You did the right thing; would that more people did.
While driving down a relatively rural road one night about 20 years ago, I hit a cat which darted out into traffic. Couldn’t avoid it, and felt terrible about it. I was about to check the cat for a collar or tag when a guy came down from a nearby house and said it was his, but that he had a lot of cats already. No big deal, from his POV. He was a lot less upset about it than I was.
Yes, trying to locate the owner is a good thing to do. I could see someone being afraid of the reaction that they’d get though. Awhile back, two people had an argument in the local Pennysaver over this. Person A took out an ad saying that someone hit their dog and called the person a killer, and wished the same thing on them (don’t know if they were wishing Person B, or B’s dog would get hit by a car). Person B took out an ad the next week saying A deserved to lose his dog since he let it run free, and let him know that the dog had been hit by a total of three cars. That was the last ad, so I guess the pennysaver decided to end it before it got any worse, and someone tried to track the other person down.
I’m glad these people didn’t meet face to face, because who knows what would have happened.
I agree that it’s the right thing to do.
I must admit, though, to being slightly nervous about aproaching anyone I didn’t know in this day and age and admitting fault in regards to harming their pet or property. There are many ‘victim’-types out there who are itching for a lawsuit, and there’s a part of me that would be saying, “drive on… no need to potentially get yourself involved in a mess with crazy strangers.”
When I was about 13 years old, I made it my personal mission to care for the colony of stray cats in our neighborhood. When one of them went missing, I was distraught, and went hunting high and low, even asking strangers if they’d seen it. A couple of weeks later, my mom confessed that she’d run over it. She wasn’t going to tell me, but then realized I would go on searching and searching and searching…
By the way, yesterday I had that song stuck in my head, “What do you get when you fall in love? A guy with a pin to burst your bubble, that’s what you get for all your trouble”, etc. I finally realized that it had come from repeated viewings of this thread title.
My in-laws have lived in their street for about 15 years, have at least a nodding acquaintance with most of the residents and to me that made it even harder to understand why they were so unwilling to try to find the owners. The family that it belonged to have also lived in that street forever, the oldest son in the family goes to school with my younger SIL, the husband works for the same company as my husband and we all know they are nice people. I can imagine circumstances where it would be more of a judgement call whether or not to stop - bad neighbourhood springs to mind - but even if MIL had only knocked on the doors of the people she knows reasonably well I suspect she would have been able to cover most of the street.
Thanks for the responses. I was made to feel like I was weird for the way I reacted, but IMO it was the Right Thing To Do[sup]TM[/sup], and is what I hope would happen if (Og forbid) anything happened to one of my own cats (though the fact that a car would have to drive in through the front wall of the house in order to hit them might give me my first clue that something was up). I was pretty sure we did the right thing when we heard the twelve year old crying from inside the house after he was told of Leo’s death. It would have been far harder for him if he’d been the one to find his cat’s body lying in the gutter and if nothing else I feel relieved that we spared him that.
I strongly suspect your in-laws were (rather selfishly) trying to avoid their own personal discomfort with the meeting with the owners, and this trumped their concern for the owners. This doesn’t mean they’re totally rotten people–most folks take the path of least resistance when it’s available to them. They made you feel weird about doing the right thing because they felt defensive about wanting to slack off.
That said, I would look for the owners. I lost one cat and never found her. Not knowing what happened to a loved pet is rough. Though I accepted that she is dead a long time ago, I still have dreams about her coming back. I wouldn’t want to take the chance of inflicting that on someone if it could be avoided.
Make a tennis racket.
Racquet even.