my dog can open doors.

warning: if you love cats, you might not want to read this

so yesterday sean and i were upstairs hanging pictures on the third floor and hear a cat wailing outside. i look out of the window and see that bonita has the cat in her mouth and is shaking it. sean ran outside and by the time i got out he had her by the collar and the cat was dead...

a little background on the cat. we were walking the other day, and there was a cat just off the side of the road in the grass. the girls got within a foot or two, and boney realized it was there and of course went crazy. on the way back the cat stuck it's head around and boney tried to get closer, but i got her in the house. i was out a bit later taking trash out and the cat was making it's way up the street. i went to get a closer look, and saw that it was missing an eye and had a huge red growth where the eye should have been. it was dragging a useless leg behind it, and was pretty slow because of this. it looked at me and opened it's mouth to hiss, but no sound came out. it's remaining eye was weepy and it looked as if it was crying. i started calling it sad cat. boney spent the afternoon looking out the windows at this cat, and we had a long talk about how obviously no one was caring for it, she needed to be sympathetic and leave it alone. i wanted to feed it, catch it and take it to the vet, and even remarked that maybe i should let boney out to put the poor thing out of it's misery. those words came back to haunt me.

boney opened our front door and let herself out. she's done it with the internal door in our main living room twice again this morninig, as if to show us that it was her, and we didn't accidentally leave the door open. we've since taken to locking the door with a key from the inside.

anyway, after we got boney in the house, sean went and wrapped the cat in a towel and we put it in a box and headed to the vet. freaking out, of course. i didn't know at that point that it was, in fact, sad cat, and was terrified that it would be a) my downstairs neighbors cat (they are our friends, and i'm sure our dog killing their cat would have ended that) or b) frau heinzscheisse's cat from down the street (she hates us, and i'm certain she would have done everything she could to have boney put down). when we got to the vet and i realized it was sad cat, i had the vet examine her so i had some ammunition for an animal cruelty and neglect case if i needed to bring one against someone if they went after us. he was dehydrated, had pellets from a bb gun in one leg, a tumor in the muscle in the other, the tumor in the eye, and was evidently old. not that any of this makes boney killing it okay, but the fact remains that the ONLY reason she was able to get ahold of this cat was because it could barely walk. it was too weak to defend itself - bonita came out without a scratch. the way boney killed it would have caused it to die instantly. i won't get into details. the cat was microchipped, but not registered, so we have no way of knowing whose it was, and i know in my heart that no one was caring for him... and if they were they were monsters.

i cried and cried at the vets, should anyone think i sound unsympathetic about this. i pet the poor thing and apologized profusely. the thing is, boney was a hunting dog. she did what she had been trained to do, and what greyhound have been trained to do for thousands of years. it's in her blood, and if she wasn't good at it in spain she probably wouldn't be alive today. that doesn't mean we won't be visiting a trainer or working with a behaviorist.

we're having the cat cremated, and i'm going to climb a hill and give it a decent send off and a beautiful resting place.