The Kitty Says it All...

This has been an especially interesting project for me, as it not only gave me a chance to revisit an issue I feel passionately about, but also gave me a chance to examine how much I’ve changed in the past few years – how I’ve grown, and what I still need to work on. Several years ago while working on my undergraduate degree here at BSU, I took a service learning class with much the same goals as this one, though we worked to create print materials rather than video for our organizations. In that class, I also chose to partner with a local animal welfare organization, who also wanted educational materials to disseminate in the community about what was then usually called “Trap Neuter Release”. I had never really heard about this method or even feral cats prior to this class, which, coupled with a high level of insecurity due to never have written anything for a “real” audience before meant that I really over-researched! Besides making me into a local aficionado on feral cats (even though I was only creating a brochure...), this class really changed my mindset and behavior in more ways than any other single class probably ever has. Due to other course content, this was the semester that I drastically lowered my meat intake, started complaining and grumbling until Ryan gave up on buying cheaper food from more questionable sources, and started to buy the majority of my clothing from thrift shops. It was also the class that gave both local and national nonprofit organizations more than an abstract presence in my life, and introduced me to the world of professional writing. Not bad for three credits...

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself not only with the opportunity to take another service learning class, but also oddly enough to volunteer for a very similar cause. I was excited by this opportunity not only to find out what the latest research on TNR was (which now stood for Trap Neuter Return), but also to find out what had changed in Boise in the past few years. Sadly, it seems that the answer to this question is: not much. When we first met with Diane, I had an eerie sense of having done this all before – we were even meeting in the same location as my original meeting years before! Much as before, Diane made it clear that one of the largest hurdles they faced concerning Feral cats was people’s lack of knowledge about them. Much as I’d needed to do before, our video would need to again assume that our audience had virtually no prior knowledge of the subject, or even of what a feral cat was. In fact, in our group of four, I was the only person who came into this project with any background knowledge at all.

In reality though, this lack of movement wasn’t particularly surprising. My group members and I had the benefit of beginning this project with years of experience between us in analyzing rhetorical situations, so it was clear from the start that this simply is not a very appealing subject area. Feral cats belong to no one, and have never been socialized. If you make eye contact with them or attempt to approach them, they cower, run away, or growl and hiss at you. If they’re not part of a managed colony, they often look mangy, dirty, and starved as well. In short, they’re really one of the most challenging rhetorical problems you can find in the area of animal welfare activism: living in the forgotten corners of society, and not making their presence known in pleasant ways when they do enter the spotlight. While the larger situation hadn’t changed, there are definite positive elements to keep in mind. Firstly, and most importantly, there are still awesome organizations in town who are willing to continue to struggle for greater awareness. With extremely dedicated people like the ones we met, things are far from over! I really do think that the day will come when Boise has a comprehensive structure in place to practice TNR on the wide level we need for the process to be at its most effective. In addition, in comparison to my earlier experience, we were much more capable of approaching this challenging problem and finding ways to make it as appealing and watchable as possible. As I think back, though I had the basic conventions of a brochure down, and though I still think that most of the information I chose to include was moving in the right direction, I definitely could have considered my audience more. My first attempt at addressing this problem could best be summed up as, “This is horrible, no one seems to know about it, DO SOMETHING!!” While all well and good, this is actually just the sort of approach that, when used in television commercials, makes me quickly change the channel to avoid being upset. I wonder how many Boiseans had similar reactions to my first creation?

Obviously, I’ve changed in much more discernible ways over the past few years as well. I find the ways that I haven’t changed more interesting in this case, however. If anything, I eat meat less than I did at the end of the course, and as is obvious, I still gravitate towards taking classes that allow me to pursue study that’s easily connected to current politics and community issues. In addition, though graduate school time constraints have lead to a hiatus, the class inspired me to volunteer to clean rooms and play with cats at a local no kill, all cat shelter called Simply Cats. Once I graduate, I look forward to once again being able to dedicate time to a similar pursuit in Chicago. While every service learning class isn’t life changing, and while these shifts built upon predispositions that were already parts of who I was, habits are hard things to change. I think that it’s quite possible that I would not have these tendencies and habits, or that they would not be as strongly ingrained if I hadn’t had the benefit of being able to not only read texts like Meat Market, and Silent Spring, but also a chance to meet with people actively trying to make a positive difference in the community in related areas, see real local issues with my own eyes, and experience the awesome feeling that I had done something to raise awareness about an important local concern.

Now, I look forward to seeing what effects I’ll be able to discern in my life from this class in a few more years. I can say that it has acted, in some ways, as a “recharging” of my enthusiasm for active involvement in activism. The past few weeks have reaffirmed that after graduation, whatever job I end up with will need to involve some element of positive community involvement to be completely satisfying to me. I will also leave this class with a better understanding of why I enjoy teaching so much, and with the hope to have the opportunity to some day give my students the opportunity to do similar course work. Really, teaching has proved to be enormously engrossing, challenging, and satisfying during the past year and a half for the same reasons that I’ve always enjoyed service learning. When I teach, I’m able to take what I’m learning in other classes and apply it directly, just as I’m able to do in service learning classes such as this one. If I weren’t a TA, I would be hard pressed to take away half of the knowledge I will at the end of this second year. In addition, on many levels the composition class is a space that is impossible to separate from the politics that I love poking at and worrying as well. I get the chance to draw student’s attention to conundrums that I’ve yet to figure out and let my own thinking be enriched by theirs. Of course, by passing along knowledge to my students, I never feel as if I’m wasting my time either – much like the problem of feral cats here and across the nation, though I may not feel as if I’m “reaching” every student, and though sometimes it seems like we live on different planets, I still feel that what I’m doing makes more of positive change in the world than what I would be able to accomplish in most positions.

Overall, this semester has had its frustrating moments (Why, Camtasia, why??), but I’m not sure that it’s possible for me to be satisfied if I don’t have those. By nature, I’ve always been a relatively stereotypically crabby, cynical idealist, but unlike some, I’ve yet to reach a point where being passive is an option. I hope that I never do.

(I’ll also never take for granted how easy it is to edit a text such as this one again, in comparison to a video! Or the general simplicity of Microsoft Moviemaker, for that matter!)