A dark rainy night
I just shot my dear old cat
Tears rolling down my face
Sorry to hear that.
I had to put my 15 year old standard poodle down last week.
Most unpleasant.
Commiserations to both of you. What was it Arrie, a car accident?
15 is pretty good machasm for a big dog. so sorry.
So sorry to hear about your dog machasm.
A big thanks to all of you for the condolences, it's truly heartwarming.
To make a short story long.
16 years ago a small and hungry, but tame and human socialized cat appeared on my doorstep and wanted food.
I let him in and fed him, I would then let him sleep at my place when he was not out playing. This turned in to a ritual where he would go out in the morning when I woke up, and in the evening I would whistle and he would come home and eat/sleep.
One morning a female cat sat outside waiting for him, it turned out he had a girlfriend. The girlfriend was a bit afraid of humans, you could only get within about three meters before she started to retreat. I let her live in my garage. They were a true couple, something I have never seen in cats before. Every morning she would wait for him and they would go of and spend the day together, and part in the evening when he jumped in through my window.
One day, after about a year or so, the little male didn't come when I whistled, I don't know what happened to him but there are a lot of dangers for reckless cats in the country side, and he was a very reckless cat.
The female however stayed on and I would feed her in the garage daily. One cold winter day when I opened my window, she jumped up on the window sill, for some reason she had decided that I wasn't dangerous and decided to trust me, I let her in the warm house.
After about an hour or so she was again sitting on the window sill, meowing, asking to be let out. I let her out.
This too became a routine after a while, and after a couple of weeks I heard her meowe outside the window, and when I opened she introduced me to four black and white kittens, They had children.
She lived in my garage with her kittens during winter and spring, it was two females and two males, One cold day in February one of the males got run over by a car (I live just some 8-10 meters from a country road with 70km /h speed limit).
End of spring/early summer I persuaded a young woman who had and still have a horse in my neighbors stable to take two of the kittens, she took the two females.
By now she was used to be in my house, (the cat, not the woman) and one day I let the door stay open for a while, and she came walking in with the remaining kitten. After that moment they both lived in my house.
The remaining kitten was shy and a bit unused to humans, but as time went by he got used to me.
The female cat would go out in the morning and come back in the evening, just like her boyfriend before her.
She was a funny cat and liked to show of when I was outside with her. She would all of a sudden start climbing high trees and make long jumps and other stuff, sometimes she would give me dead mice, neatly placed in a row next to each other, she was a darling.
Unfortunately, after about a year, she too was run over.
Now only the kitten, who was now a cat teenager, remained.
I decided to keep him indoors, and he seemed just fine with that, he was lazy, overweight, a bit afraid of things and never showed any will to go outside.
The overweight started already when he was breastfeeding, long after the other kittens stopped feeding, he would remain sucking, and that was a pattern he kept up all his life.
14 years later I'm sitting upstairs by my computer reading the WO thread and I hear him making strange noises at the bottom of the stairs. I go and look and he is on his back kicking wildly, after a short while he calms down and lays still, breathing heavy. I pick him up and carry him in to my bed where he comes to and after a while hops down and carries on like nothing happened.
Some time before that he had started loosing weight, he would still eat, but he wasn't as eager as before.
I thought at first that he might have slipped and fallen down the stairs and hit his head, but two months later, when he was sleeping in my bedroom I'm awakened by the same noise, and there he is, having a seizure on the floor, it was short and he seemed alright afterwards. I thought that maybe it was just some residual damage from the slip in the stairs.
But as time went by, he would get a seizure about every month and the last month he started getting them every week, and then the last days daily, and that's when I realized that he probably had a brain tumor or something like that.
So I made arrangements, I loaded my Ruger 22 LR revolver, prepared a plastic box with a blanket and had my hearing protection near by.
By now, yesterday, he had two seizures a day and I was sitting by the computer waiting for the next one (he was sleeping in my bed). Somewhere around two o clock in the night I hear the by now familiar sounds, I go in to the bedroom and holds him lightly while he kicks in the air, and when he stops kicking and starts going in to the unconscious faze that he has after the kicking and before waking up, I quickly put him in the box, carried him outside, put the gun to hos head and fired twice.
He kicked wildly for a short while and then it was all over.
I took him in and cleaned him up a bit and let the other two cats sniff him and understand that he was gone.
Today I have put him in a new plastic box witch will be his coffin.
We never really bonded, that cat and I, he was more like a room mate, but nevertheless we liked each others company, and he liked to jump up onto my bed and be rubbed on the belly when it was time to go to sleep, when I turned out the lights he would go and sleep in a cat basket or by the very end of my bed.
And that is the story about the cat named Ponken (little boy). He had a good life.
That was a very touching story Arrie, thanks for sharing.
I'm not into pets, never was, have always lived in a big city and believe it's no place for having a pet... But your story touched me and I can understand the emotional attachment between a pet and its owner. Ponken had a good life and you did the right thing, ending his misery and suffering.
Sometimes one can receive much more love and affection by a pet, than by a fellow human being, and that's very sad for humankind.
Being naive worked damn well back then. 
