Potential answers

When Rhianna died, it was really hard to tell what happened to her. We assumed we probably wouldn’t ever know exactly what happened and that’s still true. But there are a couple of potential answers to her death.

The first thing that happened was I discovered a bunch of bird feathers in our backyard under some trees. They seemed like they were pretty fresh so it really wasn’t likely they were related to whatever happened to Rhianna. But it does seem possible her injuries could have come from a bird and she did sometimes go after birds. If she happened upon one like a raven or a magpie, I’m sure they could have done some serious damage in short order.

A couple of days ago I came across an article on a local news website about dog attacks in our suburb. Apparently there have been about thirty here in the last three months, many resulting in the death of a cat. It seems someone was letting the dogs out at night and collecting them later on. If they were big enough dogs, I think this is also a possible answer, especially if they were able to cause damage without leaving many marks on her. The idea that someone is doing this makes me really angry. I don’t really know how likely this scenario is but it does leave us with some questions about the possibilities.

Meanwhile, the boys have both handled her death quickly and easily enough from what we have observed and from what they have shared. For the Scientist and me, it’s been a lot rougher than we ever expected. Funny how you can miss a creature in so many ways, just going about daily activities, even though she was a fairly solitary cat.