A new "I hate cats" campaign is coming

The newspapers have reported a case of a stray cat wandering into someone's flat and, upon being spotted, was chased out of the house by the owner.

The fleeing cat - must be with all claws flailing - managed to plant a deep gash on the face of a little girl, the owner's granddaughter, while making its escape.

The girl, aged only three, had to have a plastic surgeon fix up the deep cut with 15 stitches that run from her upper lip to her nose. The "first aid" cost her folks $3K, and she may bear a scar for life. [That's her wound in the pic.]

Cost aside, I can just see it coming - letters, coffeeshop talk about how cats really deserve to be reviled, hated. The dog camp is gonna tell the cat camp: "See, cats are evil!"

The newspaper report ends with the child's mom calling for a stop to the neighbourhood's practice of feeding stray cats. I'm personally with her on this. I posted an earlier blog against the blind feeding of stray moggies without the attendant responsibility of sterilising them first.

If people bother to sterilise the strays first, they can feed them all they want and rest assured the strays won't multiply and perpetuate the problem. [Look up my May 14, 2006 post in the archives headlined "Be still, a eunuch speaketh...".]

And feeding stray cats along an HDB corridor is just wrong. This will bring all the neighbourhood's cats around, and some wil inadvertently enter neighbours' homes. Not everybody likes cats, that much I know.

This being said, that stray cat was just doing what came naturally to it when it was scared out of its wits by an angry granny, stomping on the floor to shoo it out. How was my friend to know it had gone where it wasn't supposed to?

The little girl: Well, I feel sorry for her pain. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, namely, in the path of a fleeing claw-wielding furball.