November 2007

In a comment, Aiden asks if it’s ever excusable for someone to kick a cat against the wall. He paints a picture of a cat really revving someone up and driving him over the edge.

Here’s my response.

Isolated incidents are one thing, when it comes to redemption. And tempers may be lost. And individual circumstances need to be evaluated.

I believe that people mostly do the best they can with the tools available to them at the time.

What would alarm me is if this one-off incident turned into several more incidents.

Consider my ‘hood…

There are six units here. In the heart of Linden’s suburban bliss. Four cats. None of them aggressive or horrid or peeing anywhere they shouldn’t.

One of them, Moyo, has in the space of nine months become ‘accident prone’ since his owners moved into the complex. The most serious of his ‘accidents’ was a femur, broken in two places. It’s the strongest bone in a cat’s body. It takes effort to break it.

Of the other three, one is limping badly, possibly cos it has a broken femur, or other breaks. We don’t know, cos she’s terrified of humans. Particularly humans with bass and tenor voices. In other words, men.

Another is skeletal, possibly from starvation. Which is consistent with our observation of his eating habits. He’s fine around me while I speak to him in a falsetto voice. When I go to my natural speaking voice, he bolts.

And the last one has a free-floating broken rib. And eats just as voraciously as the starving one. She’s tiny. The size of a kitten. But she’s an adult. Runt of the litter? Maybe. Undernourished while growing up? Probably. A healed free-floating broken rib may mean that she was not taken to the vet. For the injury. She doesn’t feel it now.

So I look at this and think, ‘One cat in four displaying signs of injury… Let’s look to the cat for the cause. Four out of four cats showing signs? Lets look at the people around this place.

Unit 1: a man and a woman. Own three cats. Share an old Corsa between them. Never seen the man. The woman tells us that ‘Skippy has always been this thin.’ Refuses to tell us her name when we politely introduce ourselves as her neighbour.

Unit 2: A woman dying, with nursing care 24/7. Never been seen. But is wheelchair bound.

Unit 3: An aggressive, obnoxious couple who have screaming matches, during which household items get smashed. Who get aggressive when their neighbour (Roy) comes round to ask if all is well. They tell him, ‘Keep your nose out of other people’s business. Go away.’ And, ‘You’re creepy, man.’

Unit 4: Jennifer and me. Cat-lovers. I’m a bit of a cat whisperer. When I meow, they respond. And they come to me when they won’t come near other people.

Unit 5: Bart and Anna, two youngsters with a cat, Moyo. They’re cat lovers too. He does yoga. They’re decent kids. Spent three grand to sort Moyo’s leg out. Money they don’t have.

Unit 6: The owners of this complex. They use their unit as a stopover place when they drive from their home in Cape Town to Botswana. They’ve been here a total of seven nights over the past three months.

My money’s on the invisible husband of the woman in Unit 1. My guess is that he’s a wife-beater. And that part of his honed technique is to abuse his wife’s cats and blame her for his actions. ‘You made me do this. Everything that happens in this house is your fault.’ I’m willing to bet also that he strictly rations her spending money. And that she’s not allowed to buy enough cat food.

I’m also willing to bet that the only way this cat abuse can end is to remove the cats from that home.

My dad was a wife-beater. And my mom was an abusive alcoholic. And I know the patterns well. And I can spot bullshit at a million paces. I know what it means when someone doesn’t say her name to strangers.

Doesn’t mean I’m right about this particular situation. But it does mean I’m willing to put money on my reading of it.

Now here’s the rub… If I can get away from a background of abuse, and not repeat the cycle, then that means others can too. There really is no reason for anyone to BE an abuser.

Losing one’s temper isn’t the same as abuse. Losing one’s temper regularly, and with intent, and unpredictably, and with precision might possibly be abusive.

Someone in this complex is abusive. The behaviour of these cats is a reflection of this. I’m willing to bet that the dudes in units 1 and 3 are physical abusers. And that the cats are victim to the dude in unit 1.

