Mostly I’m saddened, but the rest of me is just surprised it hasn’t happened more often. Walking to the post office this morning, after allowing enough time for the school-run mums to have bought any stamps they needed, I witnessed a kind of minor accident. I say ‘kind of’, because the driver didn’t stop and wouldn’t be in trouble for not doing so.
Our village is part of a rat-run, often used as a cut-through to avoid an irritating set of roundabouts from one major road to another, and the drivers who use the rat-run seem oblivious to the 30 mph limit or the fact that there are people who live here and occasionally cross the road. So this morning, one of these drivers was speeding through the village – I shall charitably assume they were running late for major surgery or similar – and didn’t notice the decrepit cat that was attempting to cross the road. Hedonism can move at some considerable speed when it suits him, especially if there’s fresh fish around, but this cat had clearly seen better days. The car sped on, regardless of the cat, and by the time the car had cleared the bend, the cat had been flung to the side of the road from the impact. I rushed towards it, but there was nothing I could do; it didn’t even have a collar with contact details on it. I did the only thing I could, which was lift it out of the gutter and place it on the small grass verge outside one of the houses along that bit of the road, and hope that its owner would find it and be able to give it a decent burial.
I do wonder if the driver was so oblivious that he didn’t even notice the bump as his car hit and killed someone’s pet. Yet another reason for encouraging people to slow down; next time, it might be a child.
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