Little things that count

I'm going to say something that may sound rather odd to most folks. Last Friday night, I was thankful that my husband still smoked. You see there is a reason I make this statement. One of our neighbors has outdoor cats. Not something I would do in this climate as we can have rather harsh winters. We also seem to be in a string of hard weather winters around here as well. Then again, these are not my cats.

Recently, the neighbor went out of town. They provided food and water. However I don't believe they provided enough food and water. Granted, the animals are not skeletal nor are they normally ill-cared-for. But in this case, one of the kitties made its way across the street to socialize with my hubby. Hubby is a kitty friendly guy. Cats of all shapes and sizes love him. He came back inside from his smoke and mentioned that he thought the neighbor's cat was hungry.

After talking about it a bit we put out some food for the cat. See, we recently lost a cat (she was 17) and we still have some left over cat food that I haven't made myself throw out yet. Normally I choose not to interfere. In this case, I will NOT let something suffer when it's obvious that the critter is hungry and no one is home to feed it. The cat ate every bite we put out.

These people are not cruel. I think they just don't quite understand the volume of food required by their pets when they leave for extended time periods. I heard that this isn't the first time that hubby has intervened. They were away at the Christmas Holiday as well and underestimated the food requirement. The sad part of that was he encountered another neighbor doing the same thing as they had also noticed the hungry kitties.

Sometimes you just need to do something a little nice for someone. Next time I see them, I'll mention that they need to up the volume of nutritional supplements they leave out for their animals when they're gone.