A little lame for a pit thread. And I’m feeling guilty but really I don’t know what else I should have done.
I lost my cat Max today. Long haired, grey tiger, friendly to a fault. ? - 2006. RIP.
I’ve been feeding strays at my back door since I’ve owned my house. Usually my cats leave enough leftovers to feed visitors, and I’ll supplement as I need to depending on the traffic. For the most part, they have no desire to come into the house. If a cat does insist over a long enough period of time, I find it difficult to resist and they are eventually adopted. Alger Hiss was the first to come in (long since gone to the Great Catnip Field). Jane and Sam came into the house in 1998, and are still very much here. And no cat has expressed that desire since them until Max came along in Spring 2005. He was sleeping under my front porch, and would greet me at the front door when I came home, because I looked remarkably like that sucker at the back door who always fed him. I kept hoping that he would move on, or that someone else would adopt him. It was not to be.
Finally I took him to the vet before Thanksgiving; I knew that I would be home for a long weekend, and could spend time with him while he adjusted to being inside. It turned out that he’d already been neutered, and that reinforced my suspicion that he may have already spent time with other people, and was used to their presence. He got all his shots, and the vet thought that he was in very good health. I really thought I was doing the right thing.
He seemed to adjust to being inside with little problem, although things were a bit uneasy with the other cats. He stayed close to me, though, and things went okay. He put on some weight, his fur got shiny, and he looked great.
Then, over the next few weeks, he seemed to be getting a bit testy. He would go back and forth between the front and back doors, and it was clear that he wanted to go outside. I realized that he needed to get that out of his system. Selfishly, I would wait for cold or rainy nights, and he would soon be at the front door to come back into the warm dry house. Most of the time I would see him just sitting on the wall in front of my house, watching the street. I would try to ignore his exit requests, but would have to give in from time to time. My hope was to knock them down to zero over this winter, especially if there was a substantial snow fall.
Tonight was no exception. I was putting the leftovers out for the strays, and he slipped out the back and was gone. I checked for him after a half hour, but no sign. So, it was the usual routine of checking for him at each commercial like a typical overprotective dad. It was at the end of the program that I heard a racket outside with the sound of a dog in hot pursuit of a prey. “That can’t be good” I thought, and went outside. A woman down the street asked me if I owned a big puffy cat. With a sinking heart, I followed her up the street where her son and his friends were bringing back Max on a shovel. There was no blood that I could see, so I think that his neck must have been broken. The boys weren’t sure what breed of dog they had; they thought maybe part bull mastiff, but whatever it was, it’s jaws were big enough to carry a 15 pound cat down the block. The boys were truly apologetic, as was the mother.
A woman across the street had seen the chase in action and had called the police, but the damage was done by the time they arrived. The officer took down our names for his report. I just don’t think that it’s in me to file a complaint, though. If the office files the report with the dog officer, that’s procedure and out of my hands, but for me to initiate something is to deliberately try to single out my neighbors for some punishment that will gain me nothing. They may have been careless in letting the dog get loose, but there was nothing malicious about it, and they were truly upset that it had happened.
And I’m feeling guilty, too. If Max had stayed outside, my only guilt would be in that I hadn’t taken him and maybe spared him from this. Ironic, huh? But I do wonder whether he had become more trusting and less wary after coming inside, and whether those defences might have saved him. And it was clear that he just wasn’t ready to be a full-time inside cat, although he was headed in that direction.
I know it seems to be hypocritical to let a cat outside, and then complain about unleashed dogs, but I’m in a city, and an unleashed dog just has more capacity for damage than any number of cats.
Aw, crap, I’m just venting, and I know it sounds strange to get attached to a pet in this short a period of time, but I’ve had a warm purring 15 pound weight on my ankles at night for the last five or six weeks, and I’m really going to miss him.