On Reddit.com a person (Reddit username: u/DoctaEiffel) posted the headline Dumped at a shelter after 18 years because his family “didn’t want cat hair anymore,” now he lives in our sanctuary. Welcome, Pumpkin!
It has caught the eye of Internet users. Newsweek published an article on it. The comments on Reddit.com indicate dismay and shock as you would expect. They say that the person or persons who did this are hollow and that people should judge other people how they treat their cats. I think that’s quite a nice idea.
I might write an article on it because how you treat your cat is how you treat animals and how people treat animals reflects very strongly on their character. The people treat them really nicely are nearly always decent people and the people who are cruel and abusive to cats are often psychopaths who end up being violent against people.
Now I’m not saying the person who abandoned pumpkin is a psychopath, of course not. But after 18 years to abandon your cat because you got fed up with cat hair in your home, that reflects badly on the person or persons.
One aspect of this story on Reddit is that there is no real story. We have a good photograph of Pumpkin on a bed looking content. And the photograph seems to have been taken by the person who posted it on Reddit.com. So, he or she appears to be the person who adopted Pumpkin from the animal shelter where he was abandoned.
I will have to presume that that person got the story of why Pumpkin was abandoned from the shelter staff but this is not mentioned. We don’t have a story and therefore I have to at least question the veracity of the headline to the photograph.
On the basis that it is correct, it’s one of those stories that does pop up from time to time concerning the abandonment of elderly domestic cats. They are at least slightly shocking because it probably means that she lived with a cat for a very long time without really loving their cat. Without there being a really good bond. And you would have thought that at 18 years of age the bond would have cemented to the point that you will stick with your cat until the end and then you will attend the last moments of his or her life.
On the flipside, rarely, we read about exceptional people who go into a cat shelter with a specific intention of adopting the oldest and most unadoptable cat in the establishment. And if there are two cats like that, they adopt the pair of them together and give them a great life for the last few years or few months that remains. Like I said, that’s the flipside. There is often someone good to pick up the pieces.
The people who abandon cats like this are the baddies and the people who adopt them are the goodies.
SOME MORE ON ABANDONMENT:
