frozen in place, trembling while I patted and gently leashed her. She would not move. Since she was half her natural body weight, I could easily lift her, and I carried her. Half-way to the lobby she started grumbling; "there goes my face" I thought, but it was the sound of contentment. We made it outside and by her reaction I surmised she had never seen the sky. 
 
We did this every day and I left instructions for other volunteers to do the same. Every day we noticed improvement and soon she was looking forward to her walks. She would walk with other volunteers, but if she saw me, however far away, she pulled in my direction.
Fostering was the only way to expand her horizons, build trust, fatten her, and make her adoptable. But not all fosters are ideal and with Christopher’s kind approval we took her. We had two other Dogs (Farhaan and Astra), at least four Cats and she was so modest they barely noticed her. In one week the improvement was noticeable and before we got too attached (I said to myself) I took her back to the adoption line, Kennel 49, shared with another unfortunate, Queen. It was traumatic for her to return to the turmoil of a shelter. Every time I walked by she was desperate. She would follow me with her eyes wherever I went. I heard her bark for the first time, and it was not a happy one. She just wanted to go back to the only safety she had ever known. 
 
Fighting my impulses to adopt her, I posted this note on her kennel:
 
“Johnson” is the name of my past; perhaps you can call me a loving name for a better life than I have known. Let me tell you about myself:
 
Quiet, clean, and gentle.
Although still shy, I soon become attached to people, children, and dogs. Cats don’t bother me at all. I’m a great believer in peaceful coexistence.
Thoughtful and eager to please, I can go far if you take me along.
You can teach me how to fetch and other people games. I already love to play with dogs.
I have an elegant stride and walk well on the leash. Let’s avoid high-traffic streets until I’m more self-assured.
Sudden moves and angry voices still bring painful memories, so please be patient and gentle with me.
Because I have known starvation, I wolf down my food, but I will eat slower when I understand that you will feed me every day.
Because I’ve been ignored, I want to be in the same room with you; please don’t ban me to the yard.
I’m just looking for a chance to live in mutual kindness and affection in a forever home. All I have to offer (other than elegant good looks) is my total devotion and gratitude. Thank you. 
 
Hoping-for-a-Name (alias “Johnson”)
 
Obviously, I was not going to let just anyone take her and the Houston SPCA doesn’t vet prospective adopters. It’s a lottery; too often “out of the pan and into the fire”. I was going to the shelter every day to give her an extra ration of food, ensure at least one daily walk, and ward off creeps. While I was exhausted, Farhaan, Astra, and the Cats were being ignored at home. Enough is enough. On 12 December 2010 I sent an email to Chris who was traveling in order to persuade him that three Dogs were really no more trouble than two. It was a long, rambling, schmaltzy justification, to which he answered, “Do it.”
 
At the adoption line, sensing she was not coming back, she was befriending toddlers, Dogs, Cats, Rabbits and even a Budgie. Behind us there was a young woman adopting two Kittens. We exchanged stories and I mentioned I’d like to rename my new Dog "Janowitz" in honor of an infuential first-grade teacher of mine, but that it probably sounded as inadequate as her old name. The woman, a Russian Jew, informed me that both names had the same Ashkenazik root and Janowitz is the German form of several Slavic toponyms equivalent to, yes, Johnson. “Bad people called her Johnson; Janowitz sounds sweet, like your teacher” she said. (I never keep former names, but the coincidence affirmed my tentative choice.) 

One of the first things Christopher and I noticed was Janowitz’s  (aka Jano, Witz, or "Santa", a title she earned) attraction to toys. None of our current Dogs cared for them, but Jano, who in all probability had never seen one, went for them instinctively. If food was being served … toy; if we got ready for a walk … toy; and anytime Chris asked “Who’s got a toh-oy?” she ran to the basket and got one or two. The house was strewn with them. Timid kisses and prolonged soulful stares were other means of expressing happiness. Her mildness made her every visitor’s favorite.
 
Then after a short while of living with us, this quiet Dog emitted an assertive bark as she ran toward the door. Someone had rang and Janowitz had decided to protect her new “lifestyle”. She became the best home-invasion deterrent there is: a Dog with a deep, threatening, persistent bark that would scare any would-be intruder. She got so good at it that she “intuited” approaches well before we could see or hear anything.
 
