I want to kill my cat

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.