I don’t know what the answer is to the person who kicks a cat once. I do know that in the case of someone who kicks and hurts cats more than once, I’m not standing by and letting it continue. Cos that would make me an abuser too. And I’m not one.

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I may be jumping to a whole bunch of assumptions in this narrative. But hey. It’ll conclude at some point.

Unit 1 in this complex of 6 units has 3 cats.

Cat one plucks up the courage to visit us. At this point, we think he belongs to Unit 2, inhabited by a dying old woman and her 24/7 nursing service.

He’s very skittish, and bolts at the drop of a piece of paper. Seriously.

We have a ‘don’t feed the neighbours’ pets’ policy. If they visit, it’s cos they like us, not cos we’re bribing them with food.

But we started noticing that Skippy (or Skanky as he’ll be known when we catnap him when Jen and I move in together) was VERY thin. Kinda feline AIDS thin. Or starving to death thin. And we noticed that he was drinking LOTS of water when he visited.

We know his name cos he has a collar with a bell and a name tag. At least one of his ‘owners’ loves him.

So Jen and I discussed it, and decided that we would offer him food, and see what happened.

What happened is that he wolfed down the food. The same way a starving dog wolfs down food. And then he drank half a bowl of water. Gulping it down.

We fed him outside the gate of Unit 2. But the lady of Unit 1 came out and asked us what we were doing. I gave her my theory that the dying lady might not be feeding him, and that he was so thin.

And she said, ‘Actually, he’s my cat, and he’s always been this thin. Since the day we got him.’ And she scooped him up, and took him inside.

He visited us again. And ate and drank just as much.

Then last night when we got home, Skippy ran up to greet us. Followed by a little cute cat. Followed by a badly limping gray cat. All with bells.

Followed by the woman. Without bells.

A bit of neighbourly pleasantry, and then we all went about our evening business.

But Jennifer and I were both wondering why that third cat was limping. Because there’s a fourth cat in the complex. Bart and Anna’s little sweet thang… Moyo.

He’s part of the puzzle in a horrible way. When Bart moved into the complex about a year ago, Moyo came with. And within a few weeks was at the vet. With a gash up his stomach. The vet thought it was probably a rabbit kick from another cat. Fair enough.

But then… One evening Bart and Anna got home and found Moyo on the sofa. Whining. Hissing. Took him to the vet. Spent R3000 on an operation to fix the broken femur. A break that the vet said could only have been caused by two things. A car hitting the cat. Or someone kicking the cat very hard. Against a wall.

Which brings us back to last night. And the limping grey cat. Why was she limping?

We don’t have an answer to that question. Instead, we have a more intense, more disturbing question.

The little cat… Whose name we found on her collar… KC. She came to eat when we called Skippy for his meal supplement. And she came up to us for the first time.

We were sitting outside, out on the driveway. Jennifer was petting her. And suddenly Jennifer jumped a metre, and let out a small scream. She said, ‘Roy, feel this cat’s tummy.’

I felt the cat’s tummy. And I couldn’t feel anything. I was about to ask Jennifer what I was feeling for. When I felt it.

A very sharp, long, bony thing. Floating around under the ribcage. A broken rib. No. Not quite correct. A rib that had been broken off. And has since healed. And is floating around inside this cat’s body.

So Jennifer and I went back inside. And I spent an hour or two pacing around, making sure that I was absolutely not allowing myself to go outside. Rip the motherfucker’s gate off its hinges. Bash my way through the door. And kick that woman’s husband’s ass straight into hell.

Cos it’s definitely him. If those cats were hurt in that house, he’s the dude who did it. And probably as a way of abusing his wife.

So the upshot of this is that Bart called the Animal Anti Cruelty League. And I called Friends of the Cat, and the SPCA.

Anti Cruelty popped round this morning. Left a note on their gate warning them to contact them within twenty-four hours.

Tomorrow the SPCA comes. They’ll be examining the little cat for its broken rib. That’s where things stand.

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