On Monday, Sept. 29, I had just changed into a t-shirt and shorts after work in our master bathroom when I heard Ben scream and a loud sound. At first I thought he was being silly with Smokey, but then the subsequent silence confused me. I asked him what he was doing, to which he replied from our side porch, "Bandit just got attacked by two dogs!" Of course I ran outside with Ben and discovered that as soon as Ben had screamed and run outside, the two neighborhood stray dogs had run away and so had Bandit. Despite the rain, the two of us along with Smokey went searching all over our property for our precious Bandit.
About an hour later, we didn't have a single idea of where he might be. It had gotten dark by that point, so we decided to come inside and hope for the best. About an hour or so later, I stepped outside with a flashlight and scanned our yard from the patio since it was still drizzling. About 25 feet away, I saw a little patch of black and white fur moving around slowly and screamed for Ben to come help me. As Ben cradled Bandit in his arms on our kitchen floor, we examined him for major injuries. We found bite marks on his neck and open wounds on his right back leg. That's when Ben said, "That's it. We're taking him to the emergency vet."
Apparently, this is what Ben saw when he caught the attack. One dog had Bandit's head-end in his mouth and the other had Bandit's back end in his mouth. They were basically playing a rough version of tug-of-war with our cat! So about two and a half hours later, we're still at the emergency vet and they've given us an itemized bill of what our cat would need. Because he was a stray and not registered, they had to do a feline AIDS test, to which he tested negative. I'm not going to specify how much the bill was ... but it was ridiculous! After a WHOLE lot of thought, we decided to pay what it took to make our cat better.
So now he's in our upstairs bathroom with a cone on so he won't rip out his sutures. And Ben and I have decided that he needs to be an inside cat now since we can't trust that those dogs won't come back.
Here's a video too. Bandito LOVES getting all the attention now and purrs like crazy.
The people who have visited our house know that one of the biggest eyesores on our property is a big pine tree that has a massive nest of vines on it. Over July Fourth weekend, the guys cut the base of the vine and removed the roots from the ground (which were huge!). So slowly, but surely, the vines have died and dried up. Now Ben and I have begun trying to pull the vines down. It's kind of a therapeutic process for me because I've hated those vines since the very beginning. On some parts of the tree, the vines had been so tight and large that they had left imprints in the trunk!
