CatMama's Work Is Never Done: Adventures of a Rescuer

By Mori Webster

The adventures of a nomadic nature mystic who rescued and sheltered stray and feral cats for almost 50 years. For them, she lived in and renovated RVs, built indoor and outdoor "cat habitats", and explored the use of sound frequencies for healing. Lots of photos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morion
• Release date: Mar 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9780987837783

Book preview

CatMama's Work Is Never Done

Adventures of a Rescuer

Mori Webster

Copyright 2023 by Morion Webster

All rights reserved

Hands Off Medicine for Wildies (Cuddlers Too)

is excerpted from

A Guide to Audio Frequencies for Healing Rescue Animals, Pets and People

Copyright 2023 by Morion Webster

ISBN: 978-0-9878377-8-3

Disclaimer

This author is an animal rescuer, not a veterinarian nor a medical doctor.

The information contained herein does not substitute

for veterinary and/or medical advice,

Looking for the Magic

Always, as far back as I can remember, it was magic I was looking for -- and reveled in when I found it, like a cat rolling on the ground, paws in the air. Not magic of the usual definitions but intense aliveness -- like bright colors blooming in darkness. Like stars, fireflies, jack-o-lanterns, Christmas lights. I also liked peace -- translucent like water, soothing, flowing, ever-blending shades of blue, mauve, violet, green. But magic was definitely more exciting than peace. With my invisible friends -- Boneen the banshee girl and Flash the goblin girl -- we wanted to save that magic from the developers.

Animals were magic for me -- little alivenesses coming in diverse forms. And plants en masse -- at the very edge of actual seeing I always almost-saw a glowing light of aliveness around them. Growing up there were lots of animals at home. Dogs -- my dad  showed and occasionally bred German Shepherds -- parakeets, turtles, fish, a bunny, and assorted wildlife from slugs to amphibians, sick or wounded birds, a bat and a chipmunk (who bit my dad through his thumbnail). But we had no cats. I only met cats when visiting an aunt and uncle or other people.

However, I'm told I had a bunch of invisible cats who followed me everywhere. My mother told me about the time she heard the toilet flushing repeatedly and went to investigate. She found me picking ticks off my invisible cats and flushing them down the toilet just like Dad picked the ticks off the dogs.

Except for the arts which could mirror all these alivenesses in their own medium, or kindle it through creative process, human-made stuff was just Gray. Monotonous Gray. When surrounded by this Gray, I felt as if my life was being sucked out of me. And I still do.

I have been accused of having an acrobatic mind. Too much of its gymnastics invites the Grayness in. The cats around me counterbalance that. So does living close to nature, minimizing the rat race, avoiding radio and TV babble, listening to music and creating art of various media. Keeping magic around me -- re-membering it -- is always my first task. The second task is to articulate it in a culture and language that have no categories for it. I explored many spiritual and esoteric traditions. I learned a lot but their categories and values did not match the experiences I was trying to express.

My early schooling was a Catholic grade school. I loved the music, the statues, the rituals. The catechism and teachings not so much. Being told animals don't go to heaven was my first disillusionment. Years later, the edict against birth control emphatically ended my connection. Even later, in my university years, it was repeatedly pointed out that mainstream religions preached domination of both Nature and women, perhaps less so in some eastern religions such as Buddhism and Jainism.

So I moved on to explore mysticism and occultism. Some of those sects were cruel to animals, others held animals and Nature in high regard. I learned about the astral, etheric and higher-than-physical planes of existence that were also applied to animals. I learned about the connectedness of lifeforms, ignored by mainstream religions. I began to understand that oneness with Nature is the magic that I love -- the bright colors against the darkness. And the Grayness is the emptiness when that connection is gone.

It amazes and appalls me that many people seem to have only known the Grayness. It horrifies me that they seem afraid of the magic and there are those who actively try to stamp it out. No wonder the planet is in trouble. How to share the magical wonder with people who have never known it? Sheer numbers can sometimes do it -- I have seen some people bask in the magic of a group of cats. More often I’ve seen it scare them.