Not surprisingly, her voracious apetite never abated. Food was not chewed but Hoover-sucked and although she was done long before the other Dogs, she never challenged their bowls, which having been starved to near death would have surprised no one.
 
In fact, given her torturous beginnings, any odd behavior on Jano’s part would have been understood and forgiven, but, she only had goodness in her.  There was, however,  one sudden expression of fear that surfaced after several years of living with us: Sometimes she would climb the stairs from the backyard to enter the house, but then stop, cower, turn around and hide under the stairs. We had not given her any grounds for fear; not once had we yelled at her – didn’t have to. Her hiding hole was hard to access by a person. Coaxing her with words, food, toys … nothing worked until she was ready to come in, sometimes hours later in all kinds of weather. Chris then decided she might as well be comfortable and covered her hiding spot with hay and she approved. This behavior continued with varying frequency until the end. The only posible explanation was that some synister memories had come back to haunt her aging mind.
 
By 2023 Witz's hind legs were getting weeker -- not unusual in tall dogs. A veterinary checkup revealed a tumor to be further studied. Days later she had a difficult night and in the morning refused her usual treats and meds for the first time. She laid down and never got up. I managed to place her on her bed and slide her to her favorite place, behind my desk chair. 
 
On a long piece of foam I placed by her side I slept a few hours. In the morning she was breathing faster and I knew from experience that she was coming to her end. Medical intervention would only inconvenience an old dog who was duying the natural way. I spent most of 28 June by her side and, law of Nature, just as I left her for a few minutes, at 15:00 she died. This happened 160 days after Janowitz's antithesis Astra, a fellow Houston SPCA adoptee, died. 
 
My father once said that in life we eventually "run out of tears", not for lack of sorrow, but of exhaustion of having endured so much. While writing about the old-age fears that visited Janowitz is when I first cried ... not of sorrow, but rage. 
 
Janowitz's "revenge" like Holocaust survivors, was living well. Given a chance she may have licked the hands that tortured her. To this day, I would starve the culprits to death.

Eid al-Adha: whither civilization

 'With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.' Steven Weinberg

The world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims will celebrate Eid al-Adha on 28 June 2023. (1)  Sheep, Goats, Cows, and Camels will be brutally butchered, or “sacrificed” in the Muslim world by the millions -- 9 million sentient beings in Pakistan alone! Not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but significant Muslim enclaves exist all over the world and expanding. (2) 

As their mandated jihad progresses by way of migration to non-Muslim counties under the pretext of studies, business, marriage, and refuge they take with them the primitive notion of sacrifice, which in all civilized nations goes contrary to animal protection laws, humane slaughter laws, sanitation, public safety, and even the cannons of the predominant religion. (Lacking laws to protect helpless humans and other animals, a society is by definition uncivilized.)

The meekness of Western progressivism is an ally to Islamic ends. While in Muslim countries visitors are forbidden to worship in their own manner (no churches, synagogues, or temples allowed) or even wear a discrete symbol of their faith, Muslims abroad demand the free exercise of their faith in defiance of local laws and tradition. There are thousands of mosques in the US and Canada. There are mosques in South America, Australia, and a scandalous number of them in Europe. Jihad is regression and the end of Western Culture.

To gain Allah’s favor, Muslims target “clean” animals – i.e., those who chew the cud and have a divided hoof – in a feast of unparalleled savagery. Eid al-Adha cannot be understood without seeing the victims waiting their turn standing or laying in the blood of previous ones still thrashing and crying. The serial killing proceeds for days while Muslims ignore the agonies of the innocent.

To equate carnage and unfathomable suffering with holiness negates the very concept – or rather illusion -- of humans being the pinnacle of Creation. Dashain in Nepal, a frenzy of Hindu sacrifice, and other ritual mass killings survive in primitive ethnicities that can function only under brutal domination because reason and individuality require effort and intelligence. The danger ahead is that fertility rates are inversely proportional to common sense, and with at least half the human population being intrinsically cruel … well, you do the math.

And so, because of a sun-addled shepherd’s tale about a fictional “Ibrahim” killing a Ram in lieu of his son, trillions of animals have suffered and died needlessly in the name of Allah, who is as real and relevant as Little Red Riding Hood. Nor will the massacre abate soon.

