NEWS AND VIEWS: Cat lovers will be pleased about the outcome of this story. The picture is indirectly a ‘cat picture’ but we see no cat. But we do know that the red Toyota Prius which is resting precariously on top of a Jeep is a taxi and the taxi driver avoided a cat on the road and then lost control of his or her vehicle. The police confirmed that the motorist swerved around a cat on a road in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, UK at around 4 AM in the morning.
There was nothing else on the road except the cat. It is the sort of time, the perfect time, for inside/outside cats to be wandering around because we all know by now that domestic cats are crepuscular which means they are active at dawn and dusk when prey is available. Although, I don’t expect that this cat bumped into any prey but he or she almost bumped into a vehicle.
There were no injuries and apparently insurance and contact details were exchanged. One commenter amusingly wrote: “CATastrophic accident and a not so purrfect landing.”
There is an amusing element, which is obvious, but there is a serious side to it as well. The poor guy who drove the taxi has a lot of problems to deal with now and we have to think of him. The cat was lucky. Many wondering cats are not so lucky and I recall that an estimated 250,000 or perhaps more are killed on the roads of the UK annually.
Fortunately, there is a general trend in the UK to keep cats inside on the realisation that with greater urban sprawl and an increasing human population (will it ever stabilise?), the dangers to outside cats are increasing year-on-year. Road traffic is perhaps the biggest danger of all to domestic and feral cats in the UK.
Source: The Mirror newspaper.
SOME MORE ON ROAD TRAFFIC:
