I Brought a Tiny Tiger into My Home—and Did Not Get Eaten

“Why would anyone keep a tiny tiger in the house?” I asked my immediate circle approximately 1,000 times over the course of the last 20 years. Never mind that I’d made it a lifelong habit of always having at least one tiny wolf by my side.

To me, housecats were miscreants who spent their days plotting the overthrow of their rulers à la Animal Farm’s Napoleon and Snowball. That was made quite clear by the multitudes of felines I’d met who’d bat their eyes for a gentle pet only to sink their claws into my wrist moments later. Or, a decade ago, when my (very temporary) foster kitten, Elphaba Bean, would glare at me and then effortlessly slide my houseplant off the edge of the dining room table. Never mind that I internally cherished the moments she’d scale my entire body for the chance to lie on my chest purring with content, or that I volunteered monthly with a local cat rescue, or that I secretly melted every time a kitten photo crossed my social media feeds.

Devious schemers, those cats—every last one of them. Every last one, that is, until I encountered a 2-pound kitten with a black nose bordered by a white face lurking on my porch in the summer of 2021.

She was too young, too bold, for the wild, with her contrasting tones that blew the gaff on her charade as a chameleon amidst the shrubbery. I secured a kitten-sized trap from the cat rescue. I knew what I had to do.

By the next day, there was a dazed tuxedo kitten pressing herself so tightly into the corner of my laundry room that she just might have metamorphosized into the wallpaper. Success. I would spend the next few weeks vetting, spaying, and socializing her before finding her a loving home, wiping my hands clean, and calling it a day. I could add the victory to my list of good deeds for the year.

Then I stepped back outside, and there she was again, blinking up at me—only reversed? White nose, black face.

Oh. Her brother.

Soon, they were both squeezing themselves behind, above, and under cabinets, the washing machine, my fish tank. I shoved balls of towels and blankets and miscellaneous boards into every orifice to keep them out of these crevices and in my sights until I realized I had nothing left to dry off with after a shower. But despite their digging (coupled with an uncanny ability to shrink to approximately a quarter of their girth), my makeshift blockades worked, and the kittens soon acquiesced to being gently petted as they devoured their meals.  

But this isn’t their story, those two kittens who, after weeks of living in my laundry room, being inundated by my persistent company, and being carted to and from traumatizing vet visits, are now hulking, thriving cats living their best lives with my boyfriend’s mother.

This is the story of their birth mother, whom I made the executive decision to trap just two nights into the kittens’ perceived imprisonment after I nearly ran her over as she chilled in the middle of my street, unperturbed by my oncoming headlights. With raindrops pattering on my roof, I set a trap and 10 minutes later returned to vibrant emerald eyes blinking into mine and a jet black face accentuated by a petite white mustache.

Mother and kittens hissed and fought at first, as though they’d lost their memory of one another. But by the next morning, all misgivings had been abandoned, and the 8-week-old twins had returned to suckling their young mom, who was crawling with intestinal parasites and lethargic. She silently tolerated my incessant visits to her nursery room, apparently teetering between relief at the breaks from nursing and suspicion over my intentions with her progeny.

As she healed, she remained aloof, but this mama cat I began calling Chia barely uttered a hiss and never once tried to bite. It was hard to fathom that she’d always been alone, feral; perhaps, rather, she’d been raised by a neighborhood family and then been abandoned. But I posted online; I sought her people—and no one ever came looking.

At a mere two years of age, according to Chia’s vet, she was a dedicated, focused mom. She let those kittens nurse until 13 weeks when they finally went to their new home. And though she retreated under the fish tank for almost two days after their departure, I knew the agonizing decision to split them up was what needed to be done. In my humble abode with a pig and one of those aforementioned tiny wolves, a family of three felines would not fit.

It was time for Chia, too, to find a home of her own, yet a month or so in, it had become apparent that home was with me. After all, she’d chosen my yard, of all yards, in which to deposit her kittens, somehow knowing, or hoping, she’d find safety. A tiny tiger had taken up permanent residence, and it felt perfectly rational to accommodate this conspiratorial predator. She camped out in the laundry room by day, averse to confrontations with my tiny wolf, Powder, and prowled for unsuspecting crickets at night. The tenuous relationship she’d begun to forge with Powder, though, was cut short upon Powder’s sudden departure due to a massive cancer of the heart that December. I was all Chia had left, apart from the potbellied pig inhabiting the living room with whom she had no desire to associate.

Chia’s nightly escapades throughout the house grew longer, and her hours beneath the fish tank shrank. She yowled like a lost child while I slept, so I invited her into my room. When she’d finally recovered from her worm-induced malnutrition, she instituted a ritual of early morning rampages with her stuffed mouse that led to many sleep-deprived workdays on my part.

Although grumpy with fatigue, I relished in Chia’s youthful frenzy, which injected life into a household left vacant of Powder’s once effervescent presence. Still, in my season of grief, I couldn’t reciprocate that energy. We both needed a friend.

That’s when Chia’s new sister, Lip Gloss, a formerly neglected senior lady from a hoarding case, entered the picture, or rather, strutted in with the air of a queen claiming her rightly throne on my pillow. Chia’s first reaction was to smack LG and run away. But LG didn’t blink—she simply smacked her back. She could take it.

Over the coming weeks, the new frenemies interacted like stars of a cat soap opera. Despite their overt daily scuffles over tensions invisible to me, though, Chia’s confidence was soaring. Her midnight mewling simmered out, she became willing to nap within six feet of her sister, and the two tested the waters at brief games of tag. Peace descended on the household, punctuated only periodically by mutual slaps. The challenge, it seemed, had inspired compromise and adaptation.

If only humans handled conflicts like these cats, I mused one day. We’d just hurl a bad word, storm off, and sit in our respective corners to mull over what we’d done before coming back and apologizing an hour later. Perhaps we’d stop threatening nuclear warfare to prove our own might, or at least stop passive aggressively blasting our neighbor on Nextdoor when they let their grass get 6 inches too tall.

A few months in, I was narrating my adventures in feline companionship to my aunt, a lifelong cat lady. “Just wait. Chia has some surprises in store for you,” she declared.

I didn’t really believe her, assuming that with Chia, and cats broadly, “What you see is what you get.” But one day, during my newly acquired habit of reading about cats in my free time as I worked toward completing my own transition into a cat lady, I learned that it can take between 6 and 12 months for two cats to form a solid friendship. In my experience with dogs, generally, they either were or they weren’t friends. They wore their feelings on their sleeves. Cats, meanwhile, quietly survey their surroundings, formulate a hypothesis, hash out a plan of action, assess the results, and repeat until they’ve refined a strategy. They’re subtle scientists, on a path of evolution.

Sure enough, over the next year, my aunt’s predictions came to fruition. Chia and Lip Gloss are not only in an intense love-hate sisterhood consisting of Chia fervently grooming Lip Gloss’ face until the latter bats her away with impudence (only to beckon her to come play hours later)—but Chia also offers me, the human she’s supposed to be dethroning any day now, plentiful sandpaper kisses in return for a mere scratch on the back. The pair started to sleep cuddled on either side of me all night, purring like a massage chair. And now, Chia only disappears under the fish tank when the vacuum comes out.

For over 30 years, I surrounded myself with canines who felt often like an extension of me, with their unwavering affection and codependency. I couldn’t have conceived of welcoming into my home an unpredictable being who clears countertops in one leap and inexplicably, according to science, is aware at all times of my exact position in the house without even laying eyes on me. (Seriously, if that spy skill isn’t evidence of a conspiracy waiting to happen, I’ve got nothing.) I never could have predicted becoming the narrator in Taylor Swift’s “Gorgeous,” who sings, “Guess I’ll just stumble on home to my cats.” But here I am, enamored by my cats so much that I even painted the line on a cat-themed cardigan, which I purchased through an auction benefiting that cat rescue that let me borrow those traps that summer. And it all started because of the mama cat I came so close to running over that August night who now, with a complete lack of ferocity, licks my nose every time I offer her a kiss.

Oh, and as of early 2023, we’re now a three-cat family.

This story was written with the help of Tina Marie Johnson of Blue Mountain Creative Consulting.

Cat’s Permanent Grin Was Caused by Years of Neglect

Exactly 3 months, 12 days, and 4 hours ago, my entire world was shattered. Powder—my soul dog, my best friend—was ripped from my life by an aggressive cancer just as fast as she’d collided with it in early 2009 when my car nearly collided with her, a white puppy lost in the road at midnight. The pain has been so raw, so jarring, so unimaginable that I still can’t write about it. But in the depths of this sadness, an almost equally unimaginable being pounced into my life. That being is Lip Gloss.

It was only a couple weeks into the hurricane that had become my new normal after Powder’s loss, intensified by the near death (twice) of my father and the actual death of my second mom, Sherrie (2021 was quite the year for me), that I began the search for a feline friend on Petfinder. Nightly, I pored over pages and pages containing tens of thousands of cats, knowing it would be years, maybe decades, before I could welcome another dog into my heart—but that I still had a lonely cat at home and the space to offer to another in need. Yet equally needy, equally sad, they all appeared, yearning not to become one of the millions who enter shelters and never emerge alive each year. I couldn’t choose which cat to save and which to turn my back on. Although I don’t believe in “signs,” I needed one to overcome the paralysis.

The “sign” came when the name “Powder” flickered across my screen above the image of a plain white cat. Without even reading his description, I rushed to put in my application. This was the cat I had to have to fill that hole in my heart, if it could ever be filled.

Not an hour later, I was reading more about my cat-to-be and immediately learned that he had a brother who had to be adopted with him. They were an inseparable pair, but space for two in my humble abode, I did not have. I sighed as I emailed the shelter, Shenandoah Valley Animal Services Center (SVASC) of Lyndhurst, Virginia, withdrawing my application. Fate seemed to be taunting me like an uncatchable laser pointer.

But SVASC wasn’t ready to give up on me. “Is there another cat you’re interested in?” they replied. I halfheartedly scrolled the website, knowing I’d never find another Powder. And I was right—there will never be another of Powder, not for me, and not for this world. She is irreplaceable, and her loss is incurable.

But who I did find was Lip Gloss, a 12-year-old feline with a permanent grin—or grimace, depending on how you look at her—etched onto her face. She was strange; she was beautiful; and she was a sweet senior who had been looked over for two straight months. She instantly became mine, and I, hers.

Lip Gloss’ curious expression is actually the result of a “rodent ulcer,” or indolent ulcer, resulting from an ongoing, untreated flea infestation at her former home, where she was hoarded along with 12 other cats. According to the shelter, her fitting name “Lip Gloss” comes from the so-titled song by recording artist Lil Mama. Her original name, given by her previous family, was Mama, which makes me wonder if she’d previously been bred. The neglect at that home also left her with a cauliflower ear, crumpled because of a hematoma due to ear mites or an infection.

Despite her humbled appearance, Lip Gloss strutted into my house and made herself at home immediately. Like the queen she is, she has taken over my bed, roosting each night on my entire pillow and leaving me the corners. Sometimes, she prefers to burrow under the blanket and will meow until I oblige her by lifting the covers so she can crawl in—almost perfectly mimicking Powder, who whined incessantly for the same prize: being tucked in for a good night’s sleep.

Lip Gloss carries not only her unique physical features from her past, but also her own emotional baggage. She hoards each meal like it might be her last, nearly tripping me as she awaits feeding and then scarfing the food down so fast she occasionally throws it back up. I’ve resorted to feeding my other cat, Chia, in a separate room, lest Lip Gloss devour her entire bowl, too. But at least I’ve taught Lip Gloss some manners: she’ll sit every time, without fail, for a meal or even a morsel of food.

As predictably as her insatiable appetite, Lip Gloss does something else every day: she makes me laugh—a feat I never thought possible after Powder’s passing. Whether appearing apparently from nowhere beside my face baring her teeth and breathing like Darth Vader through her mouth (she also suffers from periodic bouts of stuffy nose brought on by feline herpes), sleeping upside-down with her fangs on display, or using her paw to hold up her bulbous tummy as she grooms herself, Lip Gloss is a perpetual comedian.

It was terrifying to adopt a senior cat so soon after I lost Powder. I thought I might lose Lip Gloss, too, in mere days. I rushed her to the vet in those early weeks at every sneeze or excessive trip to the water bowl (we’re exploring a possible, treatable thyroid issue currently, so my fears haven’t been completely unjustified). Death has surrounded me lately, stealing my ability to enjoy beautiful moments and replacing it with a loudly ticking clock in the back of my mind that counts down my own mortality, and that of everyone I know and love. At first, all I could think about was that I might only have two, or maybe four, years with Lip Gloss, if I’m lucky. And days ticked by unappreciated, and with them, beautiful moments. I broke down in bed for days and nearly missed the first time my cats broached their inexplicable silent battle over territory, lowered their batting paws, and simply played together.

Lip Gloss has forced me to stop missing those moments. I know her years are short. In the scheme of things, mine are too. We will all be plunged into the unknowable oblivion, like Powder before us. But we can make something of each day. I might not move mountains, but I can play a song on my ukulele; I can write a blog; I can post a photo revealing the marvels of the tiny shrimp who mate for life at the Hawaiian seashore on social media and reach untold people with a compassionate message. I can laugh at my cat snoring upside-down, knowing she had the strength to leave behind her years of neglect and keep grinning.