Islam: Whither civilization.

https://www.islamicfinder.org/special-islamic-days/eid-al-adha-2023/  

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/muslim-majority-countries

Astra: Leader of the Pack

Adopted 1 June 2009 in Houston, TX – died 19 January 2023 in Fayetteville, AR

"Cuando!” I used to entreat Heaven when Astra’s eardrum splitting bark demanded our attention … or shredded yet another new Dog bed … or launched against passing dogs … or bolted out the door running wildly for hours killing forest creatures  …. or just stared at her food long after the other Dogs had eaten ... or the boarding kennel called informing us that our trembling, drooling Dog was a huge concern … but when the time came it was not welcome. 

Nothing less than the abiding conviction that other animals are our equals and deserve equal consideration … as does the child who doesn’t meet the parents’ expectations …  would have prevented the average person from returning Astra to the shelter.

The Truth About Snakes

 Fear of Snakes is one of the most common phobias. From mild repulsion to screaming to fainting, most people react negatively to Snakes. Many kill them, just in case.

 Is it because they are so different from the rest of us vertebrates, gliding effortlessly despite the absence of limbs or fins? Is it bad press and superstition since Genesis 3:1? Actually, of some 3000 species of Snakes worldwide fewer than 15% are venomous. 

 

Facts don’t matter to people like me whose fear of Serpents oscillated between screaming and turning to stone. Once I was returning to my car and the only way over the tangled sand-dune vegetation was a narrow trail I had successfully walked over a few hours earlier. But now, to my left I spotted a coiled Coral Snake. She was venomous, I knew, but that didn’t matter; had she been a Gartersnake I would have done the same: run back to the beach and look around for some man to carry me over that only viable exit.

 

My aversion didn’t improve until 4 May 1975, a fateful Sunday morning that would nearly become my last. On the kitchen floor there was a small snake, courtesy of one of my Cats who dragged her up from the basement. This time I screamed.

 

Bob, my then husband, still asleep at that early hour, came to the rescue and was amused at the sight of the harmless Gartersnake. Putting her out in the backyard was too close for my comfort; pets on the loose, neighbors, and pesticides didn’t bode well for the reptile. He offered to put the Snake in a coffee jar so I could release her in a field out of town on my way to work.

It took courage I didn’t know I had to agree to the insane plan, but my respect for life won and I allowed him to put the jar – breathing holes previously poked in the lid -- on the passenger seat. At 5 am on a weekend an unconfined glass container by the driver didn’t raise any alarms in our sleepy minds. We had not even heard of the “elephant effect” of loose objects in a vehicle.

 

I set off in the quiet dawn and just two blocks away from home I fearfully glanced over at the jar. The lid had come off and I saw the Snake as she was falling onto the floor. I hit the brake with force … only that in a state of absolute terror I hit the gas instead. My Toyota Corolla wrapped around a utility pole, and I was critically injured. Shattered glass from the coffee jar had severed my carotid artery. Still conscious and my eyes spared, I watched my blood spurting like a geyser from my neck.  

 

I would not have lasted 10 minutes in sleeping Tulsa, OK, had a man sipping his first cup of coffee not heard the crash through his kitchen window overlooking Lewis Avenue. He called an ambulance which dispatched from St. John’s Hospital just one block away. I received a transfusion just in time.

 

When the ambulance medic dropped by my hospital room two days later –those were the days of chivalry— I asked him whether he or anyone else had found “the Snake.” As if the medic knew the genesis of the crash! As if anyone could see a small Snake in the site of a wreckage! Of course, nobody had seen a Snake. And I found myself hoping that she survived and somehow made it safely away from the street.

 

Was that an epiphany?

 

Two weeks in the hospital with multiple broken bones, vocal cords severed, and permanent impairment of some of my abilities beg the question: Could any Snake have caused more damage than my fear of them? Not a Gartersnake to be sure, but very few others and none native to Oklahoma. 

 

I didn’t dwell on the errors of judgement Bob and I made leading to the accident. Nor did I run into any snakes until one sunny morning. I was reading in my backyard and not far from my feet, on the grass, I saw two Gartersnakes entwined with each other. I had never seen such a thing, but I knew what it was, and I was filled with wonderment and compassion that those two individuals were furthering their kind and, yes, loving each other. It was so clear to me, so beautiful, and I was free of fear.

 

I would urge anyone who is still in the grip of herpetophobia to visit Advocates for Snake Preservation https://www.snakes.ngo to learn truths that will help.

