Luckily, a Kitty Tumbled, Landed Softly!
by Bill Hall(ED. NOTE: Bill Hall is the editorial-page editor of the Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune. He writes often and fondly about animals. Reprinted with permission.)
My friend Yvette was driving behind a beat up old car on a busy street when she noticed something funny going on inside the vehicle. Small children in the car appeared to be fighting over some object. Suddenly the man driving the car grabbed whatever it was and threv it out the window. A small kitten went tumbling through the air and splatted into the street.
Yvette hit her brakes trying to avoid the animal. She stopped in time, then got out and scooped up the dazed cat. She figured she would drop it by the pound but she took it home first to look it over. It had a cut lip and an abrasion over one eye. The kitten had apparently landed on its fuzzy little face.
Other than that, it didn't seem to be too severely damaged, except, of course, it was totally freaked out. Yvette wasn't going to keep the kitten. But after what it had gone through, she thought she would give it a chance to calm down a little before delivering it to the cat orphanage.
The kitten was pretty goosy at first. And who wouldn't be after being fought over by small children and then thrown out a window into a busy street? Some animals carry the signs of prior mistreatment with them for the rest of their lives.
Nellie, for instance. Our cat Nellie was rescued from rough treatment
by a friend who knew she needed a new home and brought her to us as a
kitten. I think Nellie probably belonged to a family with small
children who meant the kitten no harm. But if you don't quickly teach
kids otherwise, some small children will reach out a stubby little arm
and try to pet a cat. However, with their underdeveloped coordination,
all toddlers can manage is to kind of whack it on the head.
And then, of course, there is the way they carry a cat with a chubby little arm around its neck and the cat's body dangling down. Talk about almost being loved to death.
Nellie had probably been through something like that, or maybe something worse. Suffice it to say, to this day, after several years of nothing but pampering, you reach out a hand to pet Nellie and she flinches every time. There is a reflex permanently built into that cat to duck when she sees a human hand coming.
Once you make gentle contact and start stroking her head, she relaxes and leans into it, But Nellie is a cat who remembers being pounded.
There are also humans like that with physical or emotional flinches built into their personalities. Loud noises make some combat veterans flinch more than the rest of us. And there are once-battered women who flinch if you raise a hand near them to reach for a can of beans off the supermarket shelf.
That's the sort of thing Yvette was thinking about when she took home the kitten thrown out the car window. She wanted to take it to a calm place and get it settled down a bit before she took it to the pound where they would find it a new home.
Or a quick death, if they couldn't find it a home.
But there was the problem of its being awfully thin. And it had fleas (probably picked up from the guy driving the car). Yvette had to get all that under control first.
Well, of course, one thing led to another. And now, a month later, she still has the cat. It has stopped flinching when it is petted. The fleas are gone. It has apparently forgotten its former life.
Yvette calls the cat Lucky. And it is. Talk about landing on your paws: a kitten was tossed out a car window on a busy thoroughfare into the path of a driver with quick reflexes and a good heart; a driver with an astonishing capacity for self-delusion told herself she was just taking the cat home long enough to let it calm down.
Her only regret is that she was so busy dodging the cat with her car and then rescuing it from the middle of traffic that she didn't have time to get the license number of the guy who pitched Lucky out the window.
Yvette would like to meet him to tell him that she also has a name for him.
I would tell you what it is but it would only make you flinch.
- Bill Hall