The cat and the whale

Xander the cat got his name because we already had a dog named Alex. Scooter figured she could call them both at once: Alexander. It didn't work. Neither one ever paid any attention.

That was 17 or 18 years ago. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on . . .

I never wanted a cat. When I was little, somebody gave us a gangly, black kitten. Two days later, it ran across the yard, wriggled through the hedge and was never seen again. Dogs stay with you. Tricia likes cats but is allergic.

Veterinarian Diane Shepherd overcame my objections to adopting the orange runt by saying if we didn't adopt him, she'd have to kill him. Last week, she had to kill him.

Kidney failure.

When Xander was a kitten, he napped on top of a bookcase about 3-1/2 feet high, with his chin over the edge. In the boneless way that cats have, he would ooze over the edge until he fell off. It isn't true that cats always land on their feet. Not if they're asleep when they fall.

I'd be in the other room and hear a thump. It would be the cat falling off the bookcase again. It took Xander a couple of weeks to learn not to sleep there.

For the last couple of weeks, he'd been falling again, this time off the bed, because he was so shaky. His ears and nose turned dark. "He looks like a Siamese," said Tricia. I suppose it was a visible symptom of his kidney problems.

And for the last couple of weeks, I've been writing reports every day or two about the Blainville's beaked whale that stranded itself at the Waipuilani Beach access in Kihei.

Kidney failure.

The whale's ears didn't change color, but like Xander, it stopped eating. Tricia regretted taking Xander to Diane. "I should have let him die at home," she said. With effort and a good deal of money, Xander might have been made to suffer a little longer, but it didn't seem worth it.

And maybe the whale should have been allowed to die at home. It took a lot of effort and money to fly it to Hilo, where volunteers tended it around the clock. More than one person sourly remarked that the whale got more medical attention on the Big Island than some people do. They were right.

A few years ago, I wrote stories about Maui's doctor shortage. We have one, but not like the Big Island. Dr. David Sakamoto, then head of state health planning, told me he was less worried about whether Maui could find a third orthopedist than he was about people in West Hawaii who had no doctors at all.

David Schofield, who coordinates marine mammal rescue in Hawaii, said he hadn't heard the gripes about the effort that is put into saving sick whales or, perhaps, injured Hawaiian monk seals.

With the seals, the cost-benefit argument is straightforward: The seals are declining and will certainly be extinct soon without intervention. With intervention, they may disappear anyway, but it's a chance.

With Blainville's beaked whales, nobody knows whether there is any point in saving an individual or not - assuming it could be done, which it never has been. When I first read about the Blainville's and Cuvier's beaked whales, no one had ever seen a live one. They were known from bones of sick whales that had beached themselves. We have no idea whether their populations are declining.

I also got a call from a Hawaiian who was displeased about saving the whale. She was not unalterably opposed to trying to save any whale, she explained, but she and her group do not like the way the National Marine Fisheries Service goes about it, do not like that they are not given the bones when the whale dies, do not like the automatic assumption that every whale should be saved.

Who owns the whales?