Hitting a cat on the road is upsetting to the car driver

There are three aspects to a cat being hit by a car on the road, (a) the owner has arguably been irresponsible in letting their cat wander onto roads and (b) the cat is badly injured or killed and suffering great pain and (c) the driver of the vehicle is or should be upset and there is a moral burden on the driver to stop and help. This moral burden might become a legal one in the UK.

Cat on side of road.

The last item is rarely discussed. Hitting a cat on the road is very upsetting to a large section of society. Not everyone will care but millions will and through no fault of their own they find themselves in a very difficult position.

The driver is morally obliged to stop the car, check the cat, take the cat to the nearest veterinarian as a matter of urgency, make sure the cat is scanned for a microchip and make sure the vet contacts the cat's owner if she has one. If not there is the added complication of what to do next. Who pays the vet's bills? Do you authorise euthanasia and so on.

And in Britain 99% of cat owners allow this possibility to come about. They don't seem to recognise the dangers and the burden that it might place on a car driver.

I am not saying that letting a cat wander outside is automatically a bad decision because sometimes the outside is safe for a cat but oftentimes it is not because of heavy road traffic nearby.

Cat owners need to think of others, especially drivers of vehicles, as well as the safety of their cat when they let their cat wander freely outside.

Delivery driver runs over kitten in driveway of property. Who is at fault?

A woman is in the process of receiving a delivery of groceries having ordered them online. The supermarket vehicle is parked up in the driveway and the goods are being offloaded. The woman lets her cats go outside. This is the UK. One of her cats is a 7-month-old kitten. She does not know where he is.

As she knows he could be outside she asks the delivery driver to move off slowly after the delivery has been fully offloaded. The idea is to give the kitten warning that the vehicle is moving. The driver does not carry out her instructions and drives off quickly. The kitten is crushed by one of the wheels. The kitten must have been very near the wheel when the vehicle moved off.

The woman is naturally distraught. The supermarket apologised, gave her flowers and £100. The woman is still upset and feels aggrieved. She is complaining to the company.



Who is at fault? It is not all on one side. I'd say the woman is equally at fault as the driver. She may have to bear the burden of most of the fault in my view. She knew the van was there. She knew her kitten could have been there. A tragic accident was forseable. She did not do enough to prevent it. The better solution would have been to either keep her cats inside when the delivery was being made or to inspect under the vehicle before it was driven off.