The glass between us

I would like you to please shut your eyes for a minute and take a deep breath.

Now imagine this from the point of view of a mother: your baby is just born but you get to hold the baby only for a few minutes. If you are lucky perhaps it is a few hours or even a day. But after that, a moment comes when your baby is suddenly taken away from you.

Worst of all is that you do not know the reason why that is happening, perhaps you try to fight it, maybe you think it is just for a while, but the sad truth is that the baby will never be returned to you. Let us add a bit more details here, you are also incapable to communicate which means you cannot even ask where your baby is taken or what will happen to him/her?

Now open your eyes, take another deep breath and think.

It sounded pretty tragic, didn’t it?

Now replace the mother and the baby with “cat” and its “kitten”.

Does the story still seem as tragic as before?

What I am trying to describe through this situation is the meaning that this kitten’s photo has for me.

It is a simple shot taken with my very old and not so good camera phone. It was in the summer of 2019, in a pet shop in Shanghai during a trip to China.

It did not capture an HD glimpse of cat life. It captured a feeling.

I remember it was me and my group of friends, we walked up inside the shop after seeing the cats exposed through the windows. Standing in front of the glass cages, we just cooed and made swooning faces.

“It’s so cute,” we squealed.

“Awwwww,” some said.

I was one of them: I didn’t see the glass with the few holes for air, separating the kittens from us.

I only saw the kittens. And the only feeling or emotion in my heart and mind was “oh they’re so cute.”

It was only much later, when I looked through the photos in my phone album, that I really saw something other than “cute”.

I had noticed the glass obviously. The kittens were kept in small-sized glass cages with holes for air to pass through.

There were some bowls for water, some for food and some for their personal needs. Some had even play areas.

Little cat houses with everything they needed inside of them.

The only problem, which I oversaw during my time in the store, is that it was life inside glass boxes.

We went inside the shop, looked around, called the kittens “cute” and went on with our business.

But now, looking at the photos, all I see is lifeless kittens.

They had these big eyes looking at me through the glass and, as superficial humans, sometimes we only see what we want to see.

Only now, I realize that it was not “cute”. Yes sure, it is better to live in glass boxes instead of the dangers of the bigger world outside. They have food and protection.

They will eventually find a nice family who will want them. But how long will it take for the family to find them? And, in between so many others, how will they all be sold? And what if the family is, after all, not good? What if they are neglected?

Aren’t there dangers in the world and our babies grow up to be strong humans who can look after themselves?

Do you want to keep your babies in cages? Expose them in shop windows? Sell them?

I hope the answer is no.

After all these thoughts went through my head, I also realized how sad it was, the fact that in one way or another, the kittens were separated from their mother.

Now, I know that a cat can give birth to a lot of kittens, but don’t all of them matter?

Do mothers who unexpectedly give birth to many babies at once want their babies taken away, just because they are too many?

Writing about this took me back in memory lane to my childhood.

I grew up in a small village on a hill. My neighbour was a woman with short red hair. She kept some cats in her house.

In those childhood days, the routine was the same every summer; wake up and just hang out all day playing in the courtyard outside the house. On one of those normal days, we woke up to find out that one of my neighbour’s cats had given birth to a lot of kittens.

They were all so cute, super tiny and frail-looking. I do not remember exactly when, but some time after their birth and when they were comfortable playing around, one of the kittens was found dead.

It had been crushed under the tyre of my neighbour’s old Fiat Panda as she had left for work, early morning in the dark.

The whole afternoon, none of us children said anything. There was a sense of silent grief lingering in the air. The cat and the rest of the kittens stayed away. It was a very dark moment.

I was just a child at that time, but it really broke me. The sight of the kitten being taken away, the mother and kittens just quiet.

As a human able to feel for others, it hurts me today to think back at that time.

Yes, we find animals cute behind glass, be it at a pet shop or a zoo, but isn’t it heartbreaking if we stop for a moment and try to think what the eyes of those animals are really trying to tell us?

Maybe some are happy.

But the ones in these photos, they scream at me.

I could not see it at the time when I stood in front of it. I noticed it, but I could not “see” the glass.

The glass that separated a child from its mother forever. A glass that separated a life that would have been one of freedom from a beautiful life lived in chains.

Wouldn’t humans feel a little lonely if they were kept in glass cages?