Eight lives left

Oceanside resident Kim Applebaum had been caring for stray cats in her garage. Ever since a small litter of three kittens were born in there a few months ago, she’s been letting them live in her garage. She keeps the door open a few inches during the day so the cats can come and go, and then closes them in at night to keep them safe.

When she and her husband returned to their home on March 19 at around 8 p.m., she realized that the garage door was still open. When Applebaum went to go close it for the night, she wasn’t prepared for what she found in the garage.

“I was horrified,” Applebaum said. “It was the most awful thing to see.”

Applebaum found one of the kittens — which she and her husband had named Ellie— lying wounded on the floor of her garage. The kitten had been shot with a hunting arrow, and Applebaum witnessed the horror as it protruded from Ellie's neck. The arrow had pierced the cat through it’s front-right armpit and came out through its neck. But the kitten was still alive.

“The vets were all closed at that point, but I got my vet on the phone, and she said to take her up to an emergency hospital in Westbury,” said Applebaum. “We went there and they took her immediately and performed surgery on her.”

Applebaum and her husband took the kitten to the Nassau Animal Emergency Group, an animal hospital that is only open nights and weekends — when normal veterinary offices are closed. Someone in the waiting room of the hospital identified the arrow to the Applebaums as a hunting arrow. However, this arrow was missing the large, jagged tip typical of hunting arrows. It just had the shaft of the arrow filed to a point —more for target practice than hunting, Applebaum said she was told.

“Obviously, we were all pretty in shock,” said Dr. Rich Selkowitz, DVM, who operated on the kitten. “You had a three-foot arrow sticking out of this poor little cat. And the cat was actually almost walking around, or trying to walk around. But just the fact that someone would do something like that is kind of sick.”

The doctors at the hospital x-rayed the kitten and said that it was rather lucky, considering that the animal had just been shot with an arrow.

“That arrow narrowly missed by millimeters the most important organs in the neck you could imagine,” Selkowitz said. “It didn’t actually penetrate the chest cavity, it missed the jugular vein, missed the trachea. All these things it somehow missed.

“Two more millimeters and it would have just bled out right there,” he added.

Because the damage wasn’t as bad as the medical team had initially expected, they were able to save the kitten’s life.

The Applebaums reported the incident to the police, but no one has been arrested yet. Until they are, Ellie the kitten is no longer living in the garage, but in the house with them. “Luckily she survived this, and after paying $3,400 for her to live, she’s not going out anymore,” said Applebaum.

What surprised Selkowitz and the staff of the emergency hospital the most was not the kitten, but the Applebaums.

“I think what shocked us most about the whole case is that this was some stray cat that these people brought in,” said Selkowitz. “They spent quite a bit of money to save this stray cat that wasn’t theirs. Most people with their own pets, especially in this day and age with the economy, don’t want to spend anything.

“Normally we would just put it to sleep right away, but they didn’t want to do that,” he added. “They wanted to try and save it, and I guess that’s what we did.”

Comments about this story? ACostello@liherald.com or (516)569-4000 ext. 207.