In Conversation With...Harold Patterson

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, November 6, 2013 by Sara Mattinson.

* 2013 marks the 60th anniversary of the Korean War (1950-1953). Harold Patterson served in that war. Earlier this year, The Government of Canada declared July 27 will be recognized annually as “Korean War Veterans Day”. *

Around his neck, Harold Patterson wears the Ambassador of Peace medal he just received from the Korean government. He shakes hands with a representative of Veterans Affairs Canada prior to receiving a Certificate of Recognition from the Canadian government. 

     Sitting in the beautiful country kitchen of his house on King Street in Pugwash, Harold Patterson talks with ease about his service during the Korean War (1950 to 1953). His detailed memories are in sharp contrast to the quiet, sunny autumn day. 

“I’m a combat veteran,” says Harold, who joined the Armed Forces while he was still in high school in Montreal. “I was with the First Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, which is an airborne infantry. The first Canadian forces had been over there for a year and the war was still going on so they needed replacements. They decided to take the three First Battalions that were in Canada: the Vandoos [Royal 22nd Regiment], the Royal Canadian Regiment based in Petawawa, and us. All airborne regiments. We were all sent to Korea in October 1951. I came home in December 1952.”

He starts to speak then he stops as if gathering his thoughts on a difficult subject, not pleasant memories. 

“You know when you go over, you’re a young guy and full of pee and vinegar then you get there. You really do say to yourself, ‘What in the hell am I doing here? We’re not fooling around here’,” he says. “But anyway I survived it. We were in very heavy fighting for two periods of time but we made a good account of ourselves. After that period of time, they created what they called third battalions who came over and replaced us. They were there until 1953. It was pretty hard.”

According to Harold, they fought through rice paddies and lowlands that were wet and mucky. 

“We had quite a cold winter and a very bad rainy season the year I was there,” he says. “It rained for 38 days non-stop. The skin on your feet was the colour of that – ” He points to a piece of white paper lying on the kitchen table. “Talk about waterlogged. And when we came out of the line, we were in such a filthy state that they had large tents with hot showers and you walked up to one and you stripped naked. You got deloused coming out and your head shaved. Oh, we were crawling with stuff. They gave you a whole new kit to put on. You went on to rest and recuperation for awhile. Oh, we were a mess.” 

He pauses again. “It was not the best. But you’re young and the discipline is there and you accept it and you do it.”

When he returned to Canada after more than a year of fighting in Korea, Harold admits it was hard to adjust. 

“Parts of it still do stick in your mind. It’s an experience you go through. The army trains you the best they can. If you are a combat soldier, you’re shooting at people and that certainly isn’t something people brought up in Canada adjust to very easily. You have a difficult time with that.”

But the hardest thing, he says, was visiting a family whose son was killed in Korea. 

“That’s a difficult thing to have to go and meet a mother who has a son who hasn’t come home. It tears you apart, really,” Harold says. “You can imagine what it must be like for them because they see you and the last time they saw their son, he was wearing the same uniform. That was a tough one to do.”

As a young man in combat, fighting for his life and for his country, he couldn’t help but consider the point of it all. 

“You often think when you’re fighting in the line, ‘You know, the guy on the other side comes from a home the same as me’ and at times you do say to yourself, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ It is true, you do think that way.”

After he returned home, Harold decided to leave the Armed Forces. 

“The Iron Curtain went up in Europe and we were slated to go to Europe,” he says. “It affected my mother terribly, me being in the Forces, so I took my discharge.”

In those days, bodies were not repatriated so the soldiers who died in Korea are buried in Korea.  According to a Government of Canada website about the Korean War, “516 Canadians died and of these 378 soldiers are buried in the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan, South Korea. Another 16 soldiers have not been found and 5 sailors were lost at sea. The remaining 117 soldiers are buried in Canada and Japan.”

Harold and his wife, Shirley, retired to Pugwash twenty years ago after living in Montreal and Ottawa. That’s when he became involved with the Royal Canadian Legion’s national poster and literary contests, so this time of year, Harold is busy speaking to students. 

“I don’t speak about shooting and killing,” he says. “I try to talk to the young people in regards to the effects that the war has on people.”

His message has to do with avoiding violence. 

“As they grow up, they should do everything they can do avoid confrontations,” Harold says he tells the students. “Even starting with bullying in school. One thing leads to another and when you get into a fight with someone in schools – the result of the fight isn’t going to do anything for anyone. It’s an exercise in futility. And wars are terrible things.”

