Compromise and Conceit

Found on the street in front of my house, an alley cat with two broken legs.

The leg in this picture has a compound fracture, the bone completely severed and moved around inside. He spat and hissed a lot, but once I got him by the scruff he gave in.

I think he was injured by a car after he dashed from cover during the storm that happened that day (I found him just after the storm), so we called him “arashi” (嵐), Japanese for Storm.Currently he can’t run, but drags himself along at the speed of lightning with his mashed up back legs flipping and dragging on the ground. I love cats, I couldn’t bear to see a kitten like that, so I took him in.

The vet said that he would be fine without any surgery, would learn to run on three legs (one leg is not really badly broken) and would be able to scavenge food with no problem. But until his leg heals, he is a likely victim of crows. I can’t stand the thought of a cat I walked past being eaten alive by crows, so he got the surgery required to rejoin the bits of his legs. 40,000 yen ($AUS500) later, he survived, and no phone call from the vet, so I presume that means no internal injuries. He spits and hisses and doesn’t like people, so if he doesn’t fit in as a house cat we’ll get him desexed and let him go. Otherwise, we’ll try and keep him.

As an interesting aside, between my kickboxing fight and the trip to the vet, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to talk about smashing things, hitting things, attacking things, and being injured. My recent role-playing efforts qualified me adequately for these conversations – injury, attack, enemy, bruise, broken, wound, etc. are all words I learnt for role-playing. Survival, living, dying … the material of role-playing games is the material of a 3 month old alley cat’s world.

Handy when I visit the vet, but not so great for poor arashi-chan!