One of my patients, a transplant from the one of the south side housing projects, has a soft-spot for cats. In her tiny one bedroom apartment, she houses ten of then, each of them also a refugee from the projects. One of the cats has a broken leg that was never set properly. A couple of others have half-shut eyes. "They were so cruel to them. Just turr-ible." As a doctor, perhaps I should think otherwise, but the most amazing thing about this little old lady with 10 rescued cats is that she has advanced emphysema and requires supplemental oxygen at all times. She has a compressor and one of those incredibly long transparent tubes that coils and uncoils behind her as she walks. She resembles one of those old time scuba divers with the diving bell helmets and air hose, swimming around her living room, with cats instead of colorful fish and worn furniture rather than a coral reef. The cats adore her and seem quite happy and she loves them in her rather stern way. She does not pet them and does not permit guests to pet them. "If you stroke them, they want it all the time. It's too much trouble. It'll take me weeks to get them back right."I quickly learned to leave them be.
You might not expect Chicago's south side to be teaming with wild or semi-wild animals but, man, it's like the woods. There are critters everywhere you look, often, the depressing variety. The streets of Englewood and Woodlawn are rough enough if you are a person. I can't imagine what it's like for a cat or a dog. Nothing is more heart-breaking than strays in the wintertime. When it's so bitter, you hate to remove your gloves, watching a stray pad around the frozen concrete nearly makes me break down. Most of the time, there is nothing you can do. They are skittish and retreat quickly from people. But sometimes when they are especially hurt or desperate or recently lost you can get to them. Lenny and I delivered a couple of cats to the shelter; one that looked as if it had taken a fall (or a beating) and been struck blind. When it came time to remove him from the car and take him inside to animal control, I couldn't get him out from under the seat. It's probably the first time he had been warm in months. Once when we were making our rounds, my sister, a vet student, forwarded me a message from PETA. Apparently when they are not rallying for animal rights, they support a web-posting for animals at risk. Someone had emailed about a couple of strays that were hanging around outside a building on the south side, not too far off our route. Lenny and I spent about 20 minutes looking behind dumpsters and under porches and shrubs but couldn't find anything. Odd luck that, given that it seems like there are stray animals everywhere.
And not just stray animals. Once, two winters ago, we were driving by the entrance to one of the big south side cemeteries. I don't think it was Oak Woods. It may have been Cedar Park. Wherever it was, we were both surprised to see deer resting in the snow. And not one or two, but twenty or thirty, legs pulled beneath them, lying along a hillside next to a monument. We turned the car around and drove inside the gates. As far as I could tell, the cemetery did not abut a big forest preserve, so these deer, at some point must have walked en masse down the street, found the entrance (the park is gated) and walked inside, like a visitor searching out a relative. After parking the car, we walked slowly over to the hill where they were all resting. They were relatively small, much smaller than white tailed deer. And they had stubby conical antlers that were more like horns. We got within thirty feet, then twenty, then ten. Lenny and I were both shocked by how close they allowed us to advance. Finally, when we were five feet away, the closest deer rose to move, and I asked Lenny to stop. Something about disturbing furry wild animals in cemetery during wintertime finally shamed me. His blood and frustrated by the encounter's anticlimactic ending, Lenny let off a bit of steam by executing a running start butt-slide back down the hill. The next day, he announced that he had injured himself slightly.
We also once found a raccoon in a cage. The cage, sitting next to an alleyway and a large overgrown backyard, was barely bigger than he was. The animal smelled musty, like old urine, The cage was borrowed from a local shelter and had a phone number. We called and found out that the cage had been procured to catch a stray cat that someone had been concerned about. "Well what should we do with it?" we asked. "Let it go." Was the reply. Duh. I guess I imagined that we would drive the little guy out to a forest preserve and release him into a more natural environment. But raccoons are so ubiquitous in the city that for all intents and purposes, this was his natural environment. Using a stick to avoid chewed-upon fingers, we propped open the door. Caged raccoon sniffed the air, then, more slowly than I would have expected, ambled over the fence, climbed into the backyard, and disappeared. He was probably pretty dehydrated.
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