New life–updated
For a little break from our super-seriousness about nearly everything, here’s a photo of the first two of the puppies that are in process of being given birth by my brother’s female English Setter who around the first of April had an encounter or two with my Black Lab. A third has since been born, and there probably are others on the way.
It’s wonderful how nature provides. This was Belle’s first litter, but she knew enough to lick them clean, to cut the umbilical cord, to eat the afterbirth, and to lie down in such a way that her teats were available to the newborn puppies who knew enough to crawl their way toward them and to start nursing.
As of 8:00 this evening, Belle has given us seven puppies, six jet black and one golden. We think she’s finished–Let us pray to the Lord: Do I hear an Amen?
Brother and sister
Last month I provided foster care for two pregnant abyssinian cats. To my great surprise, they did not know to lick the the newborn kittens clean, to cut the umbilical cord, and to eat the afterbirth. In fact the one who was a first-time mother was afraid of her newborn kittens and had to be forced to lie down in position for the kittens to nurse (after the third forced feeding nature kicked in, thankfully.)
I bathed the newborn kittens myself and cut their umbilical chords, but I stopped short of eating the afterbirth.
Cute puppies!! Looks like they take after dad rather than mom, at least these two. Hmm…setters point and retrieve on land, labs are water retrievers….perhaps these pups will point, then take any downed birds to the nearest body of water and wash them off on the way back with them. Might start a new craze in the world of the sporting breeds….
Claire: Were those cats perhaps from Paris? Cty-girls?
Ah, they are darling, Joseph! If you can, please provide a few shots of them as they grow over the summer.
Claire, I recommend Doris Lessing’s “Particularly Cats,” a wonderful biography of her London cats. She is a good observer of animal behavior, doesn’t anthropomorphize, which makes the cats seem all the more fascinating because they’ve clearly got their own feline outlook.
One of her females was afraid of her kittens, too.
Congratulations on your many puppies!
Thanks for the recommendation Jean. Indeed, one of the first things I learnt about cats when I started fostering is that they each have their own distinctive personality.
Yikes, seven puppies! That’s a pretty big litter! May St. Francis watch over them all and help you find happy homes for each of them.
Claire, I’ve been dragging home foster cats since age 7, and, yes, they are all have their own unique personalities and agendas. Always interesting to see how the pecking order changes when you bring in a new one.
Seven puppies as of last night, but this morning Belle was in distress so my brother took her to a vet where it was discovered that she had a very large puppy that was stuck and had died, and behind it, still another, also still-born. So seven out of nine. Belle is back home, and the puppies are lined up at the ten-spigot fountain and drinking away.
Poor Belle. She sounds like a good, brave dog.
Hey, whatever happened to your hen that was getting pecked?
The hen survived, and her wound has pretty well healed. Now that the chickens are out all day, they’re not as prone to peck at each other. But this morning I discovered that the largest of our three roosters has disappeared. We don’t know what happened to him. Seventeen eggs today!
Belle is indeed a brave dog, and she is proving to be a very good mother.
To enliven things, we also now have two nine-week-old kittens…
Fr. Komonchak – I gather from your post that scolds are not welcome to this thread, and yet … have you considered spaying and neutering?
Jim: Yes, I’ve considered it, and will probably do it soon, even though my mother thought that the prohibition of contraception and sterilization ought to apply also to dogs and cats!
Glad the hen is better!
We had a lively discussion in the beauty shop last time I was in there about your hen and chickens others have had. Several women in there have taken over their kids’ abandoned 4-H poultry projects and made a nice sideline from them.
Only beauty shop I know of where you can also take home two dozen fresh brown eggs!
Jim, might be too early for the Bob Barker talk here, but as someone who has worked in animal welfare, I understand entirely what motivates your comments. Tagging kittens and puppies whose time is up at a shelter is a heartbreaking job.
… and that’s the missing info, here, Jean — Fr. Komonchak, if we may ask: what is to be the fate of this litter? Amusement for the chickens?
Jim: Perhaps your chickens are different, but ours show no need or desire for amusement. There’s more “missing info”: Why do you ask?
Sorry, I meant: what will be the fate of all these new pets? Will you sell them, give them away, send them to a no-kill shelter, keep them because life would be too slow without an additional 6-8 animials around the household?
I know that was what you meant. I just wondered why you asked. Two of the puppies are already spoken for. The others will be either given away or sold. Three dogs in one household is enough.
Thanks – I just find the “what will you do with all those puppies / kittens / tadpoles / guppies” a perennially interesting topic. :-)
… and children of course. As in:” What will you do with all those children?” – another interesting topic.
As a friend’s mother-in-law told her at the birth of her 4th child: “Congratulations. But, you know, we may be Catholic, but we don’t have to reproduce like rabbits…” — a memorable comment as a way of welcoming a new grandchild into the world!
Fr. Komonchak, in case you were subtly asking whether I’m interested in adopting a puppy, I fear the answer, regretfully for my children and wife, is, ‘Not at this time’. We have two cats, and in the early mornings when they are pestering me to get out of bed and feed them, it seems like too many.
