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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Henry, the tiny kitten who was dumped with a broken leg and a big heart

By David McElroy · May 29, 2011

Henry came very close to dying before I ever even met him. In fact, if a neighbor had had the least bit of compassion, he might have been dead. But because his suffering wasn’t worth anything to her, he became my problem — and he ultimately became a great source of joy for me.

It was sometime in 1992, and I hadn’t been living where I live now for very long. I didn’t know many of the neighbors yet, but I knew a number of the neighborhood kids. As I was coming back from a walk, one of the little girls came running up with a breathless story about a kitten under a porch who needed help. Here’s the story that I pieced together from talking to various people who were involved.

A woman who lived on the street found a tiny kitten who was injured, apparently after a dog attacked him. She took the kitten to a nearby vet clinic, where she found out that his right rear leg was shattered into a number of pieces. The clinic recommended putting him to sleep as the most humane option. The woman agreed, but then found out she would have to pay for it. She refused. So she brought the little lump of life and fur back home — and left him outside to fend for himself … and to die.

I would have never known about the kitten if Merritt — the neighbor child — hadn’t told me, because he was hiding under a porch, quietly shaking with shock as he slowly waited for what would have been sure death. It was night when I pulled him out from under the porch. I’d never called my vet at home, but decided this was an emergency worth making an exception for. He explained how to take care of the kitten immediately and said to meet him at his clinic first thing in the morning.

The x-rays confirmed that the kitten’s leg was indeed shattered badly. I’ll never know how it happened. The vet said that standard operating procedure called for trying to put pins into the broken bones, but that there was another old solution we could try first that might or might not work. He bound the kitten’s bones in place and then pulled the leg up to his little body — binding it tight so that the leg couldn’t move. He said that the kitten was young enough — and growing fast enough — that the bones might grow back together. He sent the kitten home with me, with instructions not to let him run around and do much for six weeks.

If you know anything about kittens, you know it was impossible to follow that instruction. By the time he recovered his strength, he ran around the house on three legs just as fast as a normal kitten ran on four. He was nothing but a ball of excited energy. He didn’t seem to know anything was wrong. He wanted to play all the time — at least when he wasn’t purring in my lap. When the binding came off weeks later, the little leg was growing — with everything in place. He walked normally for the rest of his life. You couldn’t feel or see anything wrong with the leg. It was a totally unexpected ending to a tragic story.

He lived without a name for awhile, because I couldn’t figure out just what fit this amazing little fellow. Then I decided that his tragic story with an unexpected ending seemed like something from a short story by William Sydney Porter, who wrote under the pen name of O. Henry. So he was named Henry in the writer’s honor.

(I don’t know what became of the woman who dumped Henry. She moved out shortly after this happened. Other than talking with her to confirm the facts of the story, I never spoke to her.)

Henry had two defining characteristics. One was the wild fur that caused someone to once say he looked like a screech owl. The second is that he wanted more “lap time” than any cat I’ve ever been around. He would frequently come sit at the computer while I worked and just stare at me until I would quit working long enough to let him get into my lap and settle in for a nap. I can’t count the times that he purred himself to sleep in my lap.

A couple of years ago, he started having thyroid problems in his old age. He lost more than half of his body weight and I almost lost him a couple of times, but the thyroid medication helped me keep him alive until this past October. After 18 very happy and loving years with me, Henry died on Oct. 15. The picture to the right was just seven days before he died.

I still miss this little cat who had such a big heart.

Editor’s note: If you enjoyed meeting Henry, you might enjoy previous posts about Lucy, Charlotte and Emily.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: animals, cats, henry, kittens, rescue

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

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