As her cat hangs on to life after being shot, Joanne Mueller has one over-riding question: why?
Her ordeal began on Sunday, May 1 when she went to the door of her Whittlesley Street home to call the cat in.
Mueller saw it lying on the other side of the fence but this time it did not come running to her call. Instead it just lay there “making this weird meowing sound”.
When Mueller approached the cat, it did get up, but very slowly. “That’s when I realised something was wrong,” Mueller said, her initial reaction being the cat had been poisoned.
She immediately phoned vet Howard Thwaite but he was out of town and not due back for three hours, a wait that “felt like forever”.
Thwaite decided to x-ray the pet, suspecting that it might have been hit by a vehicle.
However, the x-ray produced a very different result.
“He said, ‘ You’re not going to believe this’,” Mueller recalled, as he showed her the x-ray which revealed the cat had been shot with a pellet gun.
The pellet had entered through the shoulder, passed through the right lung, damaged part of the left lung and lodged near the heart.
Mueller said the vet reported the incident to the RCMP “because he said whoever did this knew what they were doing.”
Apart from the condition of her pet, Mueller is also concerned that there is obviously someone out there who assumed they could take the law into their own hands.
“It’s plain he wanted to kill her.”
And she feared the person would continue to commit such acts.
Given the extent of the injuries to her cat, Mueller said it was obvious she must have been shot nearby because she wouldn’t have been able to make it home otherwise.
The fact the cat never strayed far from home also supported that.
Pointing out everyone in the neighbourhood knew it was her cat, she asked why, if someone had a problem with her pet, they didn’t come over and talk to her about it.
“We could have solved it,” she said.
And she would like that person to come to see her even now. “I would like to ask him why? What was it that could not be resolved?”
Mueller added, “There is always a solution to a problem. Killing an animal is not a solution”.
For now, the cat’s right lung is improving but the pellet cannot be removed because it is too close to the heart - whether it will eventually shift enough to allow surgery is unknown.
In the meantime, says Mueller, “We can only hope.”