Gunshot cripples loved pet

Trevor the fluffy ginger cat is getting a lot of attention from the dog lately ... but not for the usual reasons.
German shepherd Tasha has been licking her feline chum Trevor incessantly and pacing around him since he was crippled by a gunshot last week.
The 8-year-old moggy was shot on Tollemache Rd, Hastings, last Friday.
A high-powered airgun pellet shattered one of his clawed toes and left metal fragments embedded in its paw, which has since become infected.
Luckily for him, his owners, Roger and Alison White, have kept him doped up on medication.
"Obviously it's quite painful but we've been disguising painkillers in his fish," Mrs White said.
Mr White, who was disgusted and angry by what had happened, contacted Hawke's Bay Today, after finding Trevor bleeding on the driveway.
"I came home about 9 o'clock at night and [as] I drove in I spotted him limping along. There was a lot of blood out there on the concrete," Mr White said.
A trip to the vet revealed that Trevor would need a $900 operation to amputate the shattered toe from his front right paw and to remove the shrapnel.
The vet told them it looked like a shot from a high-powered air rifle and that Trevor was likely to lose some balance with the amputation.
It's an expensive blow. The couple spent $2700 flying their two pets from Australia 18 months ago.
"You don't even think about spending that much because they are part of the family," Mrs White said.
Mr White added: "But we didn't exactly fly them over from Australia, expecting them to be shot. I thought we'd come to a country that was far more placid than what we had seen in Perth."
In a letter to the editor, he said a cowardly "idiot" had "inflicted pain on an innocent, much-loved creature".
While running an animal shelter in Adelaide for eight years he had "seen plenty" of similar cases, but that hadn't prepared him for the shock of it happening to his own pet.
"It made me feel sick, to be honest," he said.
Perhaps even more affected was Tasha, their German shepherd.
"She licks him all over trying to make him better."
Mrs White, originally from Northland, moved to Australia 20 years ago, remarried and returned to New Zealand with her husband.
Trevor was named after a Melbourne-based comedian with the stage name Trevor Marmalade.
"It's a manly name, it's better than Fluffy or something," Mrs White said.
They had not contacted police.
"It means a lot to me, but it is just a cat," Mr White said.