For this, he provides a poignant statement. 

“In my regiment alone, we had 127 killed, 280 wounded. Just in our regiment. It really hits you,” Harold admits. “This goes on when you’re there. The first ones that get killed or injured really shake you up. You say ‘This is for real.’ And when we were coming out of the line and went to southern Busan, you see all the white crosses at the military cemetery and it really impacts you. You visually see how many were killed.”

Harold, who turns 82 on November 12, says Remembrance Day is very important to the veterans who served in wars. 

“Many of us on Remembrance Day really do think of buddies who didn’t make it home,” he says. “For the young people especially and the parents of soldiers who did not come home, to have that minute to reflect sincerely about the way they sacrificed their lives to help others and thank these individuals who didn’t come home. The statement that we make: ‘We will remember them’. Yes, we should and we will remember them. Some of them had awfully short lives.”

The More You Know, The Easier It Will Be

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, October 30, 2013 by Sara Mattinson.

Most episodes of “bad behaviour” my father displayed during his years with Alzheimer disease had a cause that could be figured out with a little detective work. 

One evening, he awoke from a snooze on the couch and seemed confused. He put on one slipper but not the other and proceeded to clomp around the house. It was well after nine o’clock, my mother was away, and I wanted him to go to bed because I was tired after another day of taking care of him on my own. 

My father began to go back and forth to the bathroom; he would go in but come right out again. My patience was wearing out and he was becoming agitated. I just wanted him to go upstairs to bed. 

We ended up standing nose to nose in the living room and my father snarled, “I’m going to push you down the stairs.”

This was so unlike him, even inside this disease, that it snapped me out of my tired impatience. Yet I was beyond being able to play detective so I called my mother in Georgia, where she was visiting her grandchildren, and told her what was going on. 

“If he’s going in and out of the bathroom but not using it, the problem is there,” she said.

And she was right. So very simply, wisely right. The toilet seat was down; without a hole visible, he couldn’t distinguish the toilet from the floor. 

This always has stood out as a Big Learning Moment and it was driven home to me last week at the Alzheimer Society of Nova Scotia’s 24th annual provincial conference. I attended the conference as a presenter providing a family caregiver perspective but I benefited greatly from what the medical experts had to share. 

One in particular connects to my story about Dad and the toilet. Dr. Sameh Hassan, an assistant Professor working in the Department of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University, started out explaining how eyes and ears and muscles age. I wondered what on earth all this physiology had to do with dementia care? It turns out it has everything to do with it, including the answer to why my father couldn’t see the toilet. 

This is how our eyes age: They don’t take in as much light, they don’t adapt as quickly to changes in light, and the eye muscles weaken. All of these symptoms are worse in someone who has dementia. 

According to Dr. Hassan, there are two major issues we need to address when providing care for someone with dementia: Contrast and Lighting. 

Contrast was my father’s problem. His eyes’ inability to see the delineations of lines and shapes meant he couldn’t distinguish the white toilet from the white floor. Don’t make fun of the wood toilet seat! It provides the right kind of contrast. 

Think of the doors in your house. If the walls are light, and the door is white, a person with dementia can’t see where the door is. We experienced that in the first nursing home room my father was in; with grey walls and door, he was never going to know where the bathroom was because there was no contrast. 

Simple.

If you know someone in the early stages of dementia who is complaining that something is wrong with his or her glasses because they are having trouble reading the paper, it’s not the glasses. That’s normal aging coupled with the effect of dementia. The connection that’s made in the brain between what is seen and what it means is broken.  It’s more of a comprehension problem.

Here is my biggest takeaway from this conference: This information is out there, the resources are available but they aren’t getting to the newly diagnosed and their family early enough, or at all. We need to receive all this insightful information but we also need to ask for it. We know what’s going on; it’s knowing why that makes a difference.  

Dementia, and caring for someone with dementia, is never going to be easy. But it is possible to make it easier. 

Call whatever phone numbers for an infoline or caregivers outreach number you get your hands on.  You will connect with caring, knowledgeable, compassionate people who want to help. Even if you just want to talk, someone is there to listen. And you never know what you will learn.

*************

Check out this link to the "dementia-friendly" washroom designed by the Dementia Centre at the University of Stirling in Scotland: http://www.dementia.stir.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ensuite.swf

* a WC = water closet in the UK *

The Dementia Centre has designed both a dementia-friendly home and a dementia-friendly hospital. Innovative and forward-thinking. http://www.dementia.stir.ac.uk/design/virtual-environments

In Conversation With...Eleanor Ripley

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, October 23, 2013, by Sara Mattinson.