Day of Atonement

 On 22 December 1975 I killed my beloved dog Bruja. (If the Reader is so inclined, please search her name in this blog for a detailed account.) Short of a-life-for-a-life all I can do is hurt and repent. Her photo on my nightstand ensures that not a day goes by. But that’s not enough. 

The most meaningless expression in any language is “I’m sorry.” Sincere repentance demands: “How can I make it up to you?” Atonement.

 

Bruja would say: “Rescue another Red Bone Coon Hound from a killing shelter and this time, be strong, train her … don’t kill her.” Sadly, my victim is silent and so I resort to symbolism -- annual actions of atonement as banal as any religion or ritual, meant to help humans cope with their shortcomings.

 

This year, 47 years after euthanizing Bruja for no other reason than being a coward, I memorialize that innocent pup with some symbolic acts more to shame myself by their insufficiency than to fool myself into thinking they exonerate my action in any way. 

 

Fittingly, Thursday 22 December 2022 is a dreary winter day when I:

1. Bury my Cat Basmah, who died 95 days ago, to lay among the ashes of Bruja, Calpurnia, Magnus, Pertinax, Farhaan, Mago, and Argos, and also small animals from the surrounding wilderness interred at the “Companions Memorial Ground” by our house.
2. Make additional donations to nonhuman animal causes.
3. Abstain from drinking wine … when I want it most.
4. Publicly confess my crime –long after the fact—in this entry.

 Redemption is impossible and the burden of guilt well deserved.

No Heifer in a practical World Vision

 

T'is the Season of Giving. Just don't fall for the claims of two Gift Catalogs: Heifer International (Little Rock, AR) and World Vision (Federal Way, WA). Both suggest the gift of farmed animals to families in sub developed countries to help them toward self-sufficiency. It takes Lamb-like innocence to believe that. 

In countries conducive to a farm economy animals can be obtained right there. If they are not available it is because their upkeep is not feasible, as in arid environments, malaria endemic areas, etc. If farmed animals are available, however, and a person cannot barter or save enough money to buy a couple of Chickens or a Piglet then he or she shouldn't be "given" an animal.  Feeding, watering, sheltering, veterinary care ... require money and effort, and without them the "gift" dies. The family is as poor as before and animals have suffered needlessly.

Both gift catalogs picture smiling people, especially children, of every race in rapturous communion with the animals they've received from donors. The animal enclosures, pastures, watering pools, look like idealized developed-world equivalents. Let's get real: Anyone who has traveled the backroads of the USA or seen the interior of industrial farms anywhere knows that's not how animals are kept. Imagine then how they are treated in the Middle East, Africa, the Orient ... where the concept of animal welfare is alien, where there are no laws to protect animals, where the intended beneficiaries of farmed animals lack the comforts of the average Western pet. 

In reality, the animals portrayed in idyllic conditions are slaughtered inhumanely as soon as they are fattened ... if they are lucky. Else they will die of neglect, abuse, and disease. And the family in Nicaragua or the Philippines, will still be dirt poor.

Why? Because poverty doesn't happen by divine fiat, or capitalistic injustices, or climate changes, or lack of a Cow to milk, but because in much of the world people are incapable of extracting themselves from the hell they -- and no one else but they -- have created. Corrupt leaders rob and starve their own people; unbridled birth rates keep the people brutish and sick by design in places where, according to the gift catalogs, a couple of Rabbits or a Duck will propel them to a better lifestyle... And this is assuming the local strongman doesn't confiscate the animal and have a tasty dinner. It is also assuming that World Vision and Heifer actually produce what the donor has paid for.

Lies such as these organizations foist on the naive would be comical, were it not for the certainty that the animal "gifts" suffer and die miserably. How dare these so-called charities cause so much pain under the guise of altruism!? How do they get away with swindling the public and not paying taxes?

Basmah-Pastora

Adopted 26 June 2007 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia – died 19 September 2022 in Fayetteville, Arkansas

Saving the best for the last

Basmah-Pastora died by my side on the couch, watching the televised funeral of QEII. The time was 15:15 on a sunny afternoon. Basmah is the last of 23 Cats I have had the privilege of rescuing since in 1974 Bob Monforte brought LaPrecious into our life. Previously I avoided cats as much as I courted Dogs, but that first Cat and the uninterrupted line of rescuees who followed (up to seven in residence one time, plus Dogs) bolstered my appreciation for felines. 

