Kitty Love's Tragic Exit

Those who know us and who have visited our house in Savannah know that, although we don't own any pets, a number of cats have more or less adopted out front porch as a sort of feline hangout, where they can sit on the available chairs or perhaps laps and compete for whatever attention that Nancy and I are usually willing to dispense. We have even, perhaps disrespectfully, given the various cats names based on their respective appearance and attitudes.

As time has passed we've gotten more and more attached to the porch milieu as various personalities have emerged. There is Dorito, the dude, the Tom, the alpha cat, with the raspy polysyllabic croak for a meow and the certainty that it is, in fact, his porch. There is Little Head, the sweetheart, the sleepy presence, with mismatched eyes and an “I'm there for you” reassurance. And lastly there is Kitty Love, young, still a kitten really, devout in her desperate neediness, clinging but innocent. They soon began to meet us whenever we emerged from the house. Nancy began to teasingly call me the “Cat Whisperer”, since when I pulled up in my car in the evening the cats were likely to come running from elsewhere in the neighborhood to greet me. We've almost come to think of them as “our” cats, even after meeting their real sponsor, a girl in her early 20s named Lonnie who lives two doors down from us. We've never really been sure what we did to deserve such attention, but it's sad how quickly we sometimes take such things for granted.

This arrangement went on for quite a while, until one morning when I arrived at work to find a voice mail from Nancy asking me with urgency in her voice to call her as soon as I got in. I phoned to learn that shortly after I had left for work, Nancy was roused by the sounds of several dogs barking loudly and apparently out in our own yard, an unusual event in itself since we don't live in a neighborhood with many dogs and almost never see strays. After a couple of minutes of trying to resume dozing, Nancy got up and went out to the front porch in her nightgown – this was at 7:30 am.- and found three scruffy, medium-sized, mongrel dogs clustered in a barking, snarling group in our side yard. At the center of their attention was poor Kitty Love, who had somehow, in her naiveté, found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The dogs were snapping at her, grabbing her in their mouths and throwing her in the air as if playing with a toy, and now she seemed looked terrified and injured and without a hope of the escape she should have looked for in the first place. Nancy, immediate in her fury, ran down into the yard, yelling angrily at the dogs and waving some object she had grabbed off the porch. After a moment the dogs fled. Nancy went to Kitty Love, who at this point was crouching in the grass, but as Nancy tried to touch her, she hissed and cried. Nancy, by this time in tears herself, went back into the house to grab a towel and used it to wrap up the injured cat before running the short distance to Lonnie's house.

The end of this sad story is that Kitty Love did not survive her attack. Although not bleeding externally, the dogs' bites had badly crushed her body, and the vet explained to Lonnie that, even if Kitty Love had had a chance, she would have been in great pain.

Nancy has a finely honed sense of right and wrong, and her outrage at the stray dogs and by extension at their obviously negligent owners lasted for weeks. Repeated calls to the city's Animal Control Department with offers to forward photos snapped with her cell phone seemed to generate indifference at best, and in the end we've had to chalk up the experience to bad luck, though mostly for Kitty Love. Saddest to me is that we really don't see the cats anymore. Little Head, whose name we learned from Lonnie is actually, and ironically – Nancy, has pretty much disappeared. Dorito, for better or worse, has become an indoor kitty at Lonnie's.