I must say, I’m disappointed that nobody has taken up your mother’s views on the moral question of birth control for cats and dogs :-)
Claire: you know, the thing is, in my parents’ generation, US families having 6-7-8 children wasn’t uncommon at all. People think we have our hands full with four, and they’re not wrong, but lots of parents have dealt with much more. I wonder if, when my mother was bearing children (I have six siblings), people were sayinig such things about families that size.
I’m one of thirteen children, ten girls and three boys, one of whom died minutes after birth. One of my older sisters was at a party in Arizona when another guest referred to rabbits reproducing in connection with Robert F. Kennedy’s family. I’m sure the woman’s ears are still ringing with the response she got from my sister. (I have close to sixty nieces and nephews, and over seventy-five grand-nieces and -nephews. And, no, I don’t know all their birthdays!)
I am the second of eleven, nine boys and two girls, the two girls being the youngest. Over the years the comments that I have got could be almost neatly divided among these three:”Your mother must have been a saint.” OR: “Your mother must have been crazy.” OR:”Your parents must have been Catholic.”
Father Komonchak: And all their names?
We may be a bit off topic.
The Komonchaks will rule the world! At the rate of about 6 sons per generation and one generation every 30 years, in 400 years there will be 13 billions of them.
Stereotypes about family size cut two ways.
I’m the first of two children. We grew up Unitarians in a mostly Catholic neighborhood. While I have very good memories of those families, it was sometimes assumed that my brother and I would be spoiled brats because we didn’t have to share with more siblings.
But it didn’t work out that way. Our babysitter was the youngest girl in one family, and I inherited her duds, which then got passed to another family down the way with a daughter two years younger than me.
Parents took turns taking kids on vacations for several years because nobody could afford to do it every year–and my parents bought a bigger tent to accommodate the four or five extra kids who went with us on our year to host.
As to the Pauwels, with only 2 sons per generation, they’ll have a miserly 8000 male descendants in 400 years. If we all did that the world population would then be 50000 billion people (instead of 6.7 billions currently).
Claire – why is it the males rather than the females that key these Malthusian calculations? My understanding (possibly incorrect) of the pet world is that just a handful of unneutered male dogs in a population of unspayed females are capable of thwarting the best-intended programs of controlling the proliferation of litters.
Jim — either the males, or the females. I just picked one gender as a simple way to prevent overcounting, as would happen if you had one male and one female descendent who mated. It’s a detail.
This touches upon one vexing problem: why is it that every individual human life is to be welcomed with joy, but if we all followed the encouragement of the church to multiply, we’d have a world population with such high numbers that it would be completely destructive of the creation? Why does no theologian address this topic? There is just not enough room on earth to accommodate many generations of Komonchak-type fertility.
“This touches upon one vexing problem: why is it that every individual human life is to be welcomed with joy, but if we all followed the encouragement of the church to multiply, we’d have a world population with such high numbers that it would be completely destructive of the creation? Why does no theologian address this topic? There is just not enough room on earth to accommodate many generations of Komonchak-type fertility.”
Hi, Claire,
I know there are conservatives who downplay this concern. Most families don’t have thirteen children. At one time I read something by Andrew Greeley that showed that, pre- and post-Pill, the average size of families in the US really hasn’t changed that much. In many sections of Europe, the population is in decline – a trend that some conservatives believe will have catastrophic consequences.
The Church doesn’t insist that we all maximize the number of children we have – just that we be generous in welcoming new life. Each couple needs to honestly assess what that means for them. If a family decides, ‘enough is enough’ for good reason, then there is no problem (so long as contraception isn’t used).
Yes, I know; but the Church doesn’t seem worried about the prospect of a future earth with tens of billions of human beings, else it would frown on people who have very large biological families instead of using NFP.
Claire –
Math was never the Vatican’s strong suit. And it’s not just the Vatican. It simply astonishes me that people just can’t seem to face the arithmetic if most couples have more than two kids a couple: Just look at China. Their policy is one child per couple, and if you have more, the policy is forced abortion. Why? They just don’t have the natural resources to support even the same number of people. (My whole life I’ve been hearing about Chinese famines, so it’s nothing new. And Stalin let 3,000,000 Ukranians starve to death at one point.) Haven’t they seen the Rio de Janiero slums? Or Delhi? Or even Atlanta last year when it was about to run out of water? It’s madness, and the bishops are going to have a lot to answer for.
Some say, well, the U. S, has enough resources to support more people. But we don’t. We just have enough money to buy materials and products from poor countries where kids go hungry and aren’t educated. Right now there are water problems in the U. S. west. And the whole southern U.S. is becoming desert.
Yes, climate, population and other factors are inter-related. But Catholics seem to be incapable of looking at the population complication. Or they are choosing not to look at it.
Ann: amen to that.
And here is a new argument in favor of priest celibacy: fight world overpopulation! If only we had more vocations — say, if in every family every child other than the oldest two had a vocation for the priesthood or for the religious life, then all of our problems would be solved!
Sorry to be so late, but Amen!
Ann: 2 children per family isn’t enough to sustain the current population – if that is a nation’s average then, all else being equal, the nation’s population will shrink over time.
I don’t want to get into your other assertions. But rest assured that the US agricultural capacity is a good deal higher than its current output, and that famine and starvation in other countries is almost always attributable to idiotic economic systems and political dysfunction, rather than a lack of agricultural capacity relative to the population. (Zimbabwe may be the new gold standard in this regard).