NEWS AND VIEWS (COMMENT): the story comes from Middletown, USA and is told in the video just below this paragraph by Steve Mago. He tells it movingly. He and his family loved this gray cat who they found in his detached garage and adopted him. They named him Mush and they loved him perhaps partly because he was born with a spinal deformity which resulted in him walking close to the ground as if he was stalking. Everything was normal in his life until one day a female animal control officer in a uniform came onto his property and took away Mush. He knows this because he’s got one of those Ring doorbell cameras. It shows a woman knocking on his door shortly after 11 AM in the morning.
Sometimes videos such as the one above stop working overtime for various reasons beyond my control. If that has happened I apologise.
Mush was taken to the Red Bank Veterinary Hospital in Tinton Falls hospital where they decided that he was feral (which he clearly wasn’t because he acted like a domestic cat and was a domestic cat) and that he was in pain. We don’t know how they made the decision that he was in pain. That’s a big decision to make because it is hard to tell and, in any case, Steve says he wasn’t in pain. He just suffered from a spinal deformity.
We want to thank everyone for your concern for the family of Mush and your questions surrounding his care.
As…
Posted by Red Bank Veterinary Hospitals on Sunday, November 8, 2020
So, to all intents and purposes, it appears that the hospital is trying to cover up a mistake with feeble excuses. They made a big mistake in killing a perfectly healthy cat albeit one that was 15 years old with a spinal deformity. The hospital is not responding to a request but comment that they have issued a statement on Facebook which you can read on this page above. It honestly smells of a cover-up as I’ve mentioned.
Steve and his wife Rosemary and their grown children are outraged. Steve says that it was just crazy what happened because they “basically took a healthy cat off my lawn and killed it”.
I think you can hear in the video him saying that his children or one of his children cried for three hours after hearing the news. He got the news that his cat had been euthanised on the way to the hospital to pick him up. It’s one of those tragic stories of a veterinarian making a big mistake or being careless or prejudiced.
In defence, the township say that they have an ordnance which requires that all domestic cats are licensed and Mush was unlicensed. He was also not micro-chipped. If he had been he would have been saved and the tragedy wouldn’t have happened. Steve understands that and you can hear in the video that he admits that omission on his part. Nonetheless, it should not have resulted in the death of this much loved cat.
