The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. And so was the road to Eric.
Eric is our cat. My wife and I rescued him from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in July 2008: two wide-eyed ‘parents’, excited about giving a young life a fresh start. Two years on, I want him dead. In fact, unbeknown to my wife, I have just asked the vet if he will put him down.
Don’t get me wrong, I love animals — and I believe Battersea is a noble enterprise. But although Eric appeared initially to be shy and gentle, he has grown into a monster. He deserves an asbo. Several of them. In fact, with his prosthetic limb — more of which later — he’s become a peg-legged pirate rampaging through our lives, a walking refutation of the idea that animals are essentially good.
It started smoothly enough. Perhaps they had him on Valium. After an exhaustive interview process, which carefully assessed us as potential foster parents, we picked out Eric from a room of hopefuls. Black, with a single square patch of white over his top lip, he looked unsettlingly like Hitler in photo-negative. But he purred when he was handled and compared to our second choice, which clawed my wife’s face the moment she went near it, appeared affectionate.
There was, however, his past. While clearly well-behaved at Battersea, his previous owners had taken him to the home after he kept straying into the road. He’d been run over twice, and now had a metal rear leg. Did we really want such a cat, asked the anxious staff. ‘Oh yes,’ we said, confident that we could cosset Eric into submission.
Eric is a Viking name. Eric the Red founded the first Norse settlement on Greenland. Eric Haraldsson — nicknamed ‘Bloodaxe’ — was the 10th-century king of York and Northumbria. Neither was particularly domesticated. And nor was Eric the cat. In fact, when we got him home, he appeared to be borderline feral. He hid in holes and refused to come near us — except after dark, when he’d arrive in our bedroom and meow for hours on end. Then he’d pad off to sack the house. He ripped off the expensive wallpaper in the living room; he tore apart the vintage Chesterfield. He defecated in the fireplace, in our bed, and in the lower folds of the curtain. He even managed to pull a kitchen cupboard off the wall.
He also became an accomplished hunter. He left us rats, birds, even slugs. And usually under the dining room table. He preferred to leave the mice disembowelled but still alive. They were harder to clear up that way. It was quite a box of tricks. But would he sit nicely on our knees like a normal cat? Not a chance.
And then there were our neighbours. Eric bullied their little ginger tom relentlessly. It became his favourite hobby. Every evening Eric would head out in search of fun and every night he would come home covered in clumps of orange fur. Ginger, meanwhile, became so traumatised that he would return to his newly decorated home and spray it from top to bottom in a panic. And when Eric couldn’t find his favourite victim, he would knock around the little black (female) kitten from two doors down. The noise was terrible.
Our neighbour, Ginger’s owner, who was seven months pregnant, took all this on the chin until Eric began to terrorise her. Tearing his locked cat flap off the wall of our kitchen, he escaped into the night and made his home on the roof above her bedroom window. He stayed for a week, screeching and shuffling about like a madman. The neighbour came to us in tears, begging us to put a stop to it, but Eric knew no mercy.
Our friendship survived, but I still wonder whether they’d really have moved to the country if it hadn’t been for Eric. Certainly little Ginger is much happier these days.
So far, so bad. But then we had a baby of our own. If things are ever getting you down in life, have a child, and they’ll get ten times worse. Our son is the best thing that ever happened to us, but he was never a good sleeper and he has a mammoth pair of lungs. Eric, predictably, spotted a rival — and upped his game.
Initially, he took to living on the garden wall and refusing to come down for anything — we even had to feed him there. Except at night. He’d inevitably pick the rare, quiet moments when the baby wasn’t screaming to trot into the house and start a dawn chorus of his own. And every time we tried to catch him, he’d just retreat back to his wall. Sleep became a distant memory, and Eric became our nightmare, an instrument of torture.
But there was an added, hidden consequence of his self-imposed exile. Because he was impossible to catch, we couldn’t apply his monthly dose of flea ointment. And so when he did decide finally to come home, he brought with him a biblical plague of jumping biters. This is bad news for anyone. But for a new mother, it’s a catastrophe. My wife nearly had a nervous breakdown, and took more or less the entire house to the dry cleaners (cost: £250). Eric, who we’d had to take to a very expensive vet just to get de-flea’d, looked on, impassive.
Last week, he pulled off his coup de grâce. It turned out that months of wrecking furniture, torturing mice, fighting and living on walls had taken its toll on his metal leg. He’d acquired a limp and it looked sore. Still the devoted owners, despite all we’d been through, we spent a morning trying to get him into a cat box and took him to the vet.
‘No problem,’ said the vet when we eventually got there. ‘I’ll do an X-ray and have him patched up in no time.’
Ha. Five days later, he returned with a shaved leg, a bill for £782.57 and instructions to take him back the following week, for another expensive consultation and yet more drugs. I couldn’t believe it. He’d ruined my house, forced the neighbour to move, driven us to the very edge — and now he was costing us the price of a decent holiday. Worse still, because of the nature of the injury, we were warned, it could happen again. And again. He could end up costing us the same as a second mortgage.
And that’s when I cracked.
‘My wife would never condone this,’ I said to the vet. ‘And normally nor would I. But... how much would you charge to just put him to sleep?’
The vet was silent for a while, then said: ‘Erm, don’t you think you should consider something a little less radical?’
Like what? Would it be right to take him back to Battersea so that he can ruin someone else’s life? Surely not. Besides, I could butcher a cow and keep chickens in concentration camp conditions. Even abortion is acceptable. So why quibble over putting down a psychotic cat?
Either way, I have decided to put Eric on parole. Perhaps age will mellow him — he’s now four-and-a-half — or perhaps his leg will slow him down. Either way, he’s taken us down the road to hell now, so we can only hope and pray that he finds it in himself to bring us back again. If not, there’s always the canal.