A small pink pumpkin sits at the edge of the small kitchen table in Eleanor Ripley’s apartment in Collingwood, Nova Scotia, as she explains the significance of the date we are meeting: it’s the anniversary of her son’s death, and it’s Breast Reconstruction Awareness Day (BRA Day).

As she puts a mug of green tea in front of me, Eleanor says, “I’ve done some meditating on this and the way I’d like to start this interview with a minute of silent reflection, while we sip our tea, to think of all the people who have been touched by cancer, lost loved ones, struggling with being a caregiver, and remembering those who have lost the fight.”

We sit in silence for three minutes; outside, birds sing in the mid-October sunshine.

 “I don’t want my identity to be about breast cancer or about being a survivor of suicide,” Eleanor, who retired from teaching in 2004, finally speaks. “I would like it to be about a human being who’s had some zingers thrown at her.”

That is an understatement. The zingers that happened to her or to those she loves include divorce, suicide, cancer, and dementia. I’ve known Eleanor for a decade but not well enough to know all that. If asked to describe her, the words I would use are: upbeat, vibrant, spunky, energetic, talkative. 

“I’ve had a lot of support and I’ve learned through those horrible times that people do reach out and people do care,” she says. “I’ve been blessed with some very fine friends. And family. And spiritually, I do believe in a higher power. There have been some rocky roads; I’m not going to tell you there weren’t dark times but I’ve had more uplifting times.”

Eleanor picks up a journal lying on the table next to the pink pumpkin. 

“When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, almost a year to the day of losing my son, my friend Judy gave me this journal,” she says. “That was in 1993. There she is,” Eleanor points to a photo of her friend stuck to the inside cover. “I lost her to ovarian cancer.”

She touches a piece of loose paper tucked inside the journal.

“Here is another friend, strong, strong woman, fellow teacher. We’re the same age. She’s gone. It was quick. One of those ‘nothing we can do’. These two women are gone and they didn’t die of breast cancer, and here they were supporting me. It just shows you the unpredictableness of life.”

Eleanor, who is 66 but doesn’t look it, admits she has no answer to why she is here and her friends are not but then she sits up a little straighter.

“I’m still here because of research,” she realizes. “When you get cancer in your breast, it won’t kill you. It’s the metastases that will get you. No one’s ever died of cancer that’s stayed in the breast.”

The reason Eleanor moved from Pugwash to Collingwood is to be closer to her younger sister, who is battling cancer. 

“Boy, there’s another thing,” she says. “It’s one thing for the person who has cancer but it’s another thing for the loved ones who support them through the journey. I learned this with my sister. You hurt in another way. So this whole thing about diagnoses – it’s not just the patient, it’s all the loved ones, too. There isn’t anybody up and down this road who hasn’t been touched by it.”

The pink pumpkin is the reason Eleanor decided to go through with our interview. She saw a pink-painted pumpkin at the Collingwood post office and learned that two young local men who want to be farmers were donating proceeds of their pumpkin sales to the Canadian Breast Cancer Society. 

“When I saw two young men, about the age of Dan when he died, going out and doing this, I thought, ‘We’re going to have a pink pumpkin today.’ People do care, they want to fight.”

It’s a coincidence that the day of our interview is also Breast Reconstruction Awareness (BRA) Day, an idea that is important to Eleanor. Although her cancer was first detected in 1993, she didn’t have a mastectomy, and chemotherapy, until it came back in 1997.

“Losing a breast can devastate you as a woman,” she explains. “Just to look at the scar afterwards... The divorce, losing my son then losing my breast. It was just too much. Breast reconstruction isn’t for everybody.  Of all my surgeries, it was the most painful,” she admits. “A lot of people don’t want to go through more surgery but it was my way of fighting back. I wouldn’t do it at this point in my life but I had it done in 2001.”

Eleanor fought cancer again in 2009. The recurrences, the battle her sister is undergoing, the loss of so many friends keeps her humble. 

“I just feel lucky,” she says. “I don’t want to be ‘Look at me, I’m alive’ and then go tomorrow and find a lump. I have a very healthy respect for cancer, and not much wonder. So I don’t want to appear cocky.”

Although she admits that she’s not big on the whole pink ribbon thing, Eleanor loves being a member of a dragon boat team for breast cancer survivors.  

