Although perhaps under the circumstances mistaking a rabbit for your cat is possibly acceptable, this is an extraordinary story. They are, after all, quite different creatures.
Cheryl Schmidt, living in Indiana, USA believed that she had found her beloved tortoiseshell-and-white cat dead beside the road. Her cat, Kitty, is quite distinctive as you can see in the photograph. She decided to bury Kitty. She held a ceremony during which her husband, Steve, said a few kind words.
She went back to the house and there was her cat! She was staring at her through the window. She dug up the “cat” that she had just buried and took the body to a veterinarian to discover who owned him or her. The vet told her that it was the body of a rabbit. She buried the rabbit in the same hole where she had earlier buried it.
The strange error has been put down to the fact that the rabbit was badly injured by a vehicle. Cheryl even had the presence of mind to borrow a shovel from a neighbour. She was crying while she placed the rabbit in the hole which she or her husband had dug. In fact, the veterinarian had offered to cremate the rabbit but she wanted to bury the body again.
Cheryl wishes that she had checked the body more carefully before deciding that it was the body of her cat. She wanted to keep the story quiet but as you can see it’s all over the internet! It’s very difficult to keep things quiet with social media. I believe that it was Eric, her son and a voice-over actor, who had uploaded the story to social media so his mother was too late in telling him to keep quiet about it. However, it is a quite a cute story, very human. Perhaps a factor in making the mistake is that Cheryl must have been very upset and it is possible that she worries about her cat being hurt on the road and had decided that the tragedy had finally happened which caused her great distress and blinded her to the reality of what happened.
Eric’s Twitter post has been liked almost 800,000 times and re-tweeted more than 102,000 times! Clearly the story is interesting to social media users and it has made her and her family temporary celebrities. It is exceptional because of the obvious reason that it is very difficult to mistake a rabbit for your cat.
