"Have you seen a black cat with white paws?" she yelled in my direction.

"No. Did you lose your cat?"

"No. No. She's on the porch. I'm looking for the male black cat with four white socks," she answered, muttering something about kittens and fatherhood and responsibility.

Turns out that the gray tiger cat on the porch, her cat, had given birth to kittens recently. Two of them had white paws, which, apparently, is more or less what enraged this woman. She was certain, because of that fact, that she knew who the father cat was. She'd seen him around the neighborhood, and at this moment she had resolved to follow him home and have it out with the owner of the contemptible impregnator.

"It's just," she all but snarled, "not right."

Jeez. Where to start on this one.

Did that ne'er-do-well rapist cat find some way to sneak into your house in the dead of night and have his way with your cat?

No?

Since you obviously were allowing your cat to roam free, and you just as obviously hadn't had her spayed, you no doubt had her on some form of birth control the rest of us don't know about. And that failed?

No?

And you're filled with outrage about an unplanned litter? And steaming around the neighborhood looking for a target at which you can point the finger of blame?

Yeow.

By now she had huffed her way out of speaking distance, giving me a convenient excuse for not asking yet another of the unspoken questions, like the aforementioned, gnawing at the filter that keeps what you're really thinking from erupting and wiping out all pretense of civility:

Did no one ever tell you that you just can't get all righteously indignant at someone who didn't do exactly the same thing with his pet that you didn't with yours? Two free-roaming unsterilized cats. Now there's a formula ripe for unexpected results.

Other stuff that maybe should have been said to Ms. Righteous Indignation (but, as Mama always said, "Ain't no way to reason with stupid"):

You may do the responsible thing and find homes for all those kittens. We thank you for that. But people ready to adopt kittens at any given time are limited in number. And the folks who take yours won't be going to the local shelter to adopt one of the multiple dozens they have there. What do you think the outcome of that will be? On the week that you were huffing down the sidewalk hellbent on sort of weird post-partum justice, our local shelter, a pretty big one, was taking in as many as 12 litters of kittens a day. They were filled to overflowing with kittens. Had kittens in foster care. Were girding for more kittens.

And why is that? Because many cats, it turns out, were — shockingly, amazingly — having encounters remarkably similar to that which yours had with the marauding male that made his brief but lasting impression.

This is the time of year that makes even veteran shelter personnel weep. So many kittens. So few adopters. A numbers reality that didn't have to turn out this way.

So, Ms. HuffenPuff, how about you just climb down from your tower of moral supremacy, take a little personal responsibility and get your own cat fixed?

That would be a lot simpler than going through the whole paternity testing thing (maybe on the Jerry Springer show?) since, as they taught us in sixth-grade biology, color and markings — and even white socks — aren't surefire proof of parentage.