Basmah was the repository of that vital stream flowing uninterruptedly since LaPrecious through Miniman, Achilles, Barfly, Paquita, Petunia, MiReina, Esmeralda, Pomponia, Mimosa, Pandora, Perla, Calpurnia, Violeta, Sultana, Pertinax, Antares, Montecor, Minutia, Rocky, and Simba. With Basmah ends the continuance of singular lifes who lived on in those who survived them. Their stories are elsewhere in the ProubastaReader. Here is Basmah’s:

While Chris and I worked for Saudi Aramco in Dhahran, I regularly fed a yellow tabby who lived in a culvert near 122 Falcon Court where we resided. Rufino was one of countless abandoned and feral cats who eke out a living in the streets and jebels of the Kingdom. Like all strays regardless of species their life is short and miserable; wily survivors are trapped by “animal control” and drowned in the trap.

One morning I noticed a flash of white darting from bush to bush near where I always placed the kibble. Hunger won over fear and a small white and black Cat fearfully approached the food. Having seen all manner of desperate conditions among the animals of that land, this one surpassed them all: her face was half shattered, maggot-ridden, and with one eye dangling from tendons. The toughened survivors of the culvert ran her away.

Rescuing is a noble way to complicate one’s own life, and still I ran home, grabbed a carrier and a can of Tuna, and ran back to the bushes where she, I hoped, had taken cover. I hunkered down in wait. Not a minute later, the desperately hungry Cat darted into the carrier and I slammed the door shut. That was the easy part.

Dhahran’s two expert veterinarians agreed that the injuries were due to a crushing blow with a blunt object, like a club or a board. The right cheek, eye socket, mandible, and teeth, were broken. The luxated eye was irreparable and the remaining eye’s vision was but 20% due to an old lesion.  She was also emaciated and in a state of panic, making euthanasia seem like the kindest course.  

But death was what her attacker had intended and I would not abide. I persuaded Rory Cessford and his partner (Kiwi and Scott DVMs) to go for broke to save her. Three hours of reconstructive surgery later, against all odds, the frail Cat was alive.

Elusive and nearly blind she had nowhere to go but to our home in the Dhahran residential area, where two large, behaviorally challenged dogs – one Okie and one Saudi -- resided. Oddly enough, this Cat, who was justifiably afraid of people and of her own kind, was attracted to dogs. While in Dhahran, however, she remained confined to the top floor much as she wanted to befriend shy Magnus (12 OCT 2018) and Farhaan (31 JAN 2011) who scared even the local bomb-sniffing Dog handlers.

Every day I went home for lunch and sat in her safe room. It was there that a few weeks later she first let me touch her ever so briefly and I felt we had come as close as possible to avenging her without the eye-for-an-eye justice I so vehemently wanted – and always will. And so Basmah (Arabic for “smile,” because of her partial absence of lips, and Pastora for her similarities to Pandora, 20 MAY 2017) steadily began to enjoy life, even meeting the dogs almost nose-to-nose on the stairs -- which Farhaan dared not climb due to his own past traumas in Al Khobar. 

In late 2007 Chris accepted a teaching position at the University of Houston. Little did my American Cats in Tulsa know that their 9/11 was coming.

A long trip with three “special-needs” nonhumans requires devotion to duty. Maybe that’s why so many people move chattels at great cost, leaving their living, feeling companions behind in a dastardly betrayal of trust. Much can go wrong in the handling of live “animal cargo” on airplanes. (Note: Always talk to the Captain in person [!] when traveling with pets to ensure the cargo hold is pressurized and conditioned like the cabin.) We researched the best airline for nonhuman travelers – then it was KLM—and initiated the process of obtaining health certificates, exit visas, USA Embassy permits, etc. All was ready.  

The luggage was loaded in the SUV of a friend who came to drive us to the Dammam Airport intoxicated (a double jeopardy in a country where alcohol is strictly forbidden). A taxi was also waiting for the extra luggage, me and the Cat’s carrier. It was a long drive to Dammam and we were behind schedule; missing our flight meant enduring again the strict bureaucracy required for expatriates (i.e., aliens, i.e., anyone not born Saudi) to enter and exit the land of the Prophet, pbuh.

Knowing the consequences of my delay but incapable of crating a crazed Cat, I shreaked so the men waiting outside could hear: “I’m not leaving without Basmah, g—dammit! We’ll live in the desert! You all go, go, gooooo!!”

