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Uh.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) nonethefewer, don't read this. Seriously.
Same warning applies to anyone sensitive to issues regarding harm to animals and cats in particular. Contains news report, and personal recollections about my late cats, including Tabitha.
Bronx teen confesses to roasting kitten. Article text:
A Bronx teenager roasted her ex-roommate's kitten to death in a stove - then brushed off the incident as a joke when she was busted, authorities said Thursday.
"I hate cats," Cheyenne Cherry, 17, allegedly told investigators when asked about the heartless crime.
Cherry's confession came after she was arrested Wednesday by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
She and an unidentified juvenile allegedly broke into Valerie Hernandez's Tinton Ave. apartment on May 6 and trashed the place.
Then in a shocking act of animal abuse, they tossed the woman's kitten, Tiger Lily, into the stove and cranked up the temperature, ASPCA assistant director Joe Pentangelo said.
Cherry told authorities that she and her accomplice "thought we would play a joke on Valerie and mess up her apartment."
The duo bolted from the apartment with DVDs and packages of noodles, Pentangelo said.
"She didn't want to hear the cat crying and scratching at the oven door," Pentangelo said.
Firefighters found the female cat's remains smoldering in the oven after neighbors complained of smoke coming from Hernandez's apartment.
"My brother came to my house and said, 'I think food is burning,'" said Hernandez's next-door neighbor Jannetssie Genau, 24.
"Later the police came and said what it was. I was upset because I had a cat myself before."
Besides roasting the kitten, Cherry and her friend allegedly slashed Hernandez's furniture, unscrewed light bulbs and threw bleach on the walls, Pentangelo said.
"I think what was done cries out for justice," Pentangelo said. "It's a shame that this kitten had to suffer like this. For the kitten to get caught up in whatever was going on with them is a tragedy."
Pentangelo said the kitten was burned so badly a necropsy had to be performed to determine its sex.
Cherry was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals, burglary, arson, reckless endangerment and criminal mischief. She was released to the custody of her mother.
The unidentified juvenile involved in the incident has not been arrested.
There are times when believing in Christian forgiveness is hard.
Too hard.
I want that monster to burn. Literally. Alive. And I want her to survive, but narrowly, so she can spend the rest of a long and miserable life in a living hell of constant pain. Because she deserves it.
Sure, it was "only" a kitten. But think about it - it was a kitten. A creature of the category that is more-or-less perfectly constructed to be the living embodiment of "cute" and harmless. Supposedly, everyone likes kittens, even if they hate cats.
My family tends to have cats. Our last three cats were Mouse, Spike and Tabitha. Mouse was abused badly for about ten years before we got her - I watched her recover from the psychological damage that caused her. It took her three years to become stable within certain conditions, so long as her family was around - the best part of ten years until she was friendly to strangers, again, so long as her family was around. If she had one of us near, she was friendly and affectionate. If a stranger entered the house while we weren't there (like real estate reps doing rent inspections), she'd return to her traumatised behaviour for weeks.
Cats have memories. Cats have psyches. Cats can have PTSD - she did. It took her years to recover even partly. I am only glad she had the happy years she had with us. She died a happy and loved cat, at the age of 22. She died looking into my eyes, knowing that her family was around her, knowing that we adored her.
She had to be put down because her quality of life had disappeared, all of a sudden, when the tumours she'd had for about seven years by then ruptured. She was bleeding into her lungs, she couldn't move, she was struggling to breathe - the day before she'd been fine, but suddenly it was time to let her go.
I cried for days.
Spike we picked up in the mid-90s. The son of a family friend found him in a rubbish bin - he'd heard a kitten crying, had retrieved him and taken him to school, spent some of his lunch money buying milk for him. Their family couldn't keep him - they had several young children, and a baby due any day at the time - so we did.
Spike is still living with my parents. He's had his own problems - had an anxiety disorder of his own for a while, after Mouse died and Tabitha arrived - and is now diabetic, but his diabetes is under control and he's doing fine. Still a bit of a grump, but he's okay.
And then there's Tabitha.
Now, Tabitha was adopted by my sister, as a kitten, and was, quite frankly, spoilt rotten in her youth by my sister's housemates at the time. Tabitha was as thick as a stack of bricks but she was sweet and cute and very, very pretty. Not long after Mouse died, my sister decided she couldn't keep her any more, pleading allergies, and Tabitha came to live with us.
Spike hated her on sight, and we had to keep them separate for quite some time so he wouldn't kill her. Tabitha lived in my bedroom for months, and she and I got rather close. She used to follow me around the house. I got used to her being around.
And then, one night, I came home from an evening with friends, and Tabitha was dead.
She was maybe hit by a car. She was maybe deliberately tortured almost to death by a sadist. We don't actually know, because her injuries weren't consistent with being hit by a car, quite, but we don't have any evidence the other way, and my father went running towards her when she started screaming. He picked her up. He only knew that she was as badly hurt as she was when her legs seemed limp, and then he realised blood was dripping down his body from hers.
The vet herself was traumatised. The vet. She'd never seen injuries so severe. The first thing they did was try to take away the pain, but they quickly realised that all Tabitha's future held was a slow and agonising death, or euthenasia.
She was put down. It was not the sorrowful, yet calm scene that Mouse's death was.
So I'm not entirely objective on the topic of cats who die in screaming agony, because that happened to mine, and, looking back, that might have been the final trigger that set off the complete mental breakdown I had last year.
Time for food and growling at the world.
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