Seriously. He told me that, when he was younger, his family had just gotten a new kitten, and he was playing with it. The kitten was chasing his shoelaces, and he tripped. Like, catastrophically. Ass-over-teakettle. Trying to gain his balance, he brought his foot down, and the kitten, still darting around, playing, jumped into the precisely wrong space.
Poor kitty. Poor dad.
He says it happened 50 years ago, and he STILL tears up a little bit over it. Said it tore him up for a long, long time.
My mother-in-law’s nickname is Chick. When she was a pre-schooler on the farm, one of her sisters handed her a baby chick. It either pecked or nipped her. She smooshed it. What an awful way to get a nickname!! :eek:
Maybe that was the defining moment in her life, because she’s the one who rescues all kinds of critters. She raised a baby squirrel, fercryinoutloud! I guess she’s trying to atone…
When I was ~3-4 years old I killed a kitten on my uncle’s dairy farm. They had >100 cats and probably about 20-30 kittens to control the rodent population around the farm. They would feed the cats with stale bread and milk to supplement their vermin diet, so they were all half tame. I know that every year or three they would thin the population back down to 20 or so, and I have never wondered until this instant about how they did that.
Anyway, when I was a wee tyke, I thought it would be a great idea to catch all the kittens. I caught them one at a time over a period of an hour or two and shoved them under an upside down laundry basket in the garage. Well, it got to the point that the kittens were about two deep and the smallest was basically suffocated by the others. I am still haunted by it and it was more than 35 years ago. Poor little kitty. He was my favorite too. He was a little orange tabby, probably about 9 weeks old. Damn.
I might have killed a kitten. I was eight or nine, we were living on a farm with lots of cats. I was leaving the house and noticed that the screen door didn’t slam shut behind me. Without looking, I leaned back on the door to close it tight. It still didn’t feel like it was closed all the way so I turned around and looked, and one of the kittens had his head stuck between the door and the frame. He staggered off into the bushes and I never saw him again. It’s been almost 60 years and I still remember.
Mum rang over one of our kittens by accident. He was more of a teenage cat, not quite mature and he had the odd habit of sleeping on the wheels of our cars.
Inevitably, one day he didn’t get off from on top quickly enough
I saw a kitten run over several years ago. It was by the side of the road (Beltline/Broadway in Garland Texas, right by the intersection with I-30), looking like it wanted cross Beltline in the face of heavy traffic.
It happened so fast; seeing it, seeing what it was trying to do, just enough time to think “NO!” as it jumped into the road right in front of the pickup truck immediately in front of me, seeing it go under the front tires, then the back tires.
I know there was nothing I could do to stop it. I knew it was already dead as I drove by.
But I’ve always felt bad that I didn’t (couldn’t!) stop and save it.
During high school, I was riding my 10 speed at a nice clip, probably 18-20mph, when a cat of some sort darted out from the shrubbery on the side of the road.
Let’s just say I can never hear the Monty Python song “Eric the Half-a-bee” without thinking about that cat.
You should see him with cats now, though. He always handles them like delicate china. I asked if his early felicide was the reason. He said, “yep”.
For my own part, I once purposefully murdered a bird on the road. I may have told this story here before. I had come to a stop at a red light, and noticed a fluff of grey feathers in front of my car. I assumed it was already dead, but realized that there was no wind, and the weakly flapping wings meant it was still alive. I took a closer look, and saw that it was trying to drag itself, I dunno, somewhere. The eyes were open, and it was jerking in a panic. I saw that it was a hopeless case, though. Its lower half was little more than mush, and it was trailing viscera behind it.
I made sure that I ran squarely over it when the light turned green.
I think I did the right thing, but it still hurt my non-Ogre-ish little heart.
When I was 4 or 5, I loved trying to play with cats, but they would always play and hide. On afternoon in August, a cat actually let me pet it. I was very happy and time seemed to fly until i heard my name being screamed out the backdoor of my house. I knew I was late for dinner, but I didn’t want to ‘lose’ the only cat that had ever played with me.
So grimace I picked it up and put it in one of our garbage cans, putting the lid back on top after it tightly. During dinner, I forgot all about the cat and I went to bed. The next day I sudenly remembered where I had put the cat about 2 seconds after my mother screamed. She was taking out the morning garbage and had a crazed bolt of fur fly out past her, like a real-life snake can.
I have always felt guilty for that cat.
I can’t imagine the horror of being locked in a smelly metal garbage can all night long, only to be released at an ungodly hour by a suburban house-frau with a Dear Abby doo atempting to drop a sack of garbage on your head. I doubt that cat was ever ‘right’ after that…
3-4 here, and I thought that it would be a good idea to give the chicks (yes chicken chicks) that my misguided parents gave me for Easter a bath. In the toilet. And yes I depressed the handle. But I honestly don’t know what we would have done with them once they grew up…
When my brother was 9 or 10 he got our air pistol and shot a sparrow just for fun. He spent about a day crying - he only winged it, then watched it slowly die in the back garden. He’s a vegetarian now.
I also know a guy who used to whack frogs with a tennis racket and laugh. I met him recently and from that encounter doubt he has any remorse to this day.
ETA: I should add that I’m going on a pheasant shoot soon. I don’t have qualms about killing an animal for the reason that I’m going to eat it. But I don’t agree with stomping kittinz.
Honestly, I’m sure he was fine. I, too, thought this was going to end much worse.
We rescued a kitten a couple of months ago. She was about 12 weeks old, and just the sweetest thing. Great cat. But she had no voice, she couldn’t meow. We also have a cat door. One day she snuck into our kitchen cabinet and I closed the door, not realizing she was in there. Later that day, I noticed she wasn’t around, but thought she’d just gone outside. I didn’t think much of it. Probably at least 12 hours, maybe more, after she got locked in the cabinet, I opened it up to get something and there she was, meowing silently at me. She had pooped in there, but did not seem to hold a grudge for the incident.
I read your story aloud to my wife, and after she stopped saying, “Awwwwww…” and making faces, she said, “Tooooooooom! Tell them to be more caaaaareful!”
I once saw a cat/kitten in the middle of the road, obviously hit by a car… Yet it was still thrashing about, still alive… :eek:
I avoided it, but it triggered all sorts of thoughts afterward - would it have been kinder to kill it, rather than help it (if doing so was possible at all)? 'Twas also mildly traumatizing, for obvious reasons.
A friend of mine had a Himalayan cat some years ago. She had just opened the dryer, which just had a few articles in it, mostly dry and nice and warm. She left it open for a minute to do something for one of her kids, came back, and tossed more clothes in it without checking. Shut the door, turned it back on.
I was mocking my dad one day a few weeks ago because he always makes noises when he’s carrying stuff down stairs. Just little whistly things that I thought were irritating and said so in as many words. Whereupon he explained that when he was just married, he was carrying a basket of things down stairs at my maternal grandparents’ farm and couldn’t see his feet, cuz you generally can’t when your arms are full of laundry basket or box or whatever. Anyway, he stepped on a barncat and broke its back, his momentum preventing an arrest of the motion and so he was forced to feel fur, realize it was a cat and continue down regardless. So now, he makes noises when he can’t see his feet so the family cat won’t step underneath him, especially on the stairs where it might result in more than one death. I had never thought about what would happen if kitty got in the way of my foot and I couldn’t see her.
