leg stuck

Early in the evening we called our two cats in for the night. Daisy came running right up, but Leo was nowhere to be seen. Anyway, the weather was nice, so maybe he just wanted to stay outside a little longer. When I was ready to go to bed just before midnight, I checked to see if he was home yet. And sure enough, he was lying on the bottom shelf of one of our wooden garden tables. He looked at me cheerfully and I could hear him purring from a distance, but he didn’t come to the door. Now, Leo is a bit of a dork sometimes and, at eight years old, he probably also suffers from painful joints, so I went to get him. But to my horror, his legs collapsed on the doormat and he lay there with his little chin flat on the mat. I first locked the door and lowered the shutter in front of it, and then examined him. I started with his neck, because he has often had wounds and abscesses from fights with other tomcats. Our local vet earns a lot of money from him, or actually from us. I noticed that he had a lot of little scabs around his collar. When I wanted to put him back on his feet, he immediately collapsed again. In the meantime, he continued to purr happily. But that doesn’t mean anything with Leo, who also purrs happily when you remove a tick from him, when you treat a wound of his, or when he sits on the vet’s examination table. Blissfully ignorant. I was worried and called Marc, who had been asleep for a while. He soon noticed what I had up to now missed from Leo’s backside: the simpleton had stuck his right front leg through his collar. As a result, he probably hadn’t been able to stand or walk all evening, and that’s why he had scratched open the skin around his collar. And, instead of pulling that paw back out from between the collar and his throat he had apparently decided ‘this is my life now’.