My contempt for casual cat killers – how dare they squash a much-loved family member and not even stop

One Saturday last summer, my beloved ten-year-old cat Buster didn’t come over for breakfast.

He rarely missed a meal, and by mid-afternoon I was worried. I looked around the block. So did my husband and my eldest son. I asked in our WhatsApp street group if anyone had seen him. The next morning I got up early and frantically looked outside for him, when a neighbor messaged me that he had seen a cat that looked like Buster, “passed out” on the sidewalk while jogging.

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 my heart breaking.

My youngest son, 17, was on holiday with friends. We told him and he cried. He flew home early and texted me non-stop. His grief cut through me. He wrote: ‘I feel like I will do anything other than accept this as the truth. It’s just so unfair to him.” And: ‘I just want to be with my boy one more time.’

I remain bereft. My world is gray without him. He wasn’t just ‘a cat’. He was a unique, fantastic character. We loved everything about him, from his disdainful attitude toward my husband who occasionally criticized him, to his habit of purring, dribbling, and kneading his leg with his claws (“Ouch! Buster! Please !’). It was my honor to be his ‘person’.

Anna Maxted lost her ten-year-old cat Buster last summer and thinks he was hit by a car

My husband convinced our sons that Buster – shamed several times by the vet – had died of a heart attack. But the secret consensus was that he had been hit by a car.

So I felt viscerally ill when I read the cheerful piece in Femail Magazine last week about killing a cat on the road. The cat killer, after mowing down a beautiful creature, no doubt someone’s favorite, went on merrily and said, “I just continued my journey.” The headline read: ‘I didn’t stop when I ran over a cat. Is that really so terrible?’ The author then added this nice narcissistic detail: After checking for damage, he discovered his car was fine. (Gosh, thanks for that – we were worried.)

I have such contempt for people like him. He talked about what he had done, boastfully and soullessly, but lacked the backbone to put his name on the article. People like him are dangerous; they lack intelligence and imagination, the basic requirements for empathy. They fray the delicate fabric of society because they do not care about others, their pain, their pain; the little people don’t matter, they’re so vague and unimportant they might as well be cardboard cutouts.

Curiously, he writes that if he had wiped out a dog, he would have stopped, “partly out of legal obligation, but because I view dogs differently than cats.” Cats come across to him as ‘distant and less sweet’. And because he has formed a crass belief based on stupid ignorance, he thinks it’s okay to leave someone bleeding to death on the road.

Of course, there is an inherent risk associated with letting your cat outside, which is why some owners choose not to do so. Thirty years ago, when I first became a cat owner, I kept mine indoors to ensure their safety.

Femail Magazine’s cat killer said if he had swiped a dog he would have stopped, ‘partly out of legal obligation, but because I view dogs differently than cats’

One day my cat escaped. When we finally picked her up and re-captured her, she whined miserably for six weeks. I took her to the vet, who suggested antidepressants for cats. I felt the monstrosity of this and decided that my cats should have their freedom and take their chances. They were lucky. They lived their best nine lives (until 15 and 17 years old).

Yes, I understand that “accidents happen,” as the writer claims with the caveat: “It’s not like drivers are deliberately targeting cats.” How very good of them!

Coincidentally, a man rang my doorbell a while ago, convinced he had hit a cat while driving along my road. Buster was sleeping on my bed. I assumed the worst: that this man had killed or seriously injured my other equally prized and precious feline, Heathcliff (previously wild, darkly handsome, like his fictional counterpart). I was faceless and cold towards the man. “How fast were you going?” I snapped as we frantically hunted and poked at the bushes.

He eventually had to go, but gave me his number. Some time later Heathcliff sauntered in. I texted the guy and apologized because he was freezing, but he said he understood. And you know what, if he had actually run over my dear Heathcliff, I think I would have forgiven him, because he had the decency, humanity and courage to take responsibility and face me. He recognized what my animal meant to me and was truly sorry about it.

Conversely, people like this writer are likely to forget hours later that they have murdered a much-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 into their money or their enormous carelessness, or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made.” had made. .’

The shame of being like this. But of course it’s the rest of us who suffer.