Adventures of an Urban Nomad - Disaster Strikes

Laurence Harrould - Sunday, June 26, 2011

Now that the owners are back I can tell you about the disaster which befell us a few weeks ago.

When looking after someone else's house and pets what do you image would be the worst thing that can happen? For us it was the death of one of the cats. We were responsible for a dog and two cats. One night, not long after the owners had left the house and animals (their "babies") in our care, we went to bed with one of the cats asleep on the arm of the lounge suite. Next morning Danita went in to discover the cat lying on the floor NEXT TO the lounge suite. After getting me out of bed with an ominous "I think we've got a problem" we found that the cat was rather rigid - recalling the parrot sketch from Monte Python.

There were a couple of dilemmas - how to tell the owners and what to do about the body? Since there was nothing they could do, as well as fearing the bad news would probably spoil their holiday, we decided that it was not a suitable time to tell them.

Next, what to do about the body? Our feeling was that if we were in a similar situation (having left our dog, Sancho, in the care of someone else and gone away) if something like this happened we would want to be able to at least see his body. Otherwise it would leave an emptiness and lack of closure - a bit of a sense that he'd gone missing and could somehow turn up again. So we decided until we told them and had instructions as to how they wanted the situation handled we had to keep the cat's body. Fortunately, they had a couple of fridges in the garage and one had some spare room in the freezer. So we wrapped the cat's body in a few layers of material and a heavy plastic bag and kept it "on ice" having already spoken to their vet about what the options were so we could canvass those with the owners.

As it happened, that afternoon we received an SMS from the owners asking "how the furry children were". A rather vague but reassuring reply (letting them know a non specific 'they' were fine) seemed to cover things for then.

A few days before their expected return,  we phoned the owners quickly noting that the dog is fine however there had been an issue with one of the cats. Dreading a very upset reaction we were a bit taken aback with their response "oh yes we kind of expected it and sorry you had to deal with it". While they were upset by the passing of one of their pets, it was certainly not the reaction we had feared - much to our relief. As it would have been good to know this was a possibility we've added it to our list of questions to ask when taking on the caring of someone's house and pets for the future.  

Until next time...

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