pyewacketsworld

Part 8:

As I previously mentioned the Animal Care & Control was to come into our apartment nearly on a daily basis on and off from April 18th until May 4th of 2006. I hated every moment of it and had really wished that pet rescuers could have helped out when I was reaching out to them in the previous years. If each rescuer could have agreed to have taken at least one cat, the problem could have been solved long time ago, and who knows? Maybe my mother and I wouldn’t have been involved with a second eviction issue in the first place.

I’ll be frank, I have no great love for the whole Animal Care & Control issue, yet to be honest, some of the “agents” as they are called weren’t too bad. There was one guy who was almost a regular and was the one most often to come to pick up the cats, and often kidded me that I should have been a rescuer myself, for you see, rather than have some stranger try to grab at the cats, I decided to do this myself and it was no easy task. The cats somehow sensed something was up and as soon as they saw me put on my clothing to be ready for the AC&C van and wait for the phone call to announce they were on their way, the cats, like I said, sensing something was up, would start hiding. Their favorite places to hide was scrambled under my bed. A few would hop up and into the kitchen cabinets. I then decided on a different strategy and would try and grab two cats and bring them into the bathroom and close the door…that made it a little easier than trying to grab them from under the bed or try to get them from the kitchen cabinet my cats would sometimes hide in. There was a woman who once came and was rather nice, and by talking with her found out she had been assigned to help out and rescue the abandoned and stranded pets that had been left behind during the Katrina incident. So while I hated the whole AC&C thing, at least the people involved were genuinely nice…except for one.

On Tuesday, May 2nd (of 2006), the AC&C van didn’t come until rather late, around 2 in the afternoon, rather than the usual 11 or so in the morning. The agent was one that had never come before and he seemed to be a “hotshot” and not at all nice as the others had been. There was just something about him I plain didn’t like. Well even though the cat population was going down quite a bit by now and you would think it would be easier to get to the cats, it was the opposite and it seemed the smaller the cat population became the harder it was to get to the cats. On that day, the cats made a mad scramble as soon as they saw me getting dressed to get ready for the van to come. The cats by now had gotten to know the “routine” and believe me, animals are not stupid. The cats were realizing that their “pals” were being taken away one by one, and I can’t help wonder if they were wondering if they would be next.

Well on that day, it seemed harder than ever before to try to get at any of the cats. I couldn’t even grab any to bring into the bathroom to keep the next one in there in preparation for when the van came. So when this agent came into the apartment, the only cat I saw “available” was Porthos who was up in the kitchen cabinet. Well the cabinet was up high and over the sink. There really wasn’t a way I could grab at him, so the agent took out this contraption that was a long rod type thing with metal claspers at the end. The idea being the agent would swing the claspers around the neck of the animal he was trying to get to bring him down. So the agent placed this clasper thing around Porthos’s neck and virtually dragged him down from the cabinet, Porthos being frantic, dangling in the air with this metal clasper around his neck, and then the agent quite literally slammed the poor cat into the metal cage. Believe me the agent wasn’t at all gentle but it was almost as if he took delight in being rather abusive toward Porthos.

On the following two days, the regular AC&C agent was to come to pick up a few more cats, but it wasn’t until late at night on May 4th, when Karen, the rescuer from Manhattan that was monitoring and tracking the cats that were going in, and consequently she was taking out and rescuing herself, gave me a call. She asked me, did I have a cat named Porthos? And I said yes. She told me that Porthos had to be put down almost the moment he had come in on May 2nd. It seems upon examining him, he had a lot of injuries, to put it into her words that he had severe injuries to his back as if he had fallen out of a window, and worse yet, a broken jaw. She wanted to know how could this have happened and even the people at AC&C wanted to know as well. I told her that Porthos had been a perfectly healthy cat with absolutely nothing wrong with him, and I proceeded to tell her of how the agent had handled Porthos, and she said no doubt that is how he sustained his injuries including the broken jaw. His jaw must have broken right then and there as that metal clasper went around his neck and the agent allowed him to dangle from up high with it around his neck before slamming him into the metal cage.

I felt horrible. I mean it was bad enough that the cats were one by one being yanked away like that, but none had suffered severe injuries due to a rather hotshot, uncaring and to my mind, sadistic AC & C agent. Karen, who as I said was a rescuer in her own right, had some ties with AC&C and knew some of the directors there, recommended that I place a formal complaint with one of the directors and gave me the name and number of the person to contact. She informed me, that this wasn’t the first time animals in general suffered from injuries due to mishandling of the animal due to a careless agent who probably just viewed his job as a job and had no interest in the welfare of the animal. You better believe I not only called but wrote a letter about the whole incident. It was due to that incident that I was totally fed up and didn’t want to “surrender” anymore cats to AC&C…and I didn’t. But until I was able to arrange other things, I had other things on my mind, one of them being, the first court appearance which was to be on Monday, May 8th.

Here’s a picture of Porthos. No, he doesn’t have one eye, but it’s just the way the photo came out when I photographed him. Like to think he was winking.

©2009~Melanie Neer aka pyewacket

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