And I can never hear the word “shrubbery” without thinking of Monty Python.
As a little girl, my aunt dressed her kitten in baby clothes, and placed it in a baby carriage. It kept trying to hop out, so she put a rock on it, which killed it. Fortunately, she never had children.
Best friend’s brother as a child slammed a door shut on a kitten by accident. Broke its back and spine, and it died quickly.
Best friend’s daughter accidentally stepped on a kitten and killed it.
Sister-in-law ran the family cat through the clothes dryer by accident. Let’s just say that load of laundry needed rewashing.
Our terrier pounced on one of our foster kittens when it got loose from the bedroom, and his bite caused a massive seizure and death (due to either the bite or the seizure).
I’m sorry, but you reminded me of a bit in a little book by Delia Ephron: How to Eat Like a Child
"HOW TO CARE FOR A PET:
Rabbit: Pick it up. Put it down. Pick it up. Put it down. Pick it up. Put it down. Pick it up. Put it down. Pick it up. ‘Would you please leave that poor rabbit in peace?’ Put it down."
I have never, to my immense gratitude, never killed a cat, accidentally or otherwise. Although I’ve known a few cats who certainly would have deserved it (don’t look at me like that—they would have done the same to me if they had the chance).
I have had to kill a couple of rats on a couple of different occasions, though. One of which was the size of a cat—that one got as swift a death as I could manage, and a prompt Viking funeral, as befitting an honorable opponent of it’s station. Now he belongs to the ages.
Something similar happened to my friends father. He was cutting the grass (you all can see where this is going) and there were bushes that overhung the grass and long story short, Mrs Rabbit made a nest there and when the guy went to cut the grass. It was gross, little bits of bunnies everywhere
You can often tell people who live with cats because we do the “cat around our feet” shuffle - sort of slide our foot along the floor before setting it down. Cats and stairs are a bad combination - you always have to be careful of them on the stairs (for your sake and theirs).
When I was about 14 and our mama cat had one of her many litters of kittens, we decided to keep one. Can’t remember if the kitten was a tabby or a tortoiseshell but she was everyone’s favorite out of the bunch. A couple months later we moved and for a while we didn’t have anywhere to live, so we stayed in a friend’s house, and they offered their garage to keep mama & kitten in. Well one day we went off somewhere & when we came back I went into the garage to say hi to the cats. I called for them and saw mama cat laying under a trampoline, but I couldn’t find the little one. Until I looked across the room. There had been a wooden headboard propped up against the wall, and apparently the little kitty had jumped up on top of it and managed to tip it over without having had time enough to jump off.
A couple months after I moved out and got my own apartment, sometimes when I was outside there would be a little orange tabby, barely more than a kitten. He would follow me & be all cute & I’d playfully pretend to chase him. It seemed like I was making a friend, it really did. So then one morning on my way to work I had to stop and get gas, and the little guy must have been outside the previous night and tried to run across the road because as I came to a T junction, I saw the poor kitty laying there still.
Dad stepped out the door and right on a kitten. Shit hit the siding but it lived because it was still very flexible and his heel didn’t come down on it. There was never any apparent damage.
My mom stepped on a kitten as a child, and, as a consequence, was always afraid to keep cats. Through the years, when our dogs finally died out, we convinced her to take in a cat. We’d been meaning to get her spayed, but we didn’t make it in time. She had a litter in my bedroom (and it was really cool in my opinion). We decided that we’d keep the cutest and the most friendly one. Thing is, it was a bit too friendly, and didn’t realize that it shouldn’t hover around mom’s feet. All the other kittens knew to stay away, but little Bootsie was squished.
I, on the other hand, have only accidentally slammed a kitten in a door. What horrible feelings I didn’t have with Bootsie, I did have with Midnight.
We, um, don’t keep cats anymore.
In my old apartments we had these silly chairs that were actually ripped from a car at some point - my roommate had found them in the alley and thought they were cool, so we dragged them inside, cleaned up them, and my roommate attached little wheels to the bottom. They were a great conversation piece and actually super comfortable but they were not stable. Leaning back on them the tiniest bit would result in the chair tipping over backwards. They were HEAVY things. And for some reason our cats would always manage to sit right behind them, when they were being occupied by someone not quite sober. We were convinced that our cats were going to die horribly one day, but somehow they always managed to jump out of the way before the chair squashed them to bits.
Once when I was about seventeen a cat followed me and my brother home from the grocery store. We ran an ad in the lost and found, and she was claimed in about two days, but that gave us the kitty bug.
So we went to the shelter and adopted a kitten. Brought him to the vet for his complimentary checkup, then came home. He was real skittish around our bedroom, and he darted under my foot as I walked across the room. I thought he had survived it with just a shake-up, but we found him dead in the corner about an hour later.
