This is a rare RAEG/Happy hybrid.
My cat has been missing for two days.
He's a wanderer, usually spends whole nights outside. This isn't the first time he's gone missing for several days either.
Except LAST time, he was gone three days then magically appeared in the basement, half-dead and suffering from some kind of sickness.
So we were expecting the worst. Cats will do as cats will do and that's the price of owning cats you let out.
On a whim, someone walked the edge of the yard and called him, something I admit I thought was pretty futile.
An lo, a moan was heard from the trees in our neighbor's yard.
I vault the fence and wade into some pine trees to find my little fat bastard buddy alive and terrified, caught in a possum trap.
He's been "missing" since Sunday night.
I storm up to the neighbor's house, demanding to know why my fucking cat was starving (and looks like he has an infection around his eye from likely mashing his face against the cage to get out) in a trap in his back yard.
Turns out it's a 75-year-old man. He's mortified, of course, and claims he'd checked the trap every day since he put it out "three or four days ago, except for yesterday." Which by math I wasn't doing at the time, means he never fucking checked it at all. Did he plan to let the possums starve to death in the trap?
Well, sir, maybe now you realize that baiting a trap and not checking it makes you an asshole, and possibly guilty of cat slaughter and animal cruelty.
I pointed out too, politely, that had he found my cat dead and turned it in to Animal Control, they would have wanded the chip in his neck and found out he'd just killed his neighbor's cat through negligence.
He was pretty nice though and accommodating (I told him to leave his traps out for a few days since my fat bastard cat isn't going anywhere for a while and to check his goddamn traps on a daily basis in the morning.) If it happens again (which if he keeps baiting it with goddamn sardines, it will. Hopefully with someone else's cat) I told him we're going to call animal control to sort this mess out.
So GGGGRRRRRR at old people using things they don't understand and YAY that my cat came back, again. Now if he could only stop letting his gigantic belly lead him into trouble.
And for the record Dinkin is at 6/9 lives. That we know about, at any rate.