Thanks to Lip Gloss, today, I’m wide awake, and I grin, too.

Here’s Why Trademarked Glowing Fish Aren’t Such a Bright Idea

Saltwater aquariums, though prized for their glorious colors and living reefs, are a massive undertaking. And the havoc the exotic fish trade wreaks on tropical sea life is no secret. But for people who are itching to adorn their homes with vibrant fish, science came up with an easy solution: fluorescent freshwater fish. And the pet industry lapped it up–but at what cost?

A couple years ago I stumbled upon the GloFish® website–yes, trademark and all–and I was transfixed by the words: “GloFish® fluorescent fish are born brilliant! They are not painted, injected or dyed. They inherit their harmless, lifelong color from their parents. They get their stunning color from a fluorescence gene and are best viewed under a blue light.”

I was floored. It read like an advertisement for a new car. Toying with living beings this way hardly seemed harmless. I needed to know more.

These fish were among the first genetically modified animals to have been made available on a commercial scale. But their journey to pet store shelves was not quite intentional. At the turn of the 21st century, scientists from Singapore were attempting to engineer fish who could glow in the presence of certain environmental toxins as a biomarker for pollutants. They inserted fluorescent jellyfish genes into zebrafish, creating the first iteration of glowing freshwater fish.

The patented technology eventually caught the eye of the company that would ultimately create and trademark the GloFish, available now in zebrafish, tetras, danios, sharks, and barbs. As I write this, the brand is currently marketing its “Mardi Gras collection” on its website, comprising two Moonrise Pink tetras, two Galactic Purple tetras, and two Sunburst Orange tetras, to commemorate the festive occasion.

Video captured at a Virginia Petco store

Despite opposition from groups like the Center for Food Safety, the glowing fish made their way to American store shelves with a stamp of approval from officials who claimed that the captive fish posed no threat to wildlife or the food supply. (And a study later attempted to back that up, documenting that non-GMO male fish out-competed GloFish with female mates, which would eventually lead to the disappearance of the fluorescent trait in a population–should a stray GloFish ever make his way into the natural environment, that is.)

The GloFish line, from a commercial perspective, has been a massive success. The company’s sales now comprise about 10 percent of the entire aquarium industry.

And it’s easy to see why: Many people don’t want the hassle of setting up and maintaining a saltwater aquarium just to enjoy brilliantly colored fish in their living rooms. Freshwater is (relatively) easy. Plus, more and more consumers are becoming aware of the death and destruction caused by the saltwater fish trade, which pulls over 20 million fish from the waters of places like the Philippines and Hawaii every year and results in six fish deaths per live fish sold due to dangerous and cruel capture and shipping methods. And let’s not get started on the extensive coral reef damage.

Breeding fish in a captive, contained environment seemingly circumvents most of those issues.

But I was still left wondering if, throughout these past two decades of tinkering with the genetics of these tiny beings in a lab, anyone ever stopped to consider a fundamental question: What’s in it for the fish themselves? Admittedly, apart from making them the life of a house party, the modification doesn’t seem to inflict any other known physical changes on them. They eat, swim, and live just like regular zebrafish, tetras, and barbs. The process of breeding fish from already modified fish is not inherently invasive (unlike chemically dyeing or injecting inks into fish–two common, but undoubtedly cruel, practices in the aquarium industry that lead to illness and high mortality).

Yet, clearly, fluorescence won’t provide an average tetra with an evolutionary advantage, either. (Imagine a neon orange freshwater fish trying to hide from a predator behind a few strands of seaweed or a pile of grey rocks.)

So are we left with net result of zero in our cost-benefit analysis of GloFish welfare? Not quite.

The moment that Yorktown Technologies, the original company behind the GloFish, entered the picture, this genetic manipulation in the name of science became a gimmick.

The goal: Make the look and feel of saltwater tanks more accessible. Make freshwater fish prettier, more enticing, more consumable. Like a vacuum, a new car, or a frozen burrito, these fish needed to be branded.

The aquarium industry has turned these fishes’ genetics into a commodity that it markets to us as an innovative way to spruce up our home decor. After all, like any industry, it has to churn out fresh products to keep us interested. And, so far, it’s worked: There are over 9 million fish sold by this multi-billion-dollar industry living in American homes, from an endless array of Betta fish varieties to the dainty angelfish and the goldfish brought home after a carnival game victory.

For many years, I was one of the millions of consumers lured in by the appeal of having my very own fish tank. In college, I was gifted with a tetra who looked remarkably like the “Moonrise Pink” variety of GloFish–with one major exception: He didn’t glow.

