Whakaari White island trial gets underway today, dramatic scenes after a police car crash in Auckland and why New Zealand could come under pressure to provide more aid to Ukraine in the latest headlines. Video / NZ Herald
When one Kiwi woman saw a cat lying dead by the side of the road she immediately wanted to help the poor pet’s owners to find closure.
She took the animal to a nearby vet clinic, in the hope that they might identify it by microchip.
Later, she checked into see if her good deed had resulted in identifying the poor pussycat.
“Hi there,” the email began.
“Yesterday I brought a deceased cat that I found on the road into your clinic to be microchip checked.
They then revealed that a close inspection of the deceased had given another clue to its identity.
“When we tried to scan the pet, our nurses realised that it was in fact a possum.
“It was very hard to tell due to the severe face trauma.”
The possum's face had suffered severe trauma. Photo / NZME
The vet then said the “only indication was the feet compared to cat’s paws”.
The kind-hearted woman shared a screenshot of the email with a colleague and it made its way online.
The Herald contacted the colleague who said that her workmate was too embarrassed about the incident to comment.
Some online commenters said that they had made a similar mistake in the past, stopping to move a dead cat from the road only to find it was a pest marsupial.
Mistaking a possum for a cat is far from the wildest misidentification that has been made on the introduced critters.
In 2021, an East Auckland woman took to social media to ask her neighbours about the strange creature she encountered in her backyard.
