When I opened our front door at 5.45am today, four little cats looked up and meowed at me.
They are strays - a mother and three kittens almost as big as she is, so malnourished has she become as she desperately tries to feed her litter.
These cats had come tothe right door. My wife Andrea abhors seeing animals neglected or treated cruelly.
Andrea began secretly buying cat food sachets and hiding them in the bottom cupboard because she thought I would disapprove of feeding stray cats.
At first she thought she was only feeding the mother cat, barely out of kittenhood herself. Then the trio of kittens turned up. Now they all meow at our door every morning.
It is not that I disagree with feeding a family of starving stray cats. I don't. I even found myself buying tins of cat food at the supermarket on Sunday. But being one of those annoyingly practical kind of people, I can't help but wonder what will happen to them all in the long run.
I imagine it will involve a call to the SPCA at some stage. In the mean time, they are all being fed at our front door by my wife.
I know what my wife has to say on the subject of cowards in Hawke's Bay shooting people's pet cats because she has told me.
These brave souls who get their kicks by firing slug gun pellets at cats and leaving the animals in dreadful pain should themselves be shot in the leg with a bullet, she says.
She is serious. If she was the gun-owning type I have no doubt she would make good on this threat were she to find out who is shooting these poor pet cats.
Just as well then that Hawke's Bay Today is encouraging the police or the SPCA to deal with the culprits if the community can help track them down.
We have the offer of a $1000 cash reward from a reader for information that leads to the successful prosecution of the shooters.
The reader is known to us and genuinely concerned that something be done to hasten a prosecution. Hawke's Bay Today will happily pass on to the police or SPCA any information of substance from any member of the public about this spate of shootings.
