On Tuesday, July 22, 2014 at about 3 am in the morning a call out was made to the police on US 395, north of Conway Summit. This, by the way, is in Arizona, USA.
By the time the police got to the car there was a passenger in the backseat, a 33-year-old woman, but no one in the driver's seat. The driver had run off because both the passenger and the driver had been taking drugs and in the car was paraphernalia concening the use of crystal methamphetamine.
The passenger was under the influence of this drug. There was a second passenger, a cat hiding under the passenger seat. The policeman decided the cat should be taken under the care and control of Mono County County Animal Control until the lady was able to care for her cat herself.
A gentle wrestling match ensued as the police officer extracted the cat from the car. There was the usual hissing, scratching and “feline defensive mechanisms".
It seems that the policeman did a good job. The only worry I have is whether the cat is safe under the care of animal control, in a shelter. Without wishing to be overly critical, these are potentially dangerous places for cats.
Let's just hope that the lady in the back seat of the car genuinely cares for her cat. Or perhaps the cat belongs to the driver who ran-off. Not a good endorsement for for her commitment to cat ownership if she is the owner.
The whole episode begs the question whether a person who uses crystal meth is able to care for a cat to a satisfactory level. I think the answer depends on the person. If the person is a genuinely good cat caretaker then he or she will probably be able to work around the addiction, if it is an addiction.
However, if the person is an average or what I call an ambivalent cat owner then when you add drug taking to that mix you end up with inadequate cat caretaking.
When addictive drugs are in the mix, and I include alcohol, there is rarely a decent outcome for any animals in the care of the addicted person.
ReplyDeleteDid you ever see the clip of Pete Docherty and his tuxedo kittens. Poor little mites having cannabis smoke blown all over them, and worse. Docherty used a lot of drugs, crystal meth, heroin, cannabis and plenty of others. His flat was a pit, where oafish guests would fill the air with their toxic fumes at all hours of the day.
Pete Docherty has long been in rehab in somewhere like Thailand (another pit of hell for animals) He says he's over his addictions now. I wonder if he is capable of giving thought to what he did to those poor cats.
I wonder what became of them.
Actually, I wonder what became of all of the animals owned by all celebrities, murder victims, the evicted, the homeless.
I agree completely with your opening line. You can't look after a cat properly or soundly (let's put it that way) if you are a drug or alcohol addict. Shame but true.
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