Put a collar on it

Yesterday afternoon, I was puttering around in the backyard when I heard my neighbor L. calling to me.

"Rocky!* Rocky!"

"What is it, L.?", I asked.

"Rocky, there's a dead cat in my front yard!", she wailed.

Oh. Shit.

No, it wasn't Little Girl. Thank goodness. It was a big ol' tabby cat, with white paws and a white nose, and it was lying in L.'s yard, a few feet from the road. I don't know what happened - it didn't look like it had been hit by a car, and traffic goes so slowly through there, thanks to the ninety-degree-turn, that it's unlikely that it was hit by a car, but it was dead, nonetheless.

And it wasn't wearing a collar.

People, please, please collar your cats. If they don't like the kind with ID tags, just write your phone number on the collar and put it on your cat. Always use a breakaway collar, so they can't get snagged on something. Even if you have indoor cats, it's still possible that they could get outside, so collar your indoor cats as well.

Oh, we took care of the cat. At first, L. just wanted me to move it closer to the road, so that if someone was looking for it, they would be sure to see it, so I did that. I told her to call the town highway department in the morning, and they would take care of the body, but last night I saw her husband heading toward the park with a wheelbarrow, so I guess he decided to bury it. I'll check Craigslist, to see if anybody lists it as missing. But if it had just had a collar, I could have let the owners know what had happened. It would have been a sad phone call, to be sure, but at least they would have known.

Please, please - collar your cats.






*Not my real name. Ha.