Dia de Menos Gatos

Although Dia de Los Muertos is celebrated Nov 1/2nd, neither of those days was a Friday this year, which I assume is the motivation for the celebrations on Nov 3rd. I was considering going to one celebration which encouraged guests to bring photos of deceased loved ones and thinking about how I didn't actually have any pictures of my grandfathers or great grandmother. In general, I think my family has been blessed with relatively few losses, and none of them recent. So I hope you won't think it disrespecful if instead of people, I write about how on Nov. 3rd, after I'd considered not having pictures of dead relatives, I got an email from my Mom about our cat Simon.

Have very bad news about Simon. She wrote. He got killed in a hunter's trap.

Hunters are a problem around my house. The land is mostly fields and forests and although we haven't had much trouble for a while, I remember as a kid my games with my Mom being interrupted because she had to go bargan with the truck full of blaze orange men who just drove into our driveway unannounced. I remember seeing the line of orange shirts walking parallel in formation through the tree line between the neighbor's property and our marshy field area. I remember how we all had to wear blaze orange jackets if we went farther away from the road than our front lawn, and Mom being concerned that they would shoot our sheep or horse or dog. I remember when she came back from planting trees in the field after hunters standing just on the edge of our property line began shooting across at a deer running through our field, despite the fact that my Mom was blatantly, blaze-orangedly, working on our field. They shot so close to her that Mom could hear the bullets ripping the air.
And there's the blind/tree stand that I'm convinced is a few inches closer to our property every year.

I understand that some hunters are decent people. My Dad had buddies from work who politely and respecfully asked to hunt on our property, and proceeded to do so responsibly.
But, my first question as a little kid in Church was, Does God love hunters?
(The answer is yes. He even loves hunters. I was impressed by this.)

Mom said that after she noticed Simon missing, she went to look for him and decided to check an area where she'd seen a guy go on our property earlier. She found a raccoon dead in a trap, and next to it, Simon. He looked like he had a crease on his neck and all his claws were broken off. It's difficult to imagine the same cat who meowed annoyingly but was cute anyway with the bite of a trap around his neck - and the same claws which reached up to grab your pant legs in a subtle demand for attention breaking off in a last desperate battle against the solid metal trap. Actually, I can imagine it. But I don't want to.

We took a complaint against the trapper - apparently he's been trapping there for years. We've had several other cats go missing - Tiger and also Eek, who disappeared last year and, in my mind, was the best cat ever. Probably the same thing happened to them. The Sheriff gave the man a scolding, but there's not much else we can do. Trapping on our property is totally illegal, but if we make too much of a fuss, our dog might mysteriously turn up poisoned or something.

I'm a little bit frustrated that some of wonderful animals I've known have been snuffed out in such a manner - breaking off their claws while choking out their lives in a lethal trap just because someone decided that it was more important to kill things than to respect other peoples' property. I wonder how many cats that man has taken out of his trap without considering that someone's lap is going to go unwarmed and un-purred upon.


Message to hunters, if I may:
Please don't get so excited about killing animals that it becomes more important than respecting the people around you.

Thank you.