If pooties being harmed will upset you, read no further.
This morning, I was preparing to take my daughter to the airport to visit a friend in Seattle.
Two hours earlier than I expected, I get a call from her that a pair of terriers are mauling a kitty in her driveway and she's forgotten what to do.
I told her to get out the old fog horn and plug it in and set it off. That should scare the dogs off the cat and the cat could get away. That fog horn will scare ships away, it should work on dogs.
I go ahead and start her way, and when I'm almost there, she calls again to text that the horn scared off both dogs but the cat didn't leave. It was stil crouched in her driveway. The dogs, she said, were pacing across the street and watching.
I pulled over to text her back and told her I was almost there, and to not go out if those dogs were in attack mode, they might attack her as well as the cat.
When I get there, the car scares the dogs off.
The cat still hasn't tried to get up or move, so we know it's pretty badly hurt. We carefully get it into a carrier and I take it to our vet - the only one I know of that's open on Saturdays.
The verdict was grim - shattered pelvis, 3 broken legs, severe abdominal damage, puncture and bite wounds.
By then, I've already spent $150 on the this cat I'd never seen before. The vet said even if they somehow managed to save the cat, she would lose the kittens, would never be able to use her hind legs. The bill to try to heal the cat would probably be a thousand or more, with no guarantee, as badly as she was mauled, that she would live.
I know it sounds harsh, because if she'd been my cat, I'd have said let's give her a chance. I'd have spent a couple of days as they worked on her making a decision.
But I couldn't afford even what I'd already spent on her, because of the hotel at the convention where I was running the Green Room double billing me. It'll get straightened out, but until then, I've had to sell off what was left of my jewelry to pay my mortgage and raid my change jar for gas money.
What allowed me to pay for this kitty's emergency care was a series of things - y'all sent money to pay for Itzl's knee surgery, the vet made that horrible mistake and didn't charge us the full fee for the surgery, leaving a positive balance at the vet's to use on this kitty - but nowhere near enough to pay for the MRI she needs of her pelvis and legs and spine, or the tests to see how extensive her internal injuries are.
In the end, rather than have the MRIs and tests on a kitty that badly injured, we decided to humanely euthanize her. That took the balance at the vet's down another $80. The vet will keep her body for a week while we try to find her owner, but the chances are pretty high that she's a stray.
The most horrible thing about having to kill this pretty kitty is that it didn't have to happen. It was completely preventable.
The dogs (terriers, they look like they have a lot of Jack Russell in them) have been terrorizing the neighborhood for a couple of years. They've snapped at me a few times, chased my daughter's dogs so that she doesn't allow them to be with her when she's gardening in front and she's considering installing a front fence with an electric-opening gate for her car to protect herself and her dogs from them. This is the first time we've had evidence they are more than aggressive and annoying. Now we know they are killers.
After I dropped her at the airport, I went straight to the animal control department for her city (we live in neighboring cities) and asked what we could do about those dogs. I've got a list and a special number to call, but her animal control office said until the dogs either bit a person or we had an address for the dogs, they couldn't do anything. Them teaming up to kill a cat (at least one, there are always dead kitties in her neighborhood - tiny kittens to older cats, some by car, some probably by these dogs) is sad, but not actionable. And then she gave us step by step directions on how to get those dogs and their owners caught.
The dogs are one problem that has to be dealt with, but that cat should never have been placed in a position where it had to fight for its life and die. Cats can be trained, but so many people have bought into the myth that you can't train cats they don't even bother.
Every cat I've ever had has been trained. They are trained not to be on the tables or counters. They are trained not to beg for food. They are trained to play gently. They are trained to stay in my yard. I've trained them to put away their toys. Itzl has trained cats. If a 4 pound Chihuahua can train cats, an adult human can train cats.
It's simple to train cats to stay in the yard. I did by running a soaker hose all the way around the yard, halfway up the fence. I put motion detectors connected to turning on the water (my plumber helped with this) around the yard. Every time the cat got on the fence, the water would come on and send the cat back into the yard. Since this works even when I'm not there, the cat never associated it with my presence, just thought it magically happened every time they got near the fence. After a couple of weeks, the cats never even tried to go near the fence to get out and roam the neighborhood. This also had the added bonus of keeping stray cats out, and I now use it around my gardens to keep cats from digging up and pottying in my gardens.
I'm still pissed, though, at the dog owners. They made me have to kill a pretty little pootie. They let their dogs roam freely around the neighborhood, terrorizing cats, small dogs, and people, and they need to be held accountable.