I hope to share this cat magic here. Throughout the 48+ years of my rescuing and sheltering cats, I did not always have a camera. When I did, my photos weren't always high quality. Some are not sharp and some have been resurrected from scrapbooks and photo albums. Nevertheless, I have shared a number of them in order to illustrate the variety of bodies, poses, attitudes and just the plain old magic of cats.

Cats' Path

Siggie, My First Kitty

Siggie started it. She belonged to a colleague of my fiance and his wife. The husband had had to get rid of his pet dog because they were unable to housebreak it. The husband decided if he couldn’t have his dog, the wife shouldn’t have her cat. We heard the story at a dinner party where the wife of another couple arrived with chloroform for another try at killing Siggie -- they didn’t have enough the first time and she revived. I said they should hold off till I found out if our apartment building allowed pets. After several uncertain days we were given the OK and I took Siggie home. It took a while for me to get used to her. She’d just sit and stare at me. I was used to dogs snuggling and panting. Eventually Siggie became part of the family -- my by-then-husband and me. At the first apartment we had to get her to stop chasing squirrels. At the second we built her a catwalk out the window -- a two-by-four covered in burlap -- to the amusement of our neighbors.

Siggie stayed with me when my husband and I split up. She and I moved a lot that first while. I was living in a suite on the top floor of an old house in East Vancouver when one night I heard Siggie but couldn’t find her. I looked and looked and finally discovered that she’d crawled through a tiny diamond shaped window onto the very steep roof. Several times I heard her claws trying to grip the roof as she started sliding down. I pushed that little window open so far I thought I’d snap it -- and finally she squeezed back in. She had once come with my husband and I on a trip to visit my family. We couldn’t find her for the longest time and then I found her in a cupboard carefully wedged in among all my sister’s perfumes. She would sleep between my husband and I and leap away if we rolled together.

After I was living alone, I was concerned because I wasn’t home very much. Part of this was the boyfriend who claimed he couldn’t sleep in my East Vancouver apartment because it was too noisy. Since then, I have frequently noticed jealousy between my cats and various males, intense to the point that a male cat of mine will sit between us to keep us apart or jump on the hood of a vehicle to chaperone us as we are talking inside. However, at the time, I hadn’t had any other experience of this jealousy.

I wondered about getting a companion for Siggie. Siggie didn't like the other cats but she eventually got used to sharing our home with some of the stray and feral cats I met up with in my neighborhood.

What, Exactly, Is A Feral Cat?

Thinking about a companion for Siggie, I began to realize that the East Vancouver area where I lived had many stray cats.Then I discovered that some of those strays were feral. The usual description of a feral cat is: a cat that has reverted to living wild after being domestic, or the offspring of such a cat. But there isn’t anything exact about it. Domestic cats who turn wild usually do so after being abandoned by their owners. And it is a gradual process.

Some are dumped in bush areas or other unfamiliar surroundings. Some are simply left behind. Either way, the cat has to learn to deal with a totally different environment with no cues.It has to figure out where safety and food are and what threats exist. It has to learn not to trust, not to expect the kindness and care that it may have known before. These are the beginning survival tasks faced by an abandoned cat. If the cat successfully learns to stay alive and avoid threats by being wild, that cat is now fully feral. And when you meet up with an abandoned cat, it can be anywhere along that continuum. So-called stray cats, still somewhat friendly and tame, are at the beginning of that continuum.

But don’t let growling and aggressive behavior fool you. That can be simply the fright reaction of an animal trapped into an unknown, possibly threatening situation.  You won’t know the extent to which it is truly feral, until it is able to relax a little. I was once brought a feral cat in a trap by a rescue group because I lived on acreage and was able to house it for awhile.  After letting the trap and cat sit for awhile and talking to the cat, I had a hunch it wasn’t really feral. I opened the trap door hoping I wouldn’t be attacked, and Elva crawled into my lap and purred. Other rescuers have had similar experiences.

On the other hand, I trapped Nigel in a bush area. The vet tech and I both had