A BORDON resident warned pet owners to be vigilant after she said her cat was kicked by someone and had been put down.

Tracey Reeves, of Hollybrook Park, said that she wanted to “make people in Bordon aware that there is someone going around hurting cats”.

The family’s pet, Luna, was missing for seven days but, following an appeal, was found last week “curled up under a bush”.

Although the discovery seemed a happy one, Mrs Reeves said it was immediately clear something was wrong as Luna was “in pain, dragging her back leg”.

The family made an appointment at Bordon’s Amery Vets the next morning and a fracture around the pelvis was quickly identified. “I asked, could it have been a car that had clipped her,” Mrs Reeves added.

“He said: ‘No, she had been either kicked or hit very hard by someone’. I was devastated - this was our family pet.”

The following day, Mrs Reeves was called back to Amery Vets to look at some X-rays and the situation grew bleaker still.

“I had an awful feeling,” she said. “When I got to the vets he showed me that Luna’s pelvis was broken and so were some other bones near this also the result of someone’s kick.”

With an unaffordable £5,000 price tag for the operation, which would not guarantee total recovery, the family took “the very sad decision” to put their “beautiful, fluffy cat to sleep”.

“The ripple effect this has had is awful,” she said. “My kids are in a bad way. Whoever hurt my cat has opened my children up to the realisation of how cruel our world is, and they can’t get their head around the fact that someone did this. People need to keep an eye on their cats around here.”

To report animal cruelty, call police on 101 or the RSPCA on 0300 1234 999.