Last Thursday, I was returning from my morning walk with Ayla and our neighbor from across the street was ringing our doorbell to let me know my car door had been left open. Strangely enough, I don’t remember leaving it open (especially as far as it was when he showed it to me) and can’t figure out how I would have been able to set my alarm without noticing the door was ajar. You see, when a door is open and I turn my alarm on, the horn of my car beeps…and I can assure you that on a Defender, it’s not quiet! But nothing was missing from my truck so maybe while we were unloading wine making supplies from the back, both Stefan and I just spaced and I forgot to lock it.
At any rate, the neighbor and I also discussed the very still kitty who was laying under my truck – which I unfortunately thought looked like the cat of the neighbors behind us. This would be terrible news because he was only about 8 months old and the SWEETEST cat around. A total lover and always so curious about things.
Unfortunately, Stefan was out of town and I was quite emotional about the death of this little guy so I just didn’t know what to say to the neighbors. Since Stefan would be back the following day, we decided to not say anything until he got back…but the neighbors actually happened to find him before then which I was also thankful for. That’s just not the news you want to give people on a local holiday.
Shortly after the cat disappeared from under my truck, the daughterof the potato farmer behind us came by (in her mid-20’s I guess) and asked if we had scene what happened to the cat. She looked like she’d been through hell and we told her what we knew and apologized for not coming to them sooner. She said they were fairly certain he’d been poisoned and mentioned that a neighbor on the street behind them found another cat out where we walk Ayla. They asked if maybe the cat had been exposed to some sort of chemicals the farmer had sprayed in the fields recently…but since they hadn’t sprayed anything, that wasn’t too likely. So we pointed out that we’d seen another cat about 3 houses down from us in an empty lot that we assumed must have been hit – but also didn’t see any signs of car mutilation. And so we’ve all come to the conclusion that there may be someone in our neighborhood who is poisoning cats…and hope that they’re not going to start with dogs anytime soon.
On more than one occassion we’ve found Ayla chewing on strange things. Just before this cat turned up dead, she was eating a cooked chicken bone…something we would definitely not let her have willingly, nor had we had in our garbage in the last month or two. We were very concerned that she might choke on it or it would splinter – but she passed it ok. If someone had poisoned it with a hope of getting to her, they clearly would have needed a bigger piece – but if this is something they are using on local cats too, it wouldn’t take much to do them in.
I really hate to think that there could be someone out there trying to harm family pets…but there are some strange people in this world. We’ve been warning our neighbors with dogs and cats since most of the dogs are fairly accessible if someone were to throw a few treats over the fence. We know Ayla wouldn’t turn down free food…and training her to accept things only from us doesn’t seem like an easy task. But with Halloween approaching, there is no telling what people might get in their heads…so watch out for your critters. You just never know who’s out lurking in your area.
