So much death...

Starting this past weekend, my mom's dogs had been digging out of her backyard. She keeps Brin (the brindle pit bull) inside anyway, but I ended up with Brin and Bitsy (the rat terrier) over at my house, while she did everything she could to keep Blackie (Brin's brother) and Hope (a doberman mix) from getting out. Tuesday, one of her cats, Annette, was supposed to go to the vet to get spayed, but she was nowhere to be found; we have yet to see any sign of her. Wednesday morning, one of the kittes, Silvie, was lying dead in her yard. There were no visible marks on her, so we didn't know if one of the dogs had gotten to her or if something else had happened. Wednesday afternoon, mom returned home to find another cat, Jessie, lying dead in nearly the same place as she had found Silvie that morning. The body did look as though it had been disturbed by dogs (saliva all over his side), but there were no visible bite marks, and we all know that any dog that finds an animal corpse is going to play with it. We didn't want to jump to any conclusions... especially since it seemed so weird for there to be two dead cats in the same place in such a short space of time. And especially since when Blackie and Hope were around cats in the presence of either me or my mother, they showed no signs of aggression. We took the two bodies of the cats to the vet to be necropsied, so we could learn if it had been a dog, or if perhaps one of the neighbors was putting out poison. The necropsy was scheduled for this morning. We ended up cancelling it, as Blackie got ahold of and killed another cat, Stormy, this morning. We cannot have a cat killer on the premises, no matter how sweet of a dog he is to us, so sadly, we had him euthanized this morning.