Clearly, I needed help. Without responding, Chris flew upstairs, burst into the bathroom were Basmah was yowling and puffed up behind the stool, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, and dumped her in the carrier. We were off.

The three pet carriers bore stickers: “USA OR BUST!”

Thirty hours later, on 16 December 2007, we landed in Houston. Dogs and Cat were alive, surprisingly calm (or catatonic, hard to tell) and no one had soiled his or her kennel – a feat Chris and I could not equal. About Basmah’s composure I surmised that airtravel and its attendant horrors were a picnic compared to life in the mean streets of Arabia.

While Chris was getting settled in his new job and looking for a house in a reasonably safe Houston barrio, I squated at my old Tulsa home with Lanette, her pets, and the Cats I had left behind (Sultana, Pomponia, Calpurnia, Pertinax, Antares, and Montecor). Surrounded by Cats, Basmah’s pinned up aggression against her former tormentors exploded, particularly against Antares and Montecor who, like her, were barely socialized and hid in the basement for as long as she was there.

Finally, on January 2008 we were all reunited and settled in a pleasant neighborhood, albeit encircled by habitats where taquerías and neglected animals were the norm.  

Basmah came to ignore the female felines and fell in love with Pertinax (1 JAN 2021). Unable to be relocated, the five semi-or-unsocialized cats remained in Tulsa, well cared for as usual by Lanette.

At one of our then frequent house parties, Basmah got out of her safe room and bolted out of the main door. I saw it happen and from that moment on nothing mattered to me, nothing, but finding her. Only similar events with wayward companions (Majo, Maximus, and Achilles – all found) caused such distress but worse with Basmah because scared she was unapproachable.  

The details of my 24-hour/5-day quest to find Basmah would require time and wine to be told, but because the radius of territory a Cat is likely to travel was plastered with plasticized (mea culpa) posts and I roamed the area every three hours day and night wailing her name, a neighbor finally called with coordinates.  When Basmah and I spotted each other on Sylmar Road I was spared the impossibility of catching her because she ran home ahead of me! I have never been so elated … and probably so where the neighbors.

There was one more move in store for Basmah in 2012 to Fayetteville, Arkansas. By then the household Dogs were all Houston rescuees --Mago, Astra, and Janowitz (new arrivals Argos in 2016  and Tobias in 2019 didn't bother her) -- and the only Cat still alive was her beloved Pertinax. This perfect set of companions sped up her progress toward trusting us and even sharing our bed sometimes. (Oddly enough, in Dhahran, before I could touch her, she sometimes sneaked in bed and slept wrapped around my head.)

Dhahran 2007; Fayetteville 2012; Pertinax & Basmah 2019.

When Pertinax died in 2020, Basmah’s delicate psyche could have regressed but he Dogs, I believe, saved the day. Given her attraction to them, she associated with them as much as they let her, culminating in “the running of the Dogs” – a civilized version of the Spanish running of the Bulls.  At 5:30 am she would be poised at the bedroom door and when the dogs trotted out to go potty, Basmah ran in front of them making sure they caught up with her to form an odd quadriga. 

Her exclusive time with us -- for she never accepted other people -- was during the “Chris Crises in the Morning” – i.e., coffee and news read aloud by Chris -- when she climbed on my lap to be “messed with” (bouncing, squeez’n, kissing …) which she bore with pleased indifference.

When Basmah began losing her apetite in late August 2022 Dr. Rob Jones agreed that given her intractability, obtaining a blood sample could irreparably damage 14 years of built up trust for an uncertain diagnostic and treatment.  Nature would decide. She ate some Gerber’s baby food for a few days, but kept losing weight and energy.

Contrary to logic, as Basmah weakened she grew bolder. One morning she curled up on Chris’ lap during the “Crises” – first time ever. Increasingly toward the end she slept between us. Two nights before her last we noticed she wasn’t on her pad. On her wobbly legs she had left the comfort of our bed to lay on a corner of Janowitz’s – who was too shocked to move. 

Like octogenarians who skydive for the first time, Basmah had satisfied her main desire: Sleeping with Dogs. 

Basmah’s courage inspires. One has to marvel at someone born in adversity -- her capacity to trust brutalized from the start— who, cast unto incomprehensible scenarios would, by the sheer power of her Will, not only perform well but shine brightly for those with eyes to see. 

I have mourned many companions. In Basmah I grief for her and, again, for the 22 Cat friends who preceded her and whose legacy she embodied.