What's Your Number?

  Well, very sadly, Spotty, our little song thrush died. She was doing very well and then suddenly, late on the second afternoon, the sparkle in her eyes seemed a little less bold and then a short while later I found her dead. We were all very upset and it's at moments like this that I think a lot about the responsibility I bear as a vegan who has cats that hunt wildlife.
  We feed the garden birds, although we make sure to do this in the front garden to which our seven rescued cats don't have access, and whenever we see one of the cats with a creature that they have caught, we do everything we can to rescue it. We almost always manage to rescue the vole or mouse, or whatever it is, and we give them Reiki, homeopathic remedies and a safe place to recuperate. And a lot of them do survive- the year before last we released 26 little creatures, including three moles, into a safe release site and most of these (although not all- there were a couple of road casualties as well) were animals that we had rescued from the cats. But not all of them make it and it makes me feel very sad and also responsible, because it was we have put the creatures in harm's way by letting our cats roam freely in the garden.

This year's successfully released vole.

   Two years ago, we decided to count the releases that we did because I was interested to know the number. I'd read that a vegan lifestyle saves 95 animals per year; I'd never read this as a number before so I became curious about the number of other lives we saved.      I guess not all the animals survive the upheaval of being released away from their burrows etc but, on the other hand, we didn't count any of the animals that we managed to get away from the cat which then escaped immediately without our having a chance to assess them or choose a safe release point etc and a lot of them probably WERE ok and so I should think that 26 is a fairly conservative estimate.
  This year we have, so far, saved and successfully released one vole; just one small creature whose life may not make a great deal of difference to anyone else, and yet whose life is every bit as precious to him or her as ours are to us, and as rabbinic teaching says 'To save one life is to save the whole world'.