I was talking with a friend this morning. A cat was hit by a car in front
of their house the other day. They don't know the name, but it belongs to
some people up the street who allow it out a lot of the time, and were out
of town themselves at the time. The cat was able to pull itself off the
road into shelter under a step. My friends' family, the driver and the
neighbours called a couple vet clinics, which were closed, and then tried
the humane division of the city, which eventually sent a young worker. She
retrieved the cat and took it to a vet to be stabilized until the owners
can be reached to decide what treatment to authorize. They've managed to
locate a relative of the owners, but not the owners themselves. The cat
probably has a broken hip, and maybe a spinal injury, so it doesn't look
good.

Every summer, a new crop of cats show up on the streets of my
neighbourhood, an area with a lot of traffic and a fairly mobile
population, mostly students, moving in and out. Then you start seeing all
the notices about missing cats, and when the winter comes, the survivors
are inside, sitting at windows. Next summer, there'll be mostly new cats
hanging around. A few of the outdoors cats get through more than a single
summer. Some, like my Mandy, are probably converted to indoors cats after
surviving an accident. And the others,... <sigh>

Cheryl