“Florida man tries to rescue cat on turnpike causing fatal car crash” is the story of a failed cat rescue.

A visitor to PoC has said in a comment that a story of an attempted cat rescue in Florida, USA proves that cat lovers often believe that the lives of cats are more important than those of humans:

Just another person who believes that cats’ lives are more important than human lives….(SethJames)

Of course he is wrong. He is generalizing. In my experience, very rarely does a cat lover rate human lives less valuable than cat lives. There are some people who believe this, of course, but the vast majority of cat lovers are sensible and intelligent enough to rate the lives of both species equally. Am I correct?

In this Florida story Michael James Schneider pulled his car onto the shoulder of a turnpike (a toll road) to rescue a cat. The author of the article which is the source of this one states:

“…the demonic creature drew him into oncoming traffic. An unidentified woman hit Schneider with her car before losing control”.

The author appears to dislike cats! The man was thrown onto the side of the road while the woman died as her car crashed. The man was seriously injured. The cat? Nowhere to be seen and we don’t know what happened.

This story is not an example of a person placing the life of a cat above his or someone else’s. He just wanted to save the life of a cat and screwed up while trying to do it.

We don’t know the circumstances. Do turnpikes have hard shoulders? What I mean is, is there a lane at the edge of the freeway where a broken down car can park in an emergency?

If so then it is not foolhardy to try and rescue a cat on a turnpike. If Schneider stopped in one lane of the freeway on which there was free moving traffic, what he did was damn stupid. Under those circumstances he should have abandoned any idea of saving the cat because the risk was far too high.

This is a question of common sense not of one’s philosophical stance on the value if lives of various species of animal.

• Source: Florida Man Tries to Rescue Cat on Turnpike, Instead Causes Fatal Car Crash | Miami New Times
• Picture: Wikipedia Commons.