Miraculously, I loved this fish, whom I named Clapper, just the same, regardless of his slightly less lustrous hue. Clapper traveled with me from dorm room to dorm room, to my first house after graduation, and to my apartment after my relationship with my boyfriend at the time fell apart.

We shared many memories, including one that made my heart skip a beat: Midway through a thorough tank cleaning, I noticed that Clapper was missing from the jug I’d temporarily placed him in. Within a few seconds, I found him–on the floor, wedged between the washing machine and the wall. Somehow, I managed to slowly slide the machine out enough–without crushing the tiny being–and scoop him back into the water before suffocation set in.

I spent every day for months silently apologizing to him. Because I loved him.

I was diligent with his care, and Clapper remained physically healthy up until a couple of days before he passed. He met his expected lifespan of five years–and then some.

Yes, we shared many memories: memories of me crying; memories of me laughing; and, most often, memories of me leaving and coming back again, sometimes with a friend, or a new love, or a new painting.

Every day, though, Clapper stayed there, swimming in circles, silently watching me from behind his glass wall.

I didn’t know the inner toll captivity was taking on this social being for much of his life. I didn’t realize that he was lonely and isolated because tetras need schools to thrive. Or that with only a few artificial plants and rocks to enrich his environment, his life was just a slow, drawn-out death.

Today, most of us have started to question the ethics of confining magnificent mammals like dolphins and whales to the equivalent of a bathtub at marine parks for guests to gawk over. As the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) explains, films like Blackfish have “challenged people to recognize the cruelty of keeping large, intelligent, and sentient animals in such small tanks.” However, AWI continues, fish are also “sentient—showing far more cognitive abilities than they are given credit for—and few, if any, spend their entire lives in the wild in the volume of water contained in a standard fish tank.”

Remember the fish who used a rock as a tool to crack open his meal? Or the pufferfish who builds an intricate sand sculpture to attract a mate? Fish scientist Dr. Culum Brown states that “it would be impossible for fish to survive as the cognitively and behaviorally complex animals they are without a capacity to feel pain.”  The scientific research for fish complexity and sentience abounds, and in 2018, Smithsonian Magazine (finally) declared, “It’s official: Fish feel pain.”

Gaining traction for the notion of fish as individuals worthy of ethical consideration is an uphill battle, though, especially with outfits like Amazon offering up 1-gallon aquariums (a volume infinitely too small to house any fish species long-term) accompanied by descriptions like, “Compact design fits almost anywhere – perfect for dorm, office or home.”

As my fellow animal advocates and I try to rewrite the public discourse on how we ought to think about our relationships with fish, such captions continue hammering home the message: Fish are decorations, trinkets, objects. We don’t maximize their space for their well-being; we minimize it for our convenience.

And, in the case of our genetically engineered friends: We don’t have to settle for dull fish when we can have spectacularly striking GloFish.

It’s time to embrace fish for who, not what, they are. And we can start by letting them keep their natural colors.

 Petition closed with 499 signatures.

Our Cockatoo Died Flying Cargo. Don’t Let This Happen Again.

He was supposed to live 70 years. Instead, as he traveled to his forever home in paradise, a series of mistakes and, ultimately, negligence killed him.

When I was about 11 years old, my family adopted an umbrella cockatoo. Instead of resembling the mighty white birds with towering head crests soaring through the forests of Indonesia, though, he was skinny, trembling, and rather naked when I first laid eyes on him.

His pale grey torso reminded me of a turkey corpse, plucked bare before Thanksgiving dinner. But he had inflicted this damage all on his own. Before my family took him in, his first guardian, who’d had him since he first hatched, gave birth to a human child, who soon consumed all her attention. The bird was often relegated to his cage, and there, languishing in boredom and isolation, he grew neurotic and angry, quite possibly jealous of the newborn stealing away all his mom’s affection.

So this bird turned on his own flesh, plucking feathers from his chest and dancing anxiously to and fro just to release some energy.

Such behavior is all too common in the captive population of parrots worldwide. Because of captive breeding and the illegal wildlife trade, tens of millions of parrots now occupy US homes and facilities–and thousands of them end up homeless every year as they become too rambunctious and under-stimulated in a caged environment or they outlive their human caretakers.

This particular cockatoo was one such bird–but, fortunately, my mom was ready and willing to jump to his rescue.

He came into our home with the name Lilah. But at the first vet visit, we learned that Lilah was indeed a he, not a she. Yet the name remained, as it was the primary tool from the English language he’d clung to for communication with our species. We couldn’t take that from him.

