Saving Sassy

Kittens are precious.
Animal hoarding is wrong.

It was a difficult day yesterday.  Started off with a nice little get together and ended with me taking a very cute kitten to the vet to be put down.  I'm very much for animal rights, and what happened yesterday was just... beyond anything I could ever imagine.

Two people dropped a bunch of cats off with two friends of mine and took off. My friends don't know what to do with the cats. There was one kitten, Sass, who was absolutely adorable. She was polite and every bit the little lady - unlike most of the other cats who snatch food, fight, and are turning a little feral from the amount of cats that these people keep.  So, Sass was the cat that my friends were planning on keeping when these "people" came back to get the other cats "tomorrow".

Well, "tomorrow" turned into a few days later and one of the kittens in the hoard of cats died mysteriously. It turned out to be some sort of infection and when poor Sass fell ill my friend separated all of the many intruding cats away from their two cats and kept Sass in a very large cage of her own complete with bedding and water and everything else.  They kept her in a nice cool place and were trying to keep her hydrated.  I helped yesterday trying to get the cat to a vet or something and no one was willing to see her without an enormous down payment.

Finally, a vet in Whitehall agreed to see the kitten for only $150 and then would work with us from there. As we're getting ready to take this kitten, which is not ours, to a vet and give our own money into it to keep it safe they two real "owners" waltz in. They want to take the kitten down to Philly and want my friend to drive them there despite having a car.

When called on it, no, they didn't want to help the kitten, they wanted her to drive the car because it was an illegal vehicle and neither of them wanted to get pulled over with the drugs that they had.  It had nothing to do with saving poor Sassy. When I said, "We're taking her to Valley Central Emergency Vet in Whitehall the two gave me this big "oh! I wish we could help!" and I said, "How about instead of partying, you pay the $150 for your cat's vet bill instead of making us do it?"
The response I got was flooring.
Ready? You might want to sit down.

"Yeah, well, we just had a cat die from this. We took that one to the vet so we're not really willing to go through that again."
Then the male of the two shoved a twenty my way and said; "This is for gas".

There was no "thank you" or any other offer of help. They wanted to let poor Sass just lay there to die and none of us could do it. She was in too much pain and it just would have been cruel.

We rushed Sass to the vet. They were all so amazingly helpful (I'll be writing something more detailed, but five stars on this vet hospital, I highly suggest them if you need emergency vet care), but unfortunately we weren't able to save Sassy. There was a lot of anger and tears, a lot of grief.  This shouldn't have happened and there was no reason for it to happen if these people would have taken care of their own pets.

So, we take the long car ride home, thinking that's that and that the cats in my friends' house should be gone along with anything else these people had there.  But when we returned to the house the cats were still there and the idiots were gone. They abandoned all the cats to my friends who now have no idea what to do with them.

We're looking into no-kill shelters, but this isn't a responsibility that should have to be taken on by us.


To the people who did this - I hope you guys are watching this blog. You're monsters. I said it to you once and now I'm going to say it again:

If you cannot afford to care for the animals you have, you shouldn't have them!

Especially when it's over 20 cats.