Changing Lanes

We used to call him Jungly for no apparent reason apart from the fact that he was a street cat, not a stray though. He had been castrated/neutered which meant he was a house cat, either abandoned by someone or he was just lost.

Spotted him around my house in September; he looked cleaner than the rest of the lot, a lot stronger as well. I knew he was a house cat immediately cause his ear was clipped which is always a sign of a castrated cat. Well initially I thought he was a female but anyway, I’ve been feeding him on a daily basis since then. He had become the third cat of our house and we wished we could take him in but couldn’t as we had two female cats that might not get along with him.

He was the friendliest street cat I’ve ever death with and I’ve dealt with a lot of them over the years. He was attached to me and I had gotten used to him. By the beginning of this year, my family had gotten attached to him as well. My sister desperately wanted to take him in.

Unfortunately he used to get into a lot of fights with the other male cats in the neighborhood and would get beaten up quite bad. And then for the past month or so, this uber aggressive ginger cat has been roaming around in the neighborhood, has been marking his territory and well, fighting a lot. He took a bite out of Jungly’s side a month back and the wound has been refusing to heal. Since then, he’s been spending most of his time outside our door sleeping on the mat. That’s where we’d been feeding him.

After being missing for a whole day on Thursday, we found him bruised, bleeding and limping outside our door on Friday. Sister decided to do something about it and contacted Friend of Animals who asked us to get him checked. Took him today to Modern veterinary clinic where the first thing they said was they had to check him for FIV. After about 10-15mins, the results were positive and he had to be put to sleep...permanently.

Sisters been crying on and off, moms analyzing the whole situation as she usually does to keep her from thinking too much about it, I’ve just gone a little silent...

You know what really hurts is that when the veterinarian opened the bag we had used to carry him to the clinic, he popped his head out, looked around and fixed his gaze on me with this innocent look in his eyes wondering where I had brought him.

2010 is turning out to be a bad year, as bad as 1998 maybe...