“Lilah?” he’d often ask in a quivering voice, as though pleading for food, affection, anything at all.

And those things, he soon learned, he would receive in abundance. At the offset, he became my cuddlebug. We were, more or less, around the same age. As an only child, I began to see him as a bit of a younger, talkative brother–like a toddler, first learning about the world and expressing his thoughts via a series of babbles and chuckles.

One evening, I approached his cage wearing a bright red tank top and reached in for some snuggle time, as I had done dozens of times before. But this time was different. This time, he rewarded me with a sharp, deep bite to my finger. Blood immediately pooled, and I wailed in response and ran away.

At that time, I was a loud, boisterous preteen with an opinion about everything. And the vivid red hue of my shirt was like a blaring “danger” sign. I’d scared him, and he reacted the only way he knew how.

But the incident scarred me enough to keep a healthy distance from him from then forward. And in my sulky teenage years, I found myself increasingly annoyed by his calls and shrieks, natural vocalizations that are used freely by flocks of wild parrots inhabiting the jungle, but are often found to be a nuisance by those attempting to confine these exuberant birds indoors.

I’ve always loved animals, but with Lilah, I could only love him from afar.

My mom, though, never wavered in her bond with him. Despite the handful of times he’d hauled off and pierced her nose with his beak upon being frightened by a man in a baseball cap or the vacuum cleaner, she adored him.

So, naturally, as my parents planned their big move to the Big Island of Hawaii in 2014, Lilah was coming with them. My mom plotted out the magnificent habitat she’d build for him in paradise, where he could soak in the sunlight, watch the flittering yellow finches, and eat exotic tropical fruits for decades to come.

But Lilah never made it there.

Hawaii has a host of complex requirements for importing animals, and birds specifically, to prevent the spread of disease–and my mom mastered them backwards and forwards.

A quarantine for 7 days at our local vet and a mountain of paperwork: check.

As my parents prepared to depart, leaving their two dogs and Lilah at the animal intake area of the airport, I bid farewell to the bird who’d once felt a little like my nemesis during my darkest periods of teenage angst, but now, cowering in his carrier, was like a fearful little child once again.

I didn’t know then that it would be our final goodbye, but it felt peaceful, like a long-awaited truce.

“I love you,” I said.

“Lilah?” he replied.

Later that night, my mom called me from California. Unfortunately, the vet had incorrectly completed the quarantine paperwork necessary for Lilah to enter Hawaii, so he had to redo his 7-day quarantine at a vet there. My parents opted to continue on to the islands with their two dogs and pay an animal transport company a hefty sum of money to handle Lilah’s trip a week later.

He would be in good hands, they were promised. He’d be given the utmost care.

A week later, I received another call.

“Laura, Lilah’s dying. He’s dying!” My mom’s blubbering voice could hardly make out the words.

He was in her lap, having just been picked up from the airport, and was listless, lethargic, barely hanging on.

“Can’t you find an emergency vet?” I begged over the phone.

But they were in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles from anyone who could help. He died there, in her lap, moments later, after suffering a seizure.

To this day, my mom has trouble speaking about this tragedy. The sadness, the overwhelming guilt of putting her beloved companion in the hands of someone who was supposed to provide for his safety. I know it so well–I’ve been there myself.

But what happened was a string of errors my mom never could have anticipated or prevented, starting with the vet’s quarantine paperwork, which led to another crucial error: the animal transporter, who was paid to see Lilah directly onto his inter-island flight between Honolulu (the only port of entry for animals) and Kona on the Big Island.

Instead, to save money, she’d checked him into a cargo flight and left him there, where he sat for hours without water or food before being boarded up. Then, the transporter went dark, failing to answer my mom’s texts or calls. My parents didn’t even know his flight number. They had nothing.

Thus, when Lilah arrived in the cargo hold of the Kona airport, my parents had no idea of his whereabouts and couldn’t reach anyone who knew anything at all.

By the time my mom was finally contacted to pick him up, he’d gone over 24 hours without water–and likely without being checked on at all. That neglect, compounded by the stress of flying cargo, ultimately killed him.

And so my family was left to grieve in their paradise, Lilah’s empty cage on their front porch a forever reminder of what could have been.

Flying animals in cargo is always risky. Every year, animal companions die. In 2018, a report revealed that there had been 85 animal deaths in the last 3 years on flights in the US, with nearly half occurring on United Airlines. And just a few weeks ago, in the wake of two cats’ deaths on a Russian airline, guardians took to social media with photos of their dogs and cats to tell the airline that animals aren’t cargo–they’re passengers–in hopes of changing in-flight policy.

