Comic Stripper 7: A Most Unlikely Conspiracy

A new strip is up, in case you thought I forgot that there were two more characters in the marquee.

Molly saved a kitten last week. She was enjoying her Thursday afternoon off when she heard a strange crying from outside, which turned out to be a four-week-old kitten trapped in an air vent nextdoor. Molly extricated the kitten from the vent, which involved prying its claws off the grating (remember that kittens have an adorable way of clinging tenaciously to whatever happens to be in reach of their sharp yet non-retractable claws), and took it to a nearby PetCo to see if they'd take it. According to Molly the Petco personnel were "Nice, but very unhelpful." PetCo doesn't carry cats and dogs, and Molly couldn't exactly wait until Sunday when the cat adoption people came around.

So she sat outside PetCo with the kitten wrapped in a dish towel hanging out in a shopping basket, periodically picking the kitten up and putting it back into the basket. Finally a passerby suggested that she take it across the street to the smaller, mom and pop pet store which, as luck would have it, runs a full-on cat and dog rescue operation in the back of the store.

That was Thursday. On Saturday we went back to the pet store to visit the kitten. The owner took us into the back of the store, where there was a wall lined with cages, most containing dogs who had seen, shall we say, better days. All the way at the end of the row was a large cage containing a tiny ball of black fluff which, it turns out, really dislikes being held.

The owner told us that in another day or two the kitten would have died on account of the fleas. Apparently it had 150 fleas on it, and that many fleas on an animal that size can cause terminal anemia.

So hooray Molly, champion of downtrodden felines.