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With 2 cats brutalized, couple is alarmed

The owners suspect the cruelty goes beyond their back yard.

By GINA PACE
Published July 29, 2006

ZEPHYRHILLS - Harry and Arlene Bahner are used to watching their nine cats play in the back yard of their Zephyrhills home chasing squirrels and congregating at their makeshift "kitty caf," where the couple feed them.

But their peaceful pastime with the cats was interrupted earlier this week when two of them were injured, apparently by someone they fear is abusing animals in the Zephyrhills area.

Police are investigating the case, which unfolded Monday after the Bahners arrived home from a trip to Tampa and noticed their cat Sissy limping.

They rushed her to a veterinarian who told them the light gray long-haired domestic had two pellets and the fragment of a third lodged in her back left leg. The pellets were close together as if buckshot from a shotgun.

After an $800 surgery to pin, staple and stitch up Sissy's shattered leg, the couple came home to find that another cat from Sissy's litter, Rascal, was also limping. The 1-year-old gray and black cat's toe had been sliced off as if it were cut by a knife, with part of the bone still visible.

"It's pathetic someone would hurt an animal like that," Harry Bahner, 74, said Thursday afternoon. "They don't do anybody any harm."

Bahner thinks the problem goes beyond his back yard.

He said he saw a stray cat a few months ago looking as if its tail had been tied with a string.

Eventually, the tail fell off, but Bahner was never able to get close enough to the cat to help it.

Sheriff's spokesman Doug Tobin said a dog was also recently shot in the area.

For now, Sissy and Rascal are sedated and recuperating in front of the Bahners' living room TV.

"You hurt a couple animals here and a couple there and they are going to continue," Arlene Bahner said. "We have to catch this person."

Tobin said anyone with information about this case or others involving animal cruelty should call the Sheriff's Office tip line at 1-800- 706-2488.

[Last modified July 28, 2006, 22:34:43]