When a domestic cat lives in a forest, they need rescuing

This is another cat rescue story taken from a TikTok video. The information provided is sparse which I find a little surprising. Why don’t the rescuers provide some or even full details? It would be instructive on how domestic cats only very rarely satisfactorily survive when dumped into a wild place.

To be frank we don’t know how this ginger tabby male cat ended up in a forest. We don’t even know where the forest is or which country we are in. Well, it is far from obvious. My guess: America somewhere or the UK.

Note: if these videos have stopped working – sorry, but I can’t control their existence on the internet.

But is likely that this rescued cat who was named Lucian was abandoned in the forest, beside the road. That’s a very convenient and popular way of getting rid of a domestic cat. It is method that is totally divorced from humanity and decency.

It is very cruel and the people who do it are insensitive with arguably psychopathic tendencies by which I mean they are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions which in this instance might well lead to the premature death of the cat.

We don’t know for how long Lucian was in the forest. Perhaps a couple of months. You can see how he ended up: in a terrible state. They lose weight and become skinny because they have to hunt for sustenance which they can do but there might not be much prey. And a domestic cat’s hunting skills (for survival) can become rusty and inadequate.

And almost invariably, they get an upper respiratory infection (URI) which attacks the eyes leading to a secondary bacterial infection which can if left too long can cause blindness with the loss of the eye or eyes. That’s often why we see blind rescued cats. It is the kittens who suffer from URIs the worst.

Lucian was very ill. His rescuer says that he had a fever and is on antibiotics. The situation appears to be live and developing as at the time of this post. Lucian’s recovery is up from grabs at this moment in time according to Josie the rescuer.

Well done to her for taking him in and putting him through what must be a pretty arduous period of medical rehabilitation both for Josie and Lucian. Expensive and emotionally draining I should think. I still question the need to video the rescue. I am not being critical of Josie; the opposite, but years ago we’d have rescued the cat anonymously.

The moral of the story is that there is an underbelly of bad cat caretakers who abandon cats in the most unpleasant ways, one of which is beside the road and society needs to ask itself some serious questions about the overall human-to-cat relationship. How successful is it? Is it a failure due to our inability to care for the domestic cat to a high standard across the board?

Thankfully, there are, though, millions of great cat cargivers.

RELATED: Abandoned calico kitten had given up in middle of country road before rescue