“It wasn’t until my latest recurrence that I thought, ‘Darn it, I want to do that’. That’s been a real fun thing,” she says. “You get out in that boat and the drums are beating and you’re all paddling. When we’re in the boat, we don’t talk about cancer.”

She shows me a framed card with a quote on the front: ‘Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings a tune without the words/And never stops at all.’ The card came from a friend who later died of cancer.

“I found the card one day and looked at it,” Eleanor says. “I came so close, in my anger, to crumpling it up but something stopped me. I read it again and realized not everyone survives this disease. I thought, ‘There’s a message here, something deeper’. So Emily Dickinson’s quote now hangs on my wall. That’s where I’m at with this.”

Ultimately, what Eleanor wants to talk about, why she went ahead with this interview, is hope. Celebrating friendship and life is what is most important to Eleanor, not just today but every day. 

Tick Magnet

"Hi, are you in bed yet?"
"No, what's up?"
"I found a tick on Stella. It's big. Will you take it off for me?"
"Sure."
"Okay, great. I'll be there in ten."
This is what constitutes a Call-A-Friend emergency in my house. Most women call a friend when they find a lump or their husband in bed with another woman but for this country girl, I call Jane when I find a tick on the old dog.
Jane simply jams her sharp thumb nail under the big, grey blood-bloated tick and snaps. With a quick ripping sound, the tick is off the dog and in her hand. My competent friend.
"Give me a minute, then I want to see it," I say. I need a moment for the heebie-geebies induced by the sound of the tick removal to clear my body before I can examine it.
I have to see it, have to see how big it is, how long the damn thing was on the dog. Not a skin tag!
"This is Stella's third tick since we moved here," I tell Jane. "But she hardly goes into the woods. Not like Abby who is in and out of the woods constantly." Which is why Abby gets tick medicine and not Stella.
"Abby moves too fast for the ticks to grab her!" Jane laughs. Likely she is right. If you're a tick and you drop onto Abby, you'd better be braced for a rocket ride. Much easier to get on the slow old locomotive  doing the milk run that is Stella.
Ha, that reminds me: When Stella was ten weeks old and I would take her for walks down Pugwash Point Road, any person who called out to us, she would sit down. If she couldn't run to them because she was leashed, she sat down as if to wait for them to come to her. I started to introduce her as "Stella Stop A Lot". Now she is ten years old and earning that nickname again.
Jane went with me when I picked up the kitten last fall; he was covered in fleas so we stopped at her house and she washed him.
"Competent people always get wet," I told her then, looking at her shirt.
Competent people also get ticked off. Lucky for me.

Oh, Dear, It's Deer Season

Hunting season got underway in Nova Scotia on Friday so it's time to deck out the dogs in blaze orange. My husband found these fleece "collars" -- did the designer think dogs have necks like giraffes?? Fully unrolled, the tubes would fall past their noses. Well, their ears will be warm.

I don't know why they look like this! The collars don't bother them.

For me, a city girl, hunting season is the downside of country living.
We're pretty lucky where we live. We don't get a lot of hunters coming in the unimproved road, although thanks to the big clearcut job done back in the woods this summer, there is now an actual road to tempt hunters. Luckily, our normal walk through the woods ends just past our own property line, at the beaver brook, so we shouldn't be in any danger.

My annual blaze orange fashion show.

A friend in Ontario once told the story of going horseback riding on her friend's well-posted rural property and stepping out of the woods to find three hunters with their rifles aimed at them. Not only were they hunting on private, posted property, they weren't able to tell that what they heard were two horses coming through the trees. Proves you can't be too careful, and hunters can't be too smart.

My husband has decided he wants a buck this year. First time since I met him seven year ago that he has gone hunting. He started shooting partridge last fall and we enjoyed eating those tiny little birds. But really, he has to stop watching those Alaska backwoods shows because now he talks about "getting our meat for the winter". I don't venison so likely I'll be able to make good on my plan to eat less meat.
This is how irrational government policies are: You can shoot a buck with a special permit but you can only shoot a doe if you win a doe license. Yet there are more does than bucks, and bucks keep the gene pool refreshed. My husband thinks our deer are getting smaller and he reasons it's because the bucks are breeding their own offspring.
Perhaps we should draw to shoot the bucks, and allow people only one or two doe a season.
In the argument of population control, Nature takes care of an imbalance; if there are too many deer, vehicles and disease will reduce the population. It's incredible how many dead raccoons are littering the roads this year.

