Tales of Tails

Today I walked into class and was immediately met with a horrible, death-like stench.  I asked the students to sweep the floor, hoping it was some rotten food that could be removed after a short cleaning session.  As I supervised the girls (boys don't clean, of course) who were pushing around the scraps of paper, food wrappers, mothballs (don't ask), grains of rice, and food crumbs with the broom, I discovered the culprit.  A group of boys was crouched in the corner.  They surrounded the supply cabinet and, while laughing and whispering in Indonesian, kept poking at something inside.  I peered over their shoulders and saw, with great surprise, a cat curled up inside the cabinet with six newborn kittens drinking milk from her teats.  She had given birth the night before and stayed in the stinky, nasty, birthy rags she curled up in before.  Yuck!

Cats are everywhere.  Big ones, little ones, yellow ones, black ones, fat ones, starving ones, and oh-so-pregnant! ones.  Maybe one out of 20 cats has a full tail.  The rest have a variation of bobbed, zig-zagged, crimped, and just plain funky.  Many a night we've spent discussing the possible causes of this strange disappearance.  The Indonesians insist that the cats are born this way, but we see as many kittens as we do cats and the kittens keep their tails for at least the first five or six weeks.  The kittens born in my classroom had full kitten-sized tails.  So where do they go?

Speculation ranges from spontaneous detachment to traffic mishaps to cat fights to incest.  There is compelling evidence for all four.  Never fear!  I will outline all of them.

Spontaneous detachment seems quite likely given the whole mystery surrounding this issue.  One day it's there, the next it isn't!  As I said, compelling evidence.

Given the commonly displayed crimped and zig-zagged tails we see, many of them violently bent at a right angle, I think it is safe to assume that these cats have encountered a fair amount of violence in their pathetic lives.  Since the staple food in an Indonesian cat's diet is rice, we can all imagine what a food scarcity they are facing.  Everywhere they go, they prowl around with hungry, sunken eyes, ribs showing through their patchy fur, and a little too much alleycat swagger in their walk.  They circle the cast-aside banana leaves full of unwanted rice and threaten any fellow cat from stealing their prize.  Needless to say, a loud food-fight RAAEEEEERRRRRRR is all too regular in schools, in restaurants, and in my trash bags.  And when they're not fighting for food or giving birth inside my classroom's supply cabinet, they're darting through traffic in search of food or a suitable kitten-birthing cabinet.  I'll never forget the time I was driving to the grocery store on my motorcycle and saw a roadkill cat in the middle of the road.  It's fur was matted with blood, it's tail bent into the air like a flag pole, and it's eyes had popped out of its head, blowing around on the road, held on only by the bloody strings still attached inside the eye sockets.  Not the best thing to see on your way to buy food, let me tell you!

Finally we have the incest theory.  As soon as my friend suggested it, everything suddenly made sense.  All the cats at my friends' dorm never leave.  There are three females and one male (lucky guy) nicknamed Garfield for the uncanny resemblance (both in size and laziness - the only time we've ever seen him move is to impregnate a member of his harem).  We've spoiled their boom-boom on many an occasion and even interrupted what I will always believe was a cat rape.  This male cat has impregnated each of the females at least four times since I've been in Medan.  And now their kittens are cats and making their own kittens.  Who's the daddy?  None other than Garfield.

This same scenario occurs at my school and in my neighborhood.  The same males are impregnating the females, then they impregnate their children, their grandchildren, and even their great-grandchildren.  And people say cats are intelligent!