The cat in the dustbin
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-08-27 09:43:38 - Graham Ellis
The newspapers are full of the story of the woman who dumped a cat into a dustbin. Should you come back to this article years later, it appears that she was walking up a typical suburban road, a cat came up to her in a friendly way, and she stroked it, then picked it up and put it in a refuse / wheelie bin. The cat's owner luckily found it, plaintively mewing, the best part of a day later and rescued it. At first, he thought that the cat had got into the bin somehow looking for scraps, but was astonished on playing back images on a security system to find pictures of a middle aged woman "cat dumping".Miss Mary Bale, who works on the counter at a bank, bleats in the paper this morning "I've already been worried about losing my job because of the recession, but now it's a near certainty. The public see me every day when I serve them - how can I hide away from that? There's nothing I can do. ... My whole life will be turned upside down"
Two points I would make to Miss Bale:
1. There was plenty you could have done (or rather not done). Had you not dumped that cat, you would remain in obscurity in Coventry this morning.
2. You complain about your life being turned upside down. Maybe, but your intentional actions could have resulted in the cruel and lingering death of an animal. You will recover from having your life turned upside - but Lola would not have recovered from death.
And a question for Miss Bale:
Very, very few dustbins are CCTV monitored - so the chances of you being caught were slim. Is this this first time you have done this, or are you responsible for the disappearance of other animals in your neighborhood?
Image from public-domain.zorger.com, from a 1916 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with illustrations by Gordon Robinson.