France - British Expat Forum

My cat has been missing for a while, last night he came home injured, he had been shot , the pellet entered at his knee and is now lodged at his spine . It cannot be removed. His hip has also been dislocated.

As he does not look remotely like a rabbit I can only think that this was a deliberate act of cruelty.

Ollie is a very shy and nervous siamese, and stayed close to the house at all times. So this has to have been done on our land.

Has anyone else had problems like this ?

Sorry to hear about poor Ollie. How is he now?

Hello Kay,
Thanks for asking !!
He is sleeping a lot and I am doing my best to separate him from the other cat until he gets better. He seems better than he was yesterday , and he is eating which is good. His hind quarters look really odd , and he is walking with one leg raised and slightly behind the other.

The vet said that he will recover but he will never be the same cat.

Our vet said that the people around here do not like Cats as they feel they raid the nests of the pheasants, I would have thought that the fact they keep the mice down a counterweight to their argument.

We are all still in shock.

Glad to hear he's doing a bit better.

I'm kinda shocked also that they came on to your land to do this.

Me too !!

We have 3 hectares of land, but Ollie is such a scardie cat he likes to always likes to
see the house plus he does not like strangers so would run away from anyone who went towards him.

Our vet who is a really nice chap and speaks impeccable English put his leg back into the socket, but because the Injury happened ( he thinks) around 2 weeks ago it has already started to calcify so will never be right again. Ollie disappeared around 2 weeks ago when it must have happened , heaven knows how he survived on his own or where he was.

He has spent the day in my daughters room watching pop dvd's with her and being hand fed crisps.

One of our site admins, GozoMark, who is very active in his local SPCA, has some horror stories to tell about cruelty to animals in Malta and Gozo.

The France forum is a bit quiet these days. Don't forget you can come over to the main forum for a general "chat" with people all over the world. Try Chinwags. You'll be made very welcome.

Thanks Kay

Will do that

Jan x

I had similar problems with a gamekeeper in rural Scotland. He claimed that cats were responsible for a lot of his losses (a good half mile from us). We freed one of ours from a rabbit snare he set on the other side of the farm road from our front garden. He was a sloppy worker, and often drove past our house with an unbroken shotgun sticking out of the passenger window of his car.

Sadly, there are both good and bad gamekeepers in this world.

Sadly Ollie deteriorated rapidly, both mentally and physically, we had to make the hard decision of putting him to sleep. At least he is at peace now and out of pain.



We have since adopted a young kitten from SPA in Auch , a beautiful Grey and white , he has been named Smokey Joe. I know the time will come when I will have to let him go outside, but this experience had made me worry for all my animals.

So sad... We had a neighbour who kept trying to shoot our cat on the pretext that it was fighting with his cats. You get nutters everywhere.