A lesson on keeping safe

Tragically, only one of them survived, as antifreeze is almost always fatal to felines, unless they are treated super fast. And clearly, the problem with that is no cat is going to go home and say “Hey, human slave, I may have just done a silly thing.”

Sadly, once the symptoms – thirst, dizziness, vomiting and seizures – start to show, it is likely to be too late.

Whenever there is a cluster of poisonings like this, it is tempting to suspect someone is out to hurt our pets, especially when it happens in the summer. During winter, an accidental spillage is quite understandable, but in June? When the temperatures have been in the twenties?

Dogs and children have also been caught out by this stuff, or at least by the ethylene glycol, which is the killer ingredient, which can also be found in screenwash. And embarrassingly, so have I.

A few years ago, I was getting ready to leave for a camping trip. The car was loaded and I was just doing last-minute checks, when I remembered I hadn’t looked at the screenwash. I grabbed an empty fizzy water bottle out of the recycling bin, mixed the screenwash, and topped up.

Back in the house I stood the remainder behind the kitchen taps to deal with when I got home, because I knew I would NEVER leave a bottle of water there.

Two weeks later, hot and bothered as I hauled all the sopping wet stuff out of the car and wrestled the washing monster – I did say I went camping – I spied the bottle of water, popped the cap and took a long, deep drink.

As I drank, I thought “why was that bottle behind the taps?” and “This fizzy water is a bit flat”, followed by “It doesn’t taste very... Oh my God. it’s screenwash”.

Without going into detail, I did manage to rid myself of the majority of the intake before I called NHS Direct, but I was still told to get to A&E immediately and not to drive myself there.

Nothing will ever quite match the humiliation of being told by the A&E receptionist that as a journalist I should have known better, nor having to reassure the serious young doctor it really hadn’t been an attempt on my own life, just a stupid accident.

And I’m hoping that is exactly what has been happening with these poor cats. Someone has failed to store their antifreeze safely and the cats, to which it tastes sweet, have not known better than to drink it.

But it is a salutary lesson to us all to check our sheds and garages for spills and leaks to stop the suffering.

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