NEW SMYRNA BEACH -- I had a most horrible experience today that has me wondering if I should continue with my "trap nueter return workings. There was a sick cat in a shopping center, feral.
Her eyes were glued shut with infection. I wanted to trap her, clear up her infection and TNR. I set up the trap and she got whiff of the canned food pretty quick. The trap slammed, I took a step and she took off like a shot in a direction I did not anticipate...straight for a very busy and fast moving road. She made it past 3 of the 4 lanes of traffic whizzing by and I thought she made it thru the fourth until I saw her start rolling, hard. She was hit by a guy driving an SUV that never stopped. I don't even know if he looked back. I ran across the road with a blanket hoping she was dead as her severe injuries where obvious: alot of blood, broken back leg, her eye was bulging from it's socket. As I got to her I could see blood coming from her mouth, nose, eye and head. The blood from her mouth was frothy which immediately told me she was still breathing, still alive. I picked her up in the blanket and wrapped it around her. As I was running back to place her in my car I reassessed her. It was as bad as I thought. I grabbed my trap and thru in in the back of my car. I called the nearest vet who I happen to know and asked if I could bring this poor, suffering kitty in to be put down right away. I placed her on the back seat in the blanket. I could hear her gurgling breath. As I sped the 3 or so miles to the vets office I damned myself a thousand times for what my husband sometimes calls me "interfering" with cats lives. The "IF"s were rampant in my head. The most prominent one is if I had left the kitty alone and not tried to help it she would be alive and still sleeping under the bushes. I was infuriated with myself, with the driver of the car and the person who dumped the cat there in the first place. As I pulled into the vets parking lot the kitty rolled to the floor. I parked, turned the car off, scooped her up and ran into a back room in the vet office as I did not want anyone to have to see what I felt happened to the kitty because of my interfering. The vet saw me barreling towards the back exam room, took a look at my face and peeked under the blanket.
Not many, if any words were spoken. I just begged for her to put the cat to sleep as quickly as possible to stop it's obvious suffering.
She prepared the pink liquid in a syringe as a vet tech looked for the vein in the kitties back leg. The 3 of us are trying to will the lethal stuff to work faster as all three of us had a hand on this suffering little girl, feeling her heart beating hard and breathing so fast. Within 30 seconds her breathing was softer and her heartbeat faded. She was at peace now, painless.
My condition is another story. You might say it's one cat, it wasn't my cat, it was nobody's cat, what's the big deal etc, etc. But it is a big deal. Somebody dumped it! Or maybe they dumped her mother before her.
There are no residential areas there. Either way folks, I didn't put the cat there, didn't dump her or whoever she came from. I tried to help her-- to heal her illness. To have her spayed so the males wouldn't come from up to a mile around to sometimes violently impregnate her. To ensure that another unwanted litter of kittens wouldn't be born in the wild.
I am willing to put the time in and raise the funds. I am not able to have my heart torn to pieces, forever remembering and seeing the poor, helpless cat suffer in ungodly pain because some irresponsible person out there didn't spay or neuter their cat.
New Smyrna Beach City Commission had a meeting on Valentines Day. One of the issues was mandatory spay and neuter for all cats and dogs in our city unless owners have a breeding licence and punishable by fines.
I say forget the fines. Spend a day with me trying to trap these kitties, that man domesticated and then decided to not live up to their promise of caring for it the rest of its life, so that I can heal it and do the right thing.
Or spend a few hours at the shelters where perfectly healthy kittens, cats, puppies and dogs are killed everyday because some excuse to not spay or neuter. Or ride along with an animal control officer who has to deal with much more horrible things than I do everyday.
All of this begs the question: How can you call yourself human if you don't treat your pet humanely?