There are cowards amongst us

Rizal brought in the mail from our postbox last night. We found this among our assortment of bills:


Dear Neighbour,

The cat that you keep frequently littering of faeces and urine (which very unhygienic and smelly!) in my house compound.

I hope that you keep your cats within your house compound ONLY and never allow it to run loose beyond your house compound.
01/08/2006


(Typos and mis-spellings are writer’s own. Note unedited.)

1. My neighbour is obviously not dear to me and a coward as he/she doesn’t even have the courage or decency to write down their unit number or name so that I can contact them.


2. The only reason they know we have cats is because I let them out in the common backyard garden only on weekends for a few hours and I can be heard calling for them to come back after they’ve had their short run outside. And the reason I’m out there calling is because my cats are like dogs: they generally come back when they’re called.


3. Our cats DO NOT gallivant outside on weekdays. Even some weekends when we’re not home, I do not let them out.


4. I can bet any amount of money that they have no idea how many cats I have or what they look like.


5. There are numerous other neighbours with cats who roam free on a daily basis. I know because I’ve seen these cats and they’ve also left little paw marks on the walls of my car porch. I think they’re cute.


6. I have not had any “presents” or “offerings” made to me by the cats who have free run of the outdoors, even though my little back garden has little grass and some ground that cats may hide their “gifts” in. So I don’t know how true said neighbour’s claim is.


7. Trixie and Pixel prefer the grass and bushes outside in the backyard to other neighbours’ backyards. Pixel is too fat and dumb to climb up fences and into backyards. I find our cats crouched and hiding under bushes outside in the common back garden more often than not.

I will not confine our cats to our own compound because they only have the two days in the weekends to gallivant. And only a few hours at that. The backyard is a common area and my cats are free to roam there. The only worry I have is what non-cat or non-animal lovers may do to our beloved pets should they catch them wandering into their backyards. I’ve heard horror tales of nastiness people show animals, especially cats: boiling water thrown at them, even hot oil, cats being whacked with sticks or other objects, etc.

My only hope is that these people are reborn as cats or some other stray in their next life and receive the same treatment that they mete out to animals.

My project tonight will be to try to locate the coward who wrote the note and confront this ball-less idiot and clear the air. I’ll start with our immediate neighbours and work outwards. And it has to be someone living in a ground unit with a backyard. The writing looks like it may belong to a woman. If the note doesn’t belong to a neighbour on our row, it would belong to one of the neighbours whose backyard faces mine. They would be the ones who hear me calling out to my cats in the back.

All I really want to do is confront the coward who wrote me the note. And point out to that person that the neighbourhood has a plethora of people who own cats. And find out if they slipped a note into all these people’s postboxes.