Dead Kitties Tell No Tales

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I recently received an e-mail about two teenagers microwaving a kitten to death. Once such an idea or ugly picture is engrained in your mind, it is hard to shake it. I spent several hours researching this story, in an attempt to understand what would cause two teenagers to do such a thing. I would rather believe it to be some sick case of abuse, leaving the poor teenagers so disturbed that they could not help themselves. Anything but believe that a fifteen and thirteen year old could do something so cruel on the own accord.

All my searching produced no results, it turns out the story might be a fake. However, don’t get too happy, there are dozens of such cases from all over the world.

In the UK, there is a woman who was recently jailed for 168 days for microwaving a neighbor’s cat to death. Why did she do it? Because the neighbor reported her boyfriend for physically abusing her, some people don’t deserve help. The judge helped her a little, at least he won’t be beating her for 168 days.

There are several cases of small children who are probably too young to know the difference doing it, children under the age of five or so. It seems to be a pattern that burglars are sometimes microwaving cats while burglarizing homes. Maybe reports of such things being perpetrated by deprived individuals are spurring such copy cat stupidity by teenagers. Who can argue that teenagers are inclined to do stupid things?

A lawyer in Maryland recently microwaved a kitten to death and is using alcoholism and depression as his defense. I say a little jail time might at least cure his alcoholism and the severe case of horse’s butt he’s suffering from. How big are prison microwaves? I’m just asking, don’t take it too serious.

Then you have the closest thing to reality that I could find. A fifteen and sixteen year old in Pennsylvania, placed a kitten in the microwave recently and apparently too stupid to grasp the concept of such complicated technology, threw the microwave and the kitten out a three story window. Being cruel is horrible; being cruel and stupid is simply tragic.

All this brings back one of the horrors of my childhood and one of the most horrible episodes in my book, Informally Educated, which was released as an audio book yesterday, September, 23^rd and is the true story of my growing up in an abusive household.

When I was eight, I had a kitten; I also had three younger siblings who were like stair steps. My step father Jack, had named the kitten the N word, because he was solid black and Jack was solid prejudice. The kitten had gotten into the habit of eating food left on the table overnight, biscuits covered with a rag; that sort of thing. Jack had soaked some left over hamburger patties in hot sauce, the night before. They were left on the table, to teach the kitten a lesson.

We all arrived in the kitchen together that morning, there was the kitten eating a hamburger patty. He would take a bite, and shake his head as he chewed it. Then he would bat the rest around, trying to figure out why it was burning him. He would then go for another bite. We watched for a time and soon started to giggle. It was cute, and we had not yet learned that giggling was tempting or possibly defying fate.

 Suddenly, in one bound Jack was at the table. He scooped up the kitten, wound up like a pitcher and threw him against the wall, which was only the width of the table away. We watched in horror as the kitten literally exploded and fell to the table in a pile of intestines and blood, squirming only briefly before it died.

The poor kitten died on the same plate that contained the hamburger patties. We spent the rest of a nightmarish childhood, eating at that table and never knowing with any certainty, which of us were eating off of the plate the kitten had squirmed to death on. To this day I rarely eat at the dinner table. In our home, the table, our bedrooms and Christmas mornings were the main ingredients of our lifelong nightmares.

There are many lessons learned from a kitty, and not all of them are pretty.