For several days, we have been concerned over an injury to Junior's side.  I thought at first it was a warble (Cutereba), but there was no singular lump in her side.  It was a closed-over scabby wound at first, with a single circular external lesion.  She would try to clean it off, but wasn't getting very far with it.  With Ronald's help, I managed to clean enough gunk off of it to open it up, and then it drained.

When the skin moved, a great deal of tissue damage could be seen about half an inch behind the opening, as if the skin slid when she was injured.  We set up a vet's appointment, but the cat took off and we had to wait a day to get her in.   She is on the mend now that she is on antibiotics and had it cleaned out.

This is what the injury looks like today:

Closer up, it is easy to see that it is almost a perfect circle:

Since there are no other injuries (such as if she had been in a cat fight, etc.), I believe someone shot Junior with a pellet gun, and the pellet is still in the wound.  It shouldn't hurt her to have it in there now that the infection has been cleaned out.

I wonder which one of my neighbors shot my cat.

I lived south of Alvin for fifteen years.  Some of those were pretty great years, and I really enjoyed raising my kids in the Alvin 4-H Club and in Top Dogs 4-H of Brazoria County.  The Brazoria County Fair has got to be the best county fair anywhere in the world.

What I never enjoyed was living right on Highway 35.  Not only did we lose some of our own animals to that road, but we often found abandoned puppies thrown out along that road.  And the people dumping those pups never realized they were condemning all those puppies to death either by car--or by parvo.

Parvo lived in the soil on that place.  There was no way around it.  Every puppy we had that ever got outside prior to its' first shot died or nearly died of the disease.  We only ever saved one of the dumped puppies from parvo, after paying a few hundred out of our own pockets for his treatment.  Even Blaze, Alyssa's show border collie, after his shots, came down with it around five months of age.  We almost lost him too.

Now I am paranoid about losing puppies to it.  So I always keep them indoors until after their first shots.  It is a huge chore cleaning up after them.  But it is better than watching a beautiful little puppy die. 

There is an added bonus to me; these puppies will always know exactly who I am, and they will be very socialized to humans.  Someday they will make someone wonderful companions; they will be friendly, happy, and healthy.