The folks at the animal shelter were very understanding when we explained what had happened, and let us adopt another kitten right away, without charging us the adoption fee again.
This cat went on to live a happy and fulfilling life.
My friends have issues with dogs. One bought a little Teacup Yorkie. They patted the couch for him to jump up one day. He came up a little short, fell backwards, and hit his head on the coffee table. Died instantly.
Another one had the ole, “call the dog from across the street as it gets hit by a car” happen to her.
My cat didn’t die but…
We got a new little kitty when I was a kid. He was scared to death of our downstairs Orange shag carpet. But his food and litter box was in the cement floored laundry room across it. So He would race at chased-by the-devil speed across it. One day I decided to cure him of it. So I closed the laundry room door which was never closed once he started running(because the cat’s litter box was in there, duh), to force him to deal with the carpet of death.
Apparently the little guy just closed his eyes as he ran. He smashed at full speed into the door, and knocked himself out for about 5 minutes. I thought he was dead and was in 6 year old hide the evidence mode and was about to throw him in the garbage, when he finally moved. He survived but was seriously retarded for the rest of his life, couldn’t walk straight, could barely jump at all, and was really stupid.
A woman at work told me this story.
When she was a little girl, she so wanted a cat. They always had dogs growing up, but never a cat.
So, her hard working single mom got her the cat.
Day two of cat ownership, this woman was as school and her mom was taking a nap - she worked nights - and the damned cat kept jumping up on her.
So mom, used to owning dogs, took the cat outside, put it’s food and water in a bowl and tied the cat with a leash to the front porch railing. Mom went in to take her nap.
Now in case you aren’t aware - cats and dogs are a bit different.
When my co-worker came home from school, the first thing she saw on the front porch was her dead cat - that had hanged itself when it jumped off the balcony.
Co-worker is still traumatized, mom apologized for the next 20 years - but had never considered the cat would jump off the porch.
I kept a breeding pair of gerbils once (never do this) - on one occasion, I was holding one of the young and it bit me very hard on the finger (it drew blood) - I reflexively flung it at the wall. It died after a few moments of twitching and bleeding from the mouth and nose.
I once indirectly caused the death of a fledgling starling. I was about 8 years old I think. The bird was old enough that it was perfectly normal for it to be out of the nest practicing its flying, but I was convinced the poor baby bird was “lost” and that I needed to rescue it. It was still clumsy enough that I was able to catch it and take it home. Mom said I couldn’t keep it and told me to let it go.
Instead, I took it into the backyard where I planned to make a nest for it in a bush. Then it could live there and I could visit it every day and bring it worms to eat. I set it down on the ground to look for twigs, and our terrier (who had been dancing excitedly around my feet from the moment she saw what I was carrying) immediately killed it.
It was upsetting on two levels: both that I had brought the bird to its death, and that my beloved pet was capable of such (in my mind anyway) cruelty. My mom had a long talk with me about instincts and preditor/prey and how the dog was only doing what terriers have been bred to do for generations. I eventually forgave the dog.
When I was young we had a unique padlock in the junk drawer at home. This was not your typical 3-number-combo Master Lock; this was some kind of super-secure padlock my dad had brought home from work, much heavier, and with a FOUR-number combination: spin four revs left to the first number, three revs right to the second number, two revs left to the third number, and one rev right to the final number. Takes some time and some precision to dial it up correctly.
When I was 12 or 13 years old, I decided it would be amusing to put this padlock on our cat’s hind leg, just above the ankle. Cat was not amused, in fact he was quite panicked. Although the shackle wasn’t pinching his leg when still, he was constantly running around, screaming, and the weight of this massive lock flopping around was causing him severe pain. Occasionally he would settle down and lie there with a frustrated look, and I tried a few times to start dialing the combo to release the lock - but as soon as I touched/moved the lock he’d start screaming and running again. I was freaked out because I could see the cat was in agony, that I had caused it, and I couldn’t see how I was going to resolve it. I ran out in the yard and got my dad. He came in, surveyed the situation, and got an old crummy blanket from the basement. We wrapped up the cat to immobilize him, and while he screamed and howled, I went to work on that four-number combo, hoping to hell I got it right on the first try. By the time I got to the third number the cat was peeing all over the place, but I managed to get the lock off.
That was nearly thirty years ago. I don’t think my dad realizes how bad I feel about what happened; last Christmas he retold the story at the dinner table as just another one of those amusing tales from my childhood, while I quietly cringed at the other end of the table.
Remember my mom telling of when she was a child in Iowa in the 30s. Their cat had just had kittens, and got sevrely injured - broken back ISTR. Said her dad wrung the necks of the mom and kittens. Was a different place and time. Story always stayed with me.