As for Hawaii, the state requires that all animals coming into the islands be taken immediately to the quarantine holding facility in Honolulu for inspection–but it doesn’t prescribe how these animals must enter, which is up to the individual airlines. While many of them will allow companions to fly in-cabin between islands, only a couple allow this for flights from the mainland to the state, leaving thousands of cherished companions relegated to the cargo hold. Or, even worse, they’re put onto a cargo-only airline that deals mostly with inanimate shipments, leaving actual live animals with very little to no care or oversight.

Why? Because the logistics of ensuring that animals flying in-cabin make it over to the quarantine hold facility for inspection would take time. And time is money.

It’s been over five years, but it’s time for Lilah’s story to become more than a black cloud over my family. It’s time for me to share it with the world and help other dogs, cats, and birds from suffering the same fate.

It’s time for the major airlines from the mainland U.S. to the Hawaiian Islands to apply, at a bare minimum, the same rules they use for flights within the lower 48 states–which allow small animals in carriers to stay in the cabin with their families.

And for animals who are only given the option to travel in cargo either into or between the islands, these carriers must implement rigid standards for animal companions, including constant tracking of animals’ whereabouts, hourly monitoring in holding facilities, and provision of water at regular intervals.

Please join me in calling on these airlines to protect our beloved animals who are entrusted into their care by signing my petition below.

Petition to be delivered to: Hawaiian Airlines, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, and Aloha Air Cargo.

Petition count: 1,439 signatures

One Green Planet: This Dog May Have Lost His Eyes, but His Heart Just Keeps on Growing

This blog was originally posted on One Green Planet.

One thing’s quite obvious when you look at a picture of Bear the Pit Bull: He can’t see — at least, not through his eyes. At just one year of age, Bear was hit by a car and wound up at an emergency vet with severe injuries to his face. His guardian at the time was unable to afford treatment, leaving Bear’s fate hanging in the balance. Fortunately, New Jersey-based Rawhide Rescue stepped up to the plate, offering to fund Bear’s medical care if a loving family could take him in. And, luckily for Bear, one worker at that animal hospital saw beyond his disfigured eyes and into his heart.

Taking a Chance on Love

When teen Katie Frame, the daughter of that compassionate hospital staffer, first met her new dog pal, she admits that she was a bit nervous about caring for a special-needs animal. And it soon became clear that the damage was so extensive that Bear would need multiple surgeries, which would ultimately leave him eyeless.

This Dog May Have Lost His Eyes, but His Heart Just Keeps on Growing
Katie Frame
 

But Katie and her family never turned a blind eye to Bear, who, in those early days, struggled to get around and often bumped into obstacles he couldn’t see. While walking, he pressed his body up against his new family members, afraid to venture too far. Soon, however, Bear learned to “see” his environment in a new light. Katie explains, “He eventually mapped out the house in his head and he gets around easier than I thought he would.”

Shedding Light on Special Needs

Katie took to Instagram to share Bear’s journey with the world. There, Bear’s tens of thousands of followers are gifted with photos of him snoozing on the couch and sniffing out the cool autumn breeze. These images are often accompanied by insights into Bear’s daily life and how he has adapted to the world around him without eyesight.

This Dog May Have Lost His Eyes, but His Heart Just Keeps on Growing
Katie Frame
 

On Instagram, Katie explains that on walks, Bear moves from one side of a path to the other: “He’ll walk to one side and when he feels grass he starts going to the other side. People don’t really realize that a blind dog’s (or any dog’s) sense of touch is important to getting around and understanding the world.”

She’s also shared her plans to try out “nosework” — a mentally and physically stimulating activity in which Bear can use his heightened sense of smell to track down the source of a scent — with her best friend.

Katie hopes that through these snippets and photos, she will show the world that although there may be challenges to life with a special-needs animal, the rewards are boundless. She writes, “Most people see their dogs love through their eyes. I see his love through the beating of his heart … Don’t overlook the disabled pups. They can see and hear better than anyone.”

Bear Gives Back

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Bear has been his ability to inspire from the moment he walked through the door. Reflecting on her life, Katie admitted that before Bear, she wondered about her direction in life. Once Bear came into the picture, however, she felt filled with purpose. After all, what could be more motivating than a dog who, despite having no eyes, bounds into life each day, ready to navigate the world around him?

