Cat Story

I like a brave cat but I've never known a cat that was brave all on its own. That's what human beings are for, especially cat owners. We're "backup" when a cat wants to be brave but just can't seem to muster all the courage necessary for a particular cat task.

They might be able to come up with, say, half the courage necessary— maybe a little more or a little less — and that's all I require from a cat, male or female. The willingness to do a little work around the house and around the yard for his or her keep. It gives them a sense of worth that a totally lazy and dependent cat might not ever get to experience. The cat in this brief "cat story" is not really mine but my mother's, a seventeen-year-old orange-and-white tomcat. His name is Lucky and I've blogged about him before (click on the cat clipart image for that story).

Anyway, about seven or eight years ago when Lucky was nine or ten years old, I spotted him being cornered by four deer between the chain link fence surrounding our little pond and a big wall of briar bushes. This particular spot is where I used to pitch horseshoes and it's about a thirty yard "holler" across the pond from our birdfeeder. The deer were actually eating grass over there and Lucky seemed to be watching them from inside one of the horseshoe pits. Then one of the deer started stamping his front hooves at Lucky and that made me feel protective.

"Hey!" I hollered at the deer and that made all four deer stop and look at me from across the pond. "Hey, that cat's not bothering you. That's our cat and you know that. This is his yard so you guys be nice to him, now." I knew these deer didn't understand English but I know animals understand a person's tone of voice. And I like to think that I have a little telepathic communications link with all animals. I work on it and it seems to work back. Anyway, the deer went back to grazing on the blade grass and the dandelion leaves and that gave Lucky an excuse to suddenly feel brave as hell.

To my utter amazement and sheer delight, Lucky left the horseshoe pit and began threading his way between the legs of the grazing deer. Threading and weaving and rubbing and putting his scent on them, like they were now part of his special world. But the real shocker was that the deer let Lucky rub up against their legs as they grazed. All four of them. I turned back to the house and saw my mother watching from the den's sliding glass doors, shaking her head in disbelief.

"All he needed was a little backup," she said as I stepped inside the house and I knew she was right. Hell, if I was a house cat only several inches high, surrounded by four deer several feet high, I'd need a little "backup" myself. And I'd feel damn "lucky" to get it, too.

The Deer-ly Departed

There are hardly any deer left in Pennsylvania. You can drive through Sproul State Forest for hours without ever seeing a single one. In fact, you can spend all day in the car in north central Pennsylvania and not even see a single grouse, pheasant or turkey, either. But back to the dwindling Pennsylvania deer population. The reason you hardly see any deer these days is because most of them are DEAD.

Most of them were shot and killed by salivating hunters who just have to kill something with their bows and rifles and rifled shotguns and muzzle loaders each fall or else they don’t feel like real men. I'm not talking about the traditional Pennsylvania deer hunters, people who really like venison and who want to put some of that type of low-fat, high protein meat on the dinner table. That's a whole different story.

I'm taking about the "trophy" hunters who are helping to put Pennsylvania white-tailed deer on the endangered species list. These are the habitually frustrated hunters who will kill a doe rather than leave the woods empty-handed. Especially now that the boneheads in the Pennsylvania Game Commission made it legal to kill a doe as well as a buck for the entire "deer season". The male and female deer that are still alive in the woods are hiding from the thousands of roaring ATVs that are tearing up the Pennsylvania landscape. What asinine crap. Doesn't anybody walk in the woods anymore?

The flip side of this true but sorry-ass story is the Pennsylvania Game Commission, itself, which takes advantage of the fact that there are lots and lots of feverish trophy hunters in Pennsylvania who want to kill animals just so they can feel like real men. So the state sells more and more hunting licenses each year. Ten times more hunting licenses than there are animals to kill.

And, as if that isn't enough, The Game Commission doctors the animal population statistics to make it look like there are a lot more deer in the state than there actually are. They do that because a false scenario like that sets the hook in the salivating mouths of the out-of-state trophy hunters who come in from Ohio, New Jersey and Maryland to hunt our Pennsylvania game. City slickers who just have to take a life somewhere in the Pennsylvania Wilds with their high-end rifles or else they don't feel like real men.

It slays me when I hear the "big buck" trophy hunters complaining about how there aren't any deer in the woods during hunting season. Well, hell, of course there aren’t any deer this year. You dumb bastards killed them all last year. Their constant complaining about no deer for them to kill is positively ridiculous. It's about as stupid as walking into a liquor store, killing the clerk, and then complaining that there's no one there to wait on you.

Sorry-ass losers. What stupid crap.

The Pennsylvania state government is all about making money. Anywhere and any way and at any time. And then turning it over to Governor Ed Rendell so he can help out his hometown, Philadelphia, with its sorry-ass infrastructure problems.

And this is why you rarely see deer anymore on a Sunday drive in the state of Pennsylvania.