One Saturday last summer, my beloved ten-year-old cat Buster didn’t come to breakfast.
He rarely skipped a meal and by mid-afternoon I was worried. I looked around the block. My husband and my oldest son did the same. I asked in our street WhatsApp group if anyone had seen it. The next morning I was up early, frantically looking for him outside, when a neighbor texted me that while out running he had seen a cat that looked like Buster “unconscious” on the sidewalk.
The neighbor appeared and ran with me to where my sweet, loving animal lay curled up lifeless on the side of the road. I just felt like my heart was breaking into pieces.
My youngest son, 17 years old, was on vacation with some friends. We told him and he sobbed. He flew home early and texted me non-stop. His pain went through me. He wrote: “I feel like I will do anything except accept this as truth.” It’s so unfair to him. And: ‘I just want to be with my boy one more time.’
I remain helpless. My world is gray without him. He wasn’t just “a cat.” He was a unique and fantastic character. We adored everything about him, from the fact that he despised my husband, who occasionally criticized him, to his habit of purring, drooling, and kneading, with his claws out, on his leg (‘Ouch! Buster! Please !’). It was my honor to be his ‘his person’.
Anna Maxted lost her ten-year-old cat Buster last summer and believes he was hit by a car.
My husband convinced our children that Buster, who was embarrassed by the vet several times, had died of a heart attack. But the secret consensus was that he had been hit by a car.
So I felt viscerally sick reading last week’s cheerful Femail magazine article about killing a cat on the road. The cat killer, after mowing down a beautiful creature, no doubt someone’s beloved pet, merrily went his way and said, “I just continued my journey.” The headline read: “I Didn’t Stop When I Hit a Cat.” Is that really that horrible? Then the author added this nice narcissistic detail: after checking for damage, he discovered that his car was fine. (God, thank you for that, we were worried).
I have a lot of contempt for people like him. He told what he did, boastfully heartless, but lacked the courage to put his name in the article. People like him are dangerous: they lack intelligence and imagination, basic requirements for empathy. They fray the delicate fabric of society because they don’t care about others, their pain, their pain; the little people don’t matter, they are so blurry and inconsequential that they might as well be cardboard cutouts.
Interestingly, he writes that if he had killed a dog, he would have left it, “partly out of legal obligation, but because I see dogs differently than cats.” Cats seem “distant and less adorable” to him. And having formed a lumpen belief based on foolish ignorance, he considers it okay to leave someone bleeding to death along the way.
Of course, there is an inherent risk in letting your cat outside, which is why some owners choose not to. Thirty years ago, when I first got a cat, I kept mine inside to ensure its safety.
The cat killer featured in Femail magazine said that if he had killed a dog, he would have stopped, “partly out of legal obligation, but because I see dogs differently than cats.”
One day, my cat ran away. When we finally caught her and re-imprisoned her, she howled miserably for six weeks. I took her to the vet, who recommended feline antidepressants. I felt the monstrosity of this and decided that my cats should have freedom and take risks. They were lucky. They lived their best nine lives (until ages 15 and 17).
Yes, I understand that “accidents happen,” as the writer states with the caveat: “It’s not that drivers deliberately target cats.” How nice of you!
It just so happens that a while ago a man rang my doorbell, convinced he had run over a cat while driving down my street. Buster was asleep in my bed. I assumed the worst: that this man had killed or seriously injured my other equally precious and precious feline, Heathcliff (previously wild, darkly handsome, just like his fictional counterpart). I was cold and unfriendly towards the man. ‘How fast were you driving?’ I growled, as we frantically hunted and rummaged through the bushes.
In the end he had to leave, but he gave me his number. Some time later, Heathcliff calmly entered. I texted the man, apologizing for being cold, but he said he understood. And you know what, if I had really run over my dear Heathcliff, I think he would have forgiven him, as he had the decency, humanity and bravery to take responsibility and stand up to me. He recognized what my animal meant to me and was wholeheartedly sorry.
By contrast, people like this writer probably forget hours later that they have killed a deeply loved member of someone’s family.
Those hit-and-run drivers are morally grotesque: modern versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy and Tom in The Great Gatsby. As Fitzgerald wrote: “They were careless people…they destroyed things and creatures and then retreated to their money or their enormous carelessness, or whatever it was that held them together, and left other people to clean up the mess they had made.” .’
The shame of being like that. But of course, it’s the rest of us who suffer.