I was enjoying a second cup of coffee with my breakfast and appreciating the serenity of our lovely backyard woods when suddenly an ungodly shrieking pierced the silence, rudely interrupting my reverie. It was a woman in the neighborhood frantically shouting out the names of her two dogs who were circling our yard like hounds on a fox hunt. With a sinking feeling, I knew my cat was involved. Lurch was outside, enjoying the sunshine and nibbling on dandelions when these two monsters, a black lab and a golden retriever, spotted him and decided to nibble on him. 

While the pitiable cries of their hapless owner went completely unheeded ("STOP!", "COME!", "NO!"), after about five minutes the dogs accepted defeat when Lurch ran into a patch of bramble they were too big to enter. As suddenly as they had arrived the three trespassers took off without so much as an apology, leaving me to worry if my 14-year-old cat had suffered a heart attack from fright and lay dead somewhere in the thicket. I took an extra lorazepam.

Two hours later Lurch came home, covered in dirt and debris and pissed off to high Heaven. "Damn those thugs," he snorted in kitty talk. "Doesn't that woman know about leashes?" Explaining that she was a Democrat and thus feels above the law, I gave him a handful of treats and brought him up to speed on our local leash laws. While somewhat lax, they do specifically forbid the horrors he had just undergone:

"In public places, you must keep your dog 'under control'. Generally, this means close to you and ideally on a lead. If they're not on a lead, they need to be under control in another way, such as paying attention to your voice commands."