Charlie and the Neglectful Owners….

I am, aptly, writing this with my youngest cat, Sebastian, on my lap..which makes life interesting, lol.

Right then, just to show folks just how horrible and selfish some people can be…

About, what, 3-4 years ago I was around my neighbours – lets call her Bert. Now Bert, as Im sure you’ll be aware by now, has a thing about cats which is probably greater then my own..she dotes on cats. And one day I saw her in her kitchen with tears dripping down her face. She pointed to her front garden. Slowly skulking around the garden was a very, very thin black and white cart. Its fur was matted and muddy. It obviously needed worming and de-fleaing and a thorough check up with a vet. There was no doubt about it, a cat in the state he was in was very obviously a stray. I managed to approach it, picked it up – the poor little thing was far too weak to put up any resistance. I took him home, popped him in my bedroom away from my own cats, and called the Cat’s Protection League.  I couldn’t clean him up myself, but they said that they would clean him up, get him checked over by a vet etc and I said that I could provide a home for him, once he was ok to let around my own mob.

The upshot of it was that he came home to me. The first night he slinked into the lounge, ignoring the outrage from my lot, jumped onto my lap and started to purr. he was still in a wretched state. Cleaned up it was obvious his fur had been falling out, he was on pills and I later found out that he had a mouth virus that would need steroid treatment for the rest of his life.

I eventually got to the stage of letting him out. And toddled off…. Hmm, I thought. I followed him down the road to a house that he seemed to kknow well. So I knocked on the door. The people there, despite their daughter’s happiness to see him, denied he was theirs. He belonged to a friend who had called him Charlie after the drug – witty, huh? But Charlie certainly knew his way around their house. I spoke to the woman and she continued to deny owning him. I told her what had happened and that I could provide a home for him. This she was only too happy to agree to. After all, Charlie wasn’t her cat, was he? Just as well, I thought, or Id have the RSPCA out on her.

So Charlie lived with me and showed his gratitude every day. He was quite elderly and he cost me about a grand at the vets over the time he was with me, but he was worth every penny. Ironically with all that was wrong with him, he died of old age.

Skip forward to a couple of weeks ago. My neighbour – lets call her Bert – has a ginger cat and over the past few months Id noticed a miniture version of this cat hanging around at all hours of the night and day. This tiny little female ginger cat – a very rare thing apparently – decided that it was going to start visiting Bert. Bert’s front window is always open during the day as she, like me, has a cat that’s too daft to know how to use the catflap. So this tiny ginger thing was dashing into her house, yowling its head off and polishing off all the catfood that was around. The little thing was incredibly thin and starving hungry. This became a regular, daily thing. At night it would bellow at the window to be let in. And considering all that bert has been through of late, it was a great way of perking her up a little, even though we knew that there would come a crunch time when the cat couldn’t come in – it was pregnant.

Today a note gets put through Bert’s door, stating that bert is trying to steal the cat, keeping it in overnight and threatening to get the police involved. Well, once we’d stopped laughing, we went around to the house the note had come from. Guess what? It was the same place that Charlie had apparently not come from. Bert explained there was nothing she could do and that the cat was just barreling her way in to get food etc. But the woman was not happy. She looked at me and accused me of ‘doing the same with one of her other cats’. That was when I got narked and told her that she’d denied owning Charlie and if Id have known Id have got the RSPCA out to her for neglect. That shut her up. It’s obvious that they see this female ginger as a cash cow – it’ll be kept pregnant as much as possible. The garden is covered in dog muck from the huge Rottweiler they own – a dog the cat is scared of. Naturally, this ginger cat isn’t the property of this woman, oh no. It belongs to her boyfriend who is away….. Her animals never seem to belong to her.

Lies, neglect and agression. Lovely people. I doubt this is the end of it…there’ll be more trouble yet for Bert.