I have yet to reconcile myself to hunting. I don't like it, can't imagine killing an animal as beautiful as a deer. Yet I know all my meat comes from an animal that was once alive, raised in a food-factory setting, and likely suffered for that far more than any deer does. It's the beauty and freedom of a wild animal that pulls at my heart strings. Keeps me from ever pulling a trigger even just to experience that connection between taking the life and consuming the life.

The Change, It Is A-Comin'

How to start an essay about my experience at the 24th annual Alzheimer Society of Nova Scotia provincial conference? With one word, perhaps: Amazing. There is so much to say, foremost that I am kicking myself for not going to a conference like this before. But likely until the last few years, conferences were geared towards health professionals, not towards unpaid/family caregivers.


I attended as a presenter offering a family caregiver perspective; most of the other participants were health care professionals, many working directly with people who have dementia. And yet on Monday morning alone, through three presentations, I learned so much about the brain and about the normal aging process of eyes and ears and muscles (that was then linked to designing spaces for people with dementia) that I was wound up with passion and hope by the time my turn rolled around at 3 pm.

Speaking with ASNS's Donna McLean before my presentation.

My point: Attend a conference. If you are a caregiver now, it will help. You will make valuable contacts. Since you don't know if you are going to end up taking care of someone with dementia, it will help. I am aghast at how little my mother and I knew, how few resources we were given. We were never even handed a "hotline" phone number to call if we had questions or needed to vent. All that exists now and people need to get their hands on them.
My overall sense of the conference, including the "Friends and Family Night" held Monday evening, at which I participated on the panel, is that people are hungry for information, desperate to do better. Wow -- let's pay attention to that. 
I realized that through my speech, I am not really targeting those who are caregivers now but rather the next generation of caregivers. The first thing I tweeted during the keynote address by Dr. Sultan Darvesh was, "Knowledge takes away the fear, gives control." This was my instinctive response to what I was learning. People need to be armed with information and hope long before a diagnosis is ever given.
Dr. Darvesh, a professor of Medicine (Neurology and Geriatric Medicine) at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS, spoke about the brain and made it easy to understand how the brain works and how the symptoms of dementia emerge. His speech was captivating, not overwhelming.
He also dropped a bombshell during the Q&A: Dementia is not listed as the cause of death unless there is the neuropathology to back it up -- and the only way for that is with an autopsy. But we don't do autopsies automatically anymore, we aren't asked if we want part of the brain donated to research. We have to know about this beforehand, we have to indicate we want the autopsy done and why, and to check off the box for donation.
"Forget about what you see on television," Dr. Darvesh admonished. "Autopsies are done with dignity and professionally."

If you want to find a cure for dementia, you must have an autopsy, you must donate the brain.
Which is why the title of this conference was "Let's Talk About Dementia." The more you know, the less scary all of it is.

Reverend Faye Forbes spoke as someone living with dementia and caused a seismic shift in my thinking: She proves it IS possible to live well with dementia. And she provided me with insight into how my father was feeling before his diagnosis. 
I learned so much just Monday morning alone....and then Cathy Conway of the Alzheimer Society of Ontario gave her presentation on Tuesday morning. She speaks on person-centred care and listening to her, I felt that she was the perfect complement to what I say.
My two-fold message is this: "The person with dementia still exists" and "It's not about you, it's about the person with dementia. Cathy provides tools and ideas for engaging that person no matter what stage that person is in or state that person is in on any given day.
I made a lot of notes during her presentation and I don't think she'd mind if I shared some:

• Take responsibility for your interaction with a person with dementia. If it's only five minutes, make it count. 
• All behaviour has meaning. (Why is this behaviour happening? This requires detective work but also empathy. What could be causing this behaviour?)
• You need to BE the person with dementia, to imagine what it is like to be in their shoes, to be living with dementia. 
• LISTEN. 
• Slow down. It's about the person, not the task. (Love this. It's so true: Older people process everything less quickly and it's much worse in people with dementia. We need to slow down, take our time, speak and move gently. It's about the person, not the task.)
• Dementia requires extra skills and extra patience (compared to "regular" caregiving).
• Find small joys in your day.

The delightful Cathy Conway from the Alzheimer Society of Ontario.

I know Cathy is not the first to talk about this but her presentation was my first introduction to these ideas in dementia care. Sad, isn't it, that until this conference, the phrase and the concept of "person-centred care" was new to me? Dementia will never be easy but we can make it easier.
The resources are out there; they just aren't reaching people. 

