This morning, Braunbeck and I had to have our cat Bea put down. We took her in this morning because she'd been having trouble breathing, and with her history of allergies we figured it was asthma. She's had an ongoing problem with getting a granuloma on the back of her tongue, and she's had recurring ear infections that may have been caused by a polyp rupturing her eardrum. 

The doctor took a chest xray, and it revealed she had fluid in her lungs and a massive tumor compressing her internal organs. And, based on her other health problems, the tumor was functionally untreatable. The vet advised the best thing for her was euthanasia, and that any other course of action would likely just prolong her suffering. So, we agreed, and we spent some time petting her before the vet came in to give her the shot. By all appearances Bea's death was quick and painless.

I spent some time looking at the xray of her chest. Peppered across it were 7 metal pellets that we had no idea were there. We got Bea and her brother when they were starving kittens. They showed up in the parking lot of our apartment complex in January of 2005. At first we hoped they merely had irresponsible owners, but when we saw them eating snow, we realized they had been abandoned. So we fed them, and called the no-kill shelters, but nobody had room for them. So, we brought them in the house, and took them to the vet the next day to get checked out. Bea was terribly sick with an infection and was close to death. The vet figured she was about 6 months old, and she weighed slightly less than 4 pounds. She didn't have any obvious wounds on her. 

So, the pellets I saw on her xray mean that some miserable piece of shit used her as target practice when she was just a tiny kitten. Who the hell does that? I have seen too many abused animals in my life. The vet, a cat specialist, just looked at the pellets imbedded in her flesh and said "Yeah, we see a lot of that, unfortunately."

Apparently, there are a lot of people (and I'm using that term loosely) out there who need to be put on Jet-Poop's crowbar list.

We tried to give Bea a good home, but I wish we could have done better for her.