This Dog May Have Lost His Eyes, but His Heart Just Keeps on Growing
Katie Frame
 

One way Katie has channeled this inspiration is through her “Shelter Dog Sundays” on Instagram, where she shares photos and stories of other dogs in need of loving homes. Even if they can’t adopt a dog or donate to a rescue directly, Katie urges Bear’s followers to spread awareness of dogs in need of adoption. “Just don’t do nothing,” she urges, in reference to the millions of animals seeking homes every year.

About Bear, Katie concludes, “He has taught me that love is not what you see, but what you feel.” And with his enormous heart, maybe he can teach all of us to see beyond the cover and love what’s inside.

Lead image source: Katie Frame/Instagram

Teddy - Wags 4 Hope - The Every Animal Project

This Shaggy Dog Beat Heartworms–Now the Art He Inspired Is Saving Others Like Him

(By Laura Lee Cascada / Photographs by Annie Blumenfeld)

Annie Blumenfeld - Wags 4 Hope - The Every Animal Project
Annie Blumenfeld with dog, Teddy

Meet Teddy. Four years ago, he bounded into Connecticut teen Annie Blumenfeld’s life and changed it forever. Now, in 2016, Teddy spends his days watching chickens and roosters peck around the neighborhood, eagerly awaiting his next adventure with each walk and car ride. He lives a life of luxury, preferring to take his water from a glass–with plenty of ice cubes, thank-you-very-much.

But before his happily-ever-after, Teddy’s story was bleak. In a shelter in Texas, this shaggy, tail-wagging dog was slated to be euthanized because he had tested heartworm-positive, plagued with a serious parasitic infection of the heart, lungs, and surrounding vessels–all because somewhere along the way, he hadn’t received a simple monthly preventative. As the cost of treating heartworm disease can range from $600 to $2,000 (compare that with the cost of prevention, often equalling out to just a few cups of coffee each month), the only option for many overwhelmed, underfunded shelters like Teddy’s is a final, irreversible one: death.

Fortunately, just days before that fateful walk, Teddy was scooped up by Houston Shaggy Dog Rescue (warning: click the link, and be prepared to be overwhelmed with adorable pictures of furry mops with bright pink tongues and barely-visible eyes). His treatment began right away: over a month of cage confinement as an arsenic-based poison flowed through his system. As dying heartworms are dislodged from the heart area, excessive movement can cause fatal blockages of arteries. So dogs must remain still, giving their bodies time to break down the parasites. This treatment period can be grueling, leaving dogs feeling lethargic, feverish, and coughing. But Teddy survived it.

Now, meet Annie. When she learned of the painful process Teddy had to go through before he could join his loving family, her heart broke. Annie did some research and found out that animals with heartworm disease rarely stand a chance in shelters because of the high cost and length of treatment. Around that time, a piece of her art, a painting of a sheepdog, was featured in a local art show. There, a woman approached her and asked to buy the piece–and if she could paint other dogs. The wheels of 14-year-old Annie’s clock started turning. She became a teen on a mission.

Wags 4 Hope - The Every Animal ProjectAnnie thus founded Wags 4 Hope, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to spreading awareness of heartworm disease and relieving the burden of shelters’ veterinary bills. To fulfill her mission, Annie sells custom-painted portraits of dogs, cats, and even the occasional pig and then donates the proceeds to shelters and rescue groups all over the world. And to help spare other dogs from the horrors that her dog, Teddy–and others who are not so lucky–endured, she speaks out about the importance of heartworm prevention in big and small ways.

Her efforts recently paid off in one gigantic way at the Connecticut State Capitol, where Annie worked with lawmakers and rallied citizens for over a year to pass H.B. 5422, a bill that would add a checkbox onto Connecticut’s dog-licensing application for guardians to indicate whether their dog is on heartworm prevention. While not mandating the use of a heartworm preventative, the bill aimed to raise awareness of the disease and prompt guardians to look into this easy step to protect their dogs.

On the first go-round, the bill failed to pass. But Annie persisted with Teddy and hundreds of citizens by her side, and Connecticut became the first state with a heartworm awareness message on its dog license form. The Department of Agriculture ordered 100,000 copies of the form, which is available statewide and online.Wags 4 Hope - The Every Animal Project Annie has now set her sights even higher, hoping that other states will follow suit.

Today, after four years, Wags 4 Hope’s art continues to make waves and raise money for shelter animals online, where its Facebook page has garnered over 6,000 likes (help it get to 7,000!). Annie’s even recently launched a line of chic clothing featuring her artwork in partnership with Vida. You can become a part of Annie’s vision by visiting the Wags 4 Hope website and supporting her work.

In the meantime, Teddy’s story marches on, proving day after day that one dog–and his inspirational human–can change the world.