A recovering heroin addict took his cat to the humane society for a cut. He couldn’t pay right then to have the cat treated, so “[t]he staff said if he signed papers surrendering the cat, Scruffy would be treated and put in foster care…” Once the cat got to foster care, they decided the cut was too serious to use their limited funds to treat, so they euthanized her.

My first reaction is to agree with many of the Facebook comments they received, “One called for the staff to be euthanized, while another said what happened to Scruffy was murder.”

Besides the part where they apparently lead Scruffy’s person to believe that surrendering Scruffy was her only chance for health care, things like this happen every day in shelters across the country. Shelters have more animals than resources, which means they have to make hard choices like this one. I’m sure absolutely no one, including the person/people who decided to euthanize Scruffy, felt good about it. It’s possible that the money they saved treating Scruffy may allow other cats/kittens to receive the care they need and ultimately be adopted into loving homes, like the one Scruffy lived in.

I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t admit that part of the reason this story gets to me is because Scruffy’s person was an older man fighting addition.

Even though it’s totally irrational, I like to think that when terrible things like this happen, it paves the way for something good that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. In this case, it appears the shelter in question is changing their policies to prevent this from happening again.

A day or two later, it was off again. I eventually figured out what it was:

The causes of the outages

Penny likes to sit atop the UPS. The newest member of our family likes to swat at Penny. Apparently, sometimes she hits the UPS power button instead.

I taped some cardboard over the button. I do not anticipate any further outages.

This morning he sent me this one with the caption “Little Face hides well”

Little Face peeking out of the crevice for Who's murphy bed

Cat, the lighter one, is the left-most cat the header image of this blog. Little Face can be seen peeking around a building in the header and curled up in the page footer. He’s on the left.