So this is where I am at three days after the conference closed: Fired up, determined, whirling with ideas and energy. I feel as if I've embarked on a new journey with dementia, a different kind of dementia, one that will allow me to take my father's suffering and our unfortunately negative experience with dementia care and transform it into solutions and hope and change.
BIG CHANGE. As I said to one participant to stopped to thank me for my presentation, "My bazooka is loaded and I'm aiming straight at the stigma."
For that's where we are at with the future of dementia: It's time to get rid of the stigma. It's not facetious to say we can make dementia care "easier". We can. It doesn't have to be as hard as it is. There is so much great information out there, so many sensible, inexpensive, easy solutions AND many, many caring, compassionate individuals who are willing to help.
I spent two days with two hundred people with varying motivations for being there but with one in common: To become better caregivers. There is deep distress at how some people with dementia are treated in long-term care. The person still exists...
That's my motivation for starting my journey not on a moped but on a big, loud Harley!

Singer/songwriter Christina Martin graciously allowed me to share her song, "There Is A Light".

My thanks to the wonderful staff at the Alzheimer Society of Nova Scotia, particularly Linda, Michelle, Wenda, and Donna who made my first time such an inspiring occasion. 
And my thanks to my mother for allowing me to share our story.

Why We Worry At 3 AM...About Cats

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, October 16, 2013 by Sara Mattinson.

Three o’clock in the morning is Prime Worry Time.  You wake up – and Bam! the brain starts running on its treadmill of worries.  

I Googled “Why do I wake up at 3 am?” to see if there’s a reason for it. Several sources indicate that the middle of the night wake-up call is from the liver, and it’s about stress. Stress causes the adrenal glands to give off adrenaline, which revs up our system with a burst of energy to deal with whatever stressful situation we are facing. 

Now, the liver regenerates in the middle of the night and to do so, it needs glycogen. The problem is that adrenaline uses up glycogen so if there is a lot of stressful situations in your life, your body may not have enough in the glycogen bank when the liver tries to make a withdrawal at 3 am. Instead, the adrenal glands offer up adrenalin instead – and Bam! the brain fires up the treadmill.

And what is fuelling these worries at three o’clock in the morning? Pretty much the same things that cause us to feel stressed out during the day: money, a job, the kids. 

Or in my case, the cat. 

Why would anyone waste Prime Worry Time on a cat? This worry is about life and death and it’s tapped into a major global concern. While it might seem more productive to worry about money, a job, and the kids, worrying about the cat’s hunting habits is just as serious. 

Particularly if this cat has peed on you. 

Three years ago, we took in a year-old female stray cat when she decided a warm house and an easy food supply were more palatable than another winter in the wild. Since we feed birds from multiple feeders around the house, including one attached to the front deck, we made her an indoor cat, a change that didn’t seem to bother her. 

Everything went well until the following November. The combination of a major renovation to the house and the arrival of a puppy made Fern long for the great outdoors. To get this message through to me, she began to pee on our bed. When I couldn’t figure out why, she peed on me. At three o’clock in the morning. Out the door she went and everything has been stress-free ever since.

Unless you are a bird. 

According to a recent national survey by Environment Canada, it is estimated that more than 95 percent of the 268 million birds killed through human activity are victims of cats, power lines, traffic or houses. 

Here’s how that breaks down: Feral cats are estimated to kill 116 million birds a year while domestic cats kill 80 million. Compare that to the next two items on the list – power lines and houses account for 25 million and 22 million bird deaths respectively – and you get an idea of the massive destruction cats are causing to our bird population. 

And that’s just in Canada. The most recent estimates out of the USA suggest American cats kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds a year.

Is it any wonder I wake up at three o’clock in the morning worrying about this? My sweet little tuxedo cat is responsible for the slaughter of at least 40 birds a year. One cat…in a country that is estimated to have eight and a half million domestic cats and upwards of four million feral cats. All because I don’t like being peed on in the middle of the night and there seems little justification for putting a cat down simply because she follows her natural instincts to prey on, and play with, birds and rodents. There has to be a way to enjoy the songbirds without endangering their lives more than power lines and houses already do. 

Luckily, I have discovered a product that may save the birds and my bedding. It’s a colourful ruff-like cloth collar that fits over a breakaway collar – the kind Fern goes out wearing but never comes home with. Apparently, songbirds’ eyes see bright colors as extra bright, making them easily noticed. So Fern can wear the bright collar, the birds can fly to safety and my liver can rejevunate itself with all the glycogen it needs since I won’t be worrying all the time that by feeding the birds, I’m also feeding the cat. 

Fern waiting for supper...