Malice Aforethought: An Upstate New York Cat Is Saved from a Watery Grave by a Dead Tree and a Passerby; a New Hampshire Cat Is Not Nearly So Fortunate

"They left it there for the tide to come in and drown it. It was a horrible way to die, to wait for the waves to come in. It was imprisoned by the rocks on all four sides."
-- Animal Control officer Peter MacKinnon

When it comes to cats, the brutal murders and sickening acts of unspeakable cruelty never end. If it is not bird and wildlife advocates with their slanders, libels, and fiendish plots to do in the species, it is the white-coated men and women of science with their worthless experiments.

In addition to organized and well-financed ailurophobes, there are legions of freelance evildoers who strike like vipers in the grass when no one is looking. A good case in point is the individual who weighted down a gray mother cat in a sack and dumped her into the West Branch of Cayuga Inlet Creek in the upstate New York community of Newfield on May 5th.

Occasionally the angels intervene in the affairs of cats in order to undo some of Satan's work and this, fortunately, was one of those times. The first act of deliverance came when the sack lodged in a dead tree instead of going directly into the drink.

The second godsend came in the form on an unidentified eagle-eyed motorist who noticed that something was moving inside the sack. The driver then climbed down the slope, freed the cat, and took it to the Tompkins County SPCA.

The American Shorthair apparently did not sustain any serious injuries during her encounter with the Grim Reaper but the emotional scars will last her a lifetime. (See photo above.)

Her would-be tomb was constructed out of either a cushion cover or a pillowcase and was weighted down with a brick. (See photo below.) Unfortunately, SPCA investigators so far have not been able to locate either her kittens or the perpetrator of this heinous crime.


"I don't know what drives people to kill an animal when there is a place for them in their community," Abigail Smith of the SPCA told the Ithaca Journal on May 8th. (See "Lucky Cat Caught in Newfield Tree, Saved from Intentional Drowning.")

The Newfield cat's narrow escape is almost identical to the experience had by a cat named Lucky that was imprisoned in a cage with a sixteen-pound rock and then tossed into the Clark Fork River in Missoula, Montana on December 27, 2005.

The gods were on her side also in that she landed on the ice as opposed to in the river. A passerby spotted her and she was subsequently rescued by the Missoula Fire Department. (See Cat Defender post of January 13, 2006 entitled "Montana Firefighters Rescue "Lucky" Calico Cat Who Was Caged and Purposefully Thrown into an Icy River.")

Even before her owner attempted to snuff out her life, she had been terribly abused. Starved to the point where she was little more than skin and bones, it is a wonder that she did not die from either a lack of oxygen or infection in that her collar was fastened so tightly that it had worn away the fur from around her tiny neck.

Her abrupt change of fortune continued when she was adopted by her rescuer, firefighter Josh Macrow. (See photo below.) "It's the sweetest cat. It sits on your shoulder when you drive down the road and it curled up with my black labs this morning," he told The Missoulian.

As far as it is known, no arrest was ever made in the case.


Lucky and the Newfield cat are, sadly, exceptions to the rule. Most cats do not have the resources in order to survive direct assaults upon their lives and the gods cannot always be depended upon to intervene on the side of the innocent.

In Hampton, New Hampshire, for instance, an obese, ten-year-old dark-gray domestic cat was sealed up inside a black Spalding gym bag along with forty to fifty pounds of rocks on May 12th and left on the beach. Once the tide came in the bag became submerged in four to six feet of water. The helpless cat's tiny lungs filled with salt water and she died.

A beachcomber made the grisly discovery the next morning and called Animal Control officer Peter MacKinnon. "I was horrified," he told the Portsmouth Herald on May 14th. (See "Cat Found Dead in Rock-Filled Bag on Beach.") "I deal with live and dead animals all the time. I never saw anything like it."

As was the case with Lucky, this cat had been improperly cared for even before it was murdered. In addition to pinpointing the cause of the cat's death, a necropsy revealed that it also suffered from heart disease.

That is not surprising in that it weighed in excess of twenty pounds at the time of its death. Most likely it also had been sterilized. (See Cat Defender post of August 22, 2007 entitled "Indoor Cats Are Dying from Diabetes, Hyperthyroidism, and Various Toxins in the Home.")

"They left it there for the tide to come in and drown it," MacKinnon added. "It was a horrible way to die, to wait for the waves to come in. It was imprisoned by the rocks on all four sides."



The police are allegedly investigating this case, but feline abuse is seldom taken seriously in this society so an arrest is extremely unlikely. (See Cat Defender post of May 13, 2008 entitled "Just When It Appeared That She Was Going to Make It, Arwen Dies Suddenly after Being Shot in the Abdomen with a Barbed Arrow.")

Disposing of unwanted cats and kittens by drowning them is so old that it has become politically acceptable in many communities throughout the so-called civilized world. (See Cat Defender posts of October 23, 2007 and July 3, 2006 entitled, respectively, "Virginia Does It Again! Farmer Who Drowned at Least Five Cats Gets Off with a Slap-on-the-Wrists" and "Crooked Massachusetts Cops Allow Politician to Get Away with Attempting to Drown a Kitten Named Lucky Girl.")

Even Daniel Defoe's fictional Robinson Crusoe made a habit of drowning cats. Obviously, as long as this despicable practice remains politically palatable it is going to continue.

The same logic applies equally to veterinarians, Animal Control officers, and shelter workers who exterminate tens of millions of cats each year. Despite all of their strutting and pontificating, they are every bit as evil as individuals who murder cats outright.

In Cincinnati, twenty-three-year-old miscreant Raymond Southerland gets his jollies by playing a slightly more macabre game. As an added inducement in order to get his former roommate to repay a debt, he wired the ensanguined corpse of a cat that he had stored in his icebox to the tailpipe of her van on May 12th. (See photo above.)

"The only message that I got from that was that he was a complete idiot and disgusting, because I knew who did it," Mallory Fisher told WKRC-TV on May 13th. (See "Cat Wired to Car Exhaust.") "I knew he had a dead cat in his refrigerator."

Southerland, who has been charged with animal cruelty, is back out on the street after an unidentified Louisville woman bailed him out of the slammer. Meanwhile, it is not known how the cat died or even if the authorities are planning to conduct a necropsy. Most likely the cat will be denied even a proper burial.

Photos: Tompkins County SPCA (Newfield cat and bag and brick), The Missoulian (Lucky and Josh Macrow), and WKRC-TV (cat wired to exhaust pipe).