Jon,This morning Richie and I found a dead cat in the woods next to our house. We had seen the cat lounging at the edge of the yard the past couple of mornings, but it looked content, fat and happy. (I tried to approach it once and it started to run away, so I left it alone.) Anyway, I cannot tell what the cause of death is, but it has a hole in the rear left haunch with innards spilling out. That's the only injury I can see.
The hole is so odd, having the precision of a warble, but it is very deep and almost looks bored from within, or like the innards burst out of it. We turned the cat over and found no other injuries. Attached are pics -- very gross. I hope you don't think me morbid, but this is just so odd. I am not expecting anything unnatural, I am just unpleasantly surprised and I want an idea of what could have killed this poor cat. I figured you were the best person to ask. Naomi
I will also be showing these pictures to my lovely step-daughter Shoshannah who, as regular readers will know, is in her final year at the Royal Veterinary College in London.
However, I have another motive. As Naomi so rightly wrote, there is no reason to suspect anything unnatural, but there are many folk who would need convincing of that.
I still remember with a shudder a well known UFO publication about a decade ago publishing pictures of small mammals that had suffered post mortem attacks by secondary invertebrate predators, and claiming that the `rectal coring` was the work of aliens, or at the very least shadowy Government agencies, when it was obviously the work of burying beetles. This made me furiously angry then, and as we at the CFZ, although mostly a straightforward zoological and conservation organisation, do somtimes operate in the grey area between science and forteana, I think that it is important to investigate such things as openly as possible...
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Here's an odd cat who's rather enjoying himself:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/also_in_the_news/7919495.stm
A friend suggested to me that a vulture had started to eat the cat. She said that vultures will sometimes make a hole like that when they push their beaks in. So what killed the cat may have been unrelated to the hole... Like I said, there were no other injuries, so maybe it got into some poison or something.
I have read that vultures prefer the meat of herbivores, and we have plenty of dead deer on the sides of our roads around here, so maybe the vulture didn't care for the taste of the cat.
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