Story of a cat full of BBs

There were a few odd things about Twirly that we didn't give much thought when we first met him on our front porch.

For one thing, he was a very shy cat, even for a feral. It took him nine months of daily feedings before he got close enough to touch. "He's cautious, that's all," I thought. It was almost a year before he finally dropped his guard and we discovered that he is the most affectionate cat we've ever met. Up until then, he was simply "that black spot on the ground" that a seemingly impossible amount of food went into every day.

The first time we let him inside, he stayed for 5 days.  We didn't know if he had ever seen a litter box, so I had daily conversations with him that went like this.  "Twirly, you need to go out and go to the bathroom," I'd say, opening the door.  "Nah, I'm good.  I'm a man, see?" he'd reply, displaying the evidence, "I can hold it.  There is no tomorrow, you know, not for a cat.  There's just today, and today I'm warm and safe.  Who knows what will happen once I leave."

He also walked funny. It was almost as if his rear legs were making their own choices, different from the actions executed by his front legs. Perhaps they were simply operating at a different speed. He could walk, run and even jump with some level of coordination, but when he got excited, his rear legs would do circles around the rest of him. This is how he got his name. "Neurological damage," I thought, and left it at that. It was cute, even.

Occasionally, he would appear with animal-inflicted injuries. A bite wound on the leg, scratches here and there. I didn't think much of this also, he's an outdoor cat. A feral, "not really our" cat. We patched him up when we could. What I should have asked was "Why is my other outdoor cat fine?" Yesterday, he hobbled home with bigger bite wounds, and that's how he wound up on an operating table and under an x-ray.

The veterinarian tactfully asked me "Are you aware that your cat has over 20 BBs in his body?" Not having grown up in a gun-friendly culture, I didn't immediately understand what that meant. Then I saw the x-ray. "It's fairly common," the vet told me. This is where Twirly's symptoms all came together for me, his fear of people, his troubled coordination, his inability to avoid wildlife encounters, all tracing back to past emotional and nerve damage. I could hear the tension in the vet's voice ease up as she became more or less convinced that we didn't shoot "our" own cat full of metal balls. With a gun.

The purpose of writing this down is not to "other" the neighbor who did this, whoever it was. I say "neighbor" both because the cat probably didn't travel far, and because the shooter is almost certainly someone's neighbor, somewhere. I don't even know when it happened.

I can't judge because I operate within my own capacity, and so does he (or she). I have childhood memories I am not proud of, choices I would not make today. For me, these choices stemmed from lack of empathy, a sense of separation from other living beings. My wish is that parents help children cultivate empathy. Perhaps this illustration will help.

In my mind, Twirly is a veteran, and now that we've taken our vet to the vet, he is recovering, slowly, indoors. He may have trouble going through airport security, but at least he'll be able to walk, albeit in his cute and funny way.