Death of a cat that I did not love

Ifirst saw it in bits — two paws here, the tip of a tail there — on grainy, black-and-white images taken by our backyard trail camera. Normally that device captures only the wild animals you’d expect to find in a firstring suburb: opossums, mainly, but also rabbits and raccoons and rat snakes, sometimes an owl, now and then a fox. I once saw a bobcat slink across our street, but it’s never shown up in the trail-cam photos. My heart lifted when I first saw a clearly feline haunch in one of the pictures, but the scale was all wrong for a bobcat. It was just an ordinary house cat, prowling in my backyard.

Soon the cat was showing up in the daytime, too, apparently drawn by the leftover bits of lunches left around the construction site two doors down from our house. He was a ragged, battle-scarred tom, thin but not emaciated, with one eye that didn’t open all the way. A feral cat, not someone’s cherished pet.

As we passed my husband’s car in the driveway one morning, my skittish rescue dog darted away from the tyres, spooked by something under the car. I squatted down for a look. The feral cat hissed at me. Let me just say it, flat out: If I owned a gun, I swear I would have shot that cat.

The morning after I didn’t kill the feral cat, a child from the neighbourhood came to get me, hoping I could help a sick cat she’d found in her family’s driveway. When we got to her house, the embattled tomcat was lying in the driveway, his limbs twitching, his eyes unseeing, his hindquarters resting in a pool of urine. From time to time his neck would arch, and his mouth would pull back in a grimace. Our feral cat was in agony. Our feral cat was dying, and his suffering broke my heart.

Later, when Animal Control picked up his body, we learnt that the cat had been poisoned. Most likely a neighbour had set out rat poison, and the cat had caught and eaten the dying rodent. Our feral cat didn’t lose his life to a hungry owl or coyote or bobcat. He died because a human being was too squeamish to set the kind of trap that leaves behind a corpse. There are mousetraps that kill quickly and painlessly, and those traps don’t weaponise the mouse, turning it into a poison-delivery system for predators, but such traps do require people to face what they are doing: taking the life of another creature.

Deadliest predators

For weeks I have been trying to understand my own tears in the presence of a dying cat I did not love. It’s hard not to feel connected to a living thing in a state of suffering.

In the weeks since the tomcat’s terrible death, I have thought a lot about the danger outdoor cats pose to the natural world and also about the danger the natural world poses to cats. Most of all I have been thinking about the way human beings, the deadliest predators of all, keep finding new ways to destroy everything that sustains the planet that sustains us. A hungry animal cannot be faulted for killing to eat. Like the poisoned mouse and the poisoned insects and all the other animals crowded out by development, it is simply a creature that has been failed by human beings.

My young neighbour came to me for help. At 10, she was sure that someone my age would know what to do about a dying cat. I did not know what to do, and I couldn’t tell her that the true miracle would not have been the saving of a doomed cat’s life. I couldn’t tell her that the true miracle will never come until human beings have finally learnt to live a better way: in concert with the natural world, and not in domination.