Killing Cats Hammer

Big companies are killing cats in animal testing; I have discussed that. Rescue centers are forced to kill cats on a scale that can only be described as mass slaughter. It is a scale that is quite staggering in its enormity. Yet I sit and type this and talk about it and am powerless to stop it.

There is another way to kill cats, by the actions of ignorant and ill-educated individuals scattered over the planet in developing countries and modern countries, behind closed doors and in back gardens and with any means at their disposal.

These are individuals such as referred to in a story I picked up on the internet; I've forgotten where from now (I think it was actually from a Flickr member). Anyway it happens a gazillion times each day. Right now a cat is being hit and beaten to death in agony and it makes me scream inside.

This is the story. A family had lots of cats (this sounds like a family at the poorer end of the spectrum both financially and in terms of education). When one of the cats did something that displeased the father (e.g. something entirely natural for a cat such as bringing in a bird) he would fetch a hammer from the tool shed and hit the cat until dead (it hurts typing this). Neighbors knew about it but did nothing. We don't do we. Of course his son (or one of them) learned from this and hit a neighbor's cat over the head with a hammer and killed the cat. He thought is was normal - he would wouldn't he. At that point the neighborhood sat up and took action.

Eventually the cats were taken from the family and the usual rather low level punishments took place.

There's more than one way to kill cats but it's always the same perpetrator either directly or indirectly - mankind.

Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Top photograph copyright Kaworu Koneru
Second photo down of an abandoned cat with a mouth tumor. The kind of cat referred to in the story above copyright Celladoor