UNTAGGED STRAY CAT

A young black cat with very orange eyes wandered into a garage, wearing a collar that made the poster stop and stare. It was snug, Cuban-link style, and didn't have a name tag. More to the point, it wasn't the kind of collar cats are usually supposed to wear. "This collar wasn't a normal collar for cats though," the poster wrote. "Cats are supposed to have breakaway collars."

The poster likes to hang out in the garage, where there's a TV set up and neighbors can stop by, so the cat had a place to linger. It didn't act wild. It acted hungry. The poster fed it dry kibble, and the cat "seemed like it was starving," scarfing the food down and knocking kibble everywhere.

Then came the bigger problem: the house was near a very busy street, and the cat stayed around for about ten hours. The poster decided it was best to keep the cat overnight "so it didnt get hit by a car." The next day, the search began.

Missing-cat posts went up on Facebook, Nextdoor, and other sites. The poster also took the cat to a local shelter to check for a microchip. There wasn't one. Then came the waiting. "A week passes by, nothing..."

With no responses and no sign of an owner, the poster booked a vet appointment and had the cat fixed. The reasoning was simple enough in the poster's account: "you are supposed to get stray cats fixed so they dont spray everywhere and so they can be less territorial."

After the healing time passed, the cat was let back outside. The poster said there wasn't extra time or resources to keep another stray cat, even though the busy street still worried him.

Then, on the same day the cat was released, the owner showed up at the door.

According to the poster, the owner said the cat was his. The poster explained everything: the garage, the food, the shelter visit, the missing-cat posts, the week of waiting. The owner, he said, didn't seem to care much. What he did care about was breeding the cat.

The owner told the poster, "dont go around neutering cats that are not yours."

The poster fired back that if the cat was truly owned, it should have had some sort of identification on him, something to show it wasn't "some stray that was abandoned."

By the end, the clash wasn't about the garage, the food, or even the missing posters. It was about whether the cat had been a pet all along, and whether the owner had any right to complain after showing up only after the surgery was already done. The poster summed up the whole mess bluntly: "I am not sure if what I did was an asshole move or if I am justified."