2008 kinda star­ted on a low today… We we’re doing a spot of leaf­let­ing for Romana’s French teach­ing today when I walked up one drive and saw a tabby sleep­ing near the back of a car. I dropped the leaf­let off, walked back, but noticed the cat seemed rather still.

So I went back, knocked on the door of the house, where they said, simply “He’s not ours!” So I asked if they knew any­one who might own it as it seemed very sick. The old chap did make a curs­ory trip to a neigh­bour, who wasn’t in. But I was a bit shocked when he explained he’d seen the cat on his drive earlier in the day. Ah well, some people don’t like anim­als and don’t care, and I men­tioned as much to Romana. A shame he got aggress­ive on over-hearing this (maybe I meant him to) but he was a daft, small old man. He even got him­self wound up to the point that he threatened to knock me out. Riiiight.

Any­way, I left him and his equally cal­lous wife to it, wrapped the cat in my jacket and jogged (well, coughed and spluttered — I have a cold) back home to get my car.

While I was gone other people in the area got talk­ing with Romana and they tried to find if the cat had an owner nearby, but there was no joy, the cat had no col­lar (and later we found, no chip) so it was hard to see if he was owned.

We got him, smelly, cold, and barely breath­ing to the nearest open vets. He had very little sign of life except when we picked him up when he’d miaow quite pathet­ic­ally So he wasn’t dead, but he was in a really poor state.

At the vets his body temperature barely registered, he was anaemic, full of fleas and in poor condition. He was quite young though, and not badly injured, so almost certainly very sick with something. He was nearly dead. They felt the best decision for him would be to put him down humanely. He was almost certainly a stray, but even if not, you could see the vet felt that trying to help him could just be prolonging the poor cat's misery.

The pic­ture above shows him still alive, but poorly. Bless the little tyke — and at least he didn’t die cold and alone on a damp drive­way. He had people look­ing after him at the end.

So… a sad start to 2008.

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