Update on cat:

For the past few days I've been feeding a poor starving cat. It's not a stray. The owners put their house on the market and moved, leaving the cat behind. She's a friendly little thing but she's not doing too well. She's dirty, one of her ears has been badly bitten, and you can feel every vertebra. When I fed her on the first day you could tell she hadn't eaten in awhile.

Today my nine year old daughter and I rode our bikes to this house to feed the cat. She was there waiting for us since this was our "usual" time. Just like the other times the cat hogged right in. We were getting ready to leave when a car pulled up. It was the owners' daughter. She was there to get the mail but saw our bikes at the top of the drive and came down to see what we were doing. I told her I was feeding the cat since it looked like it was in bad shape. She said she fed the cat every morning and that she couldn't help it if other strays came and ate her food. She was very rude. I told her we wouldn't be back and we left.

My daughter was very upset and couldn't understand why we couldn't feed the cat anymore. We were almost a block away when the woman drove up behind us and pulled to the curb. My daughter was afraid but I figured maybe the woman was going to ask us if we wanted the cat since it apparently was a chore for her so we stopped. We should have kept going. She said her mother wanted to talk to me and handed me her phone. As soon as I said hello the woman started tearing into me...how dare I tell her daughter that she was deliberately starving the cat (which I didn't), she's had the cat for 12 years, she's a county public school teacher (yikes on that!), blah blah blah. She kept going so I just handed the phone back to her daughter. I told her I did not accuse anyone of anything, that I was just trying to feed the cat and I showed her the baggie of food. The lady gets off the phone and starts yapping at me about her mother's house and she didn't appreciate me being there. I told her that my husband and I were interested in the house (it's got twice as much land as ours and a pond) and that we were just checking it out. She said we had no right. I told her she better move the realtor's FOR SALE sign if they didn't want people looking and good luck selling it with that attitude. Then we left. She didn't follow us this time.

I was so upset by the encounter I was shaking. Since the cat was an alleged family pet for 12 years you'd think the woman would be grateful that someone was looking after it. Holy smokes! It wouldn't have shocked me one bit had the woman started lobbing rocks at us. So now my daughter has sufficient reason to be afraid of people and I've personally had it as well. I don't know what I'm doing wrong!