Neighbour just rung doorbell at 2.30am!

My neighbours are so dodgy I wouldn't let any into my house id be in garden looking for her cat whilst im being robbed, she doesn't know her apart from she lives close by. We sadly don't live in good times.

OP didn't help because it was an outdoor cat doing normal outdoor cat things. There was also no need for empathy too because it wasn't an actual emergency, it was just a cat.

DH was fast asleep again within 5 minutes so clearly wasn't actually that concerned about going to 'help' either.

What would the help involve anyway? Chasing a cat around the garden in the cold in the middle of the night? Fuck that. There's a reason why I don't have cats.

No, what do they say about karma? my best friend's 6 year old son recently died unexpectedly - was that due to karma?

Do tell me what she must have done to deserve karma like that.....

If you can't handle the fact that your cat will like to wander around the neighbourhood then you shouldn't have a cat.

If you cannot understand that a cat who gets into a garden can then get out of a garden, then you shouldn't have a cat.

If you are knocking the neighbours awake at 2 am and 5 am over a car, then you definitely shouldn't expect "kindness"

I think the OP was very considerate. I'd have told her to FO home and wait for the bloody thing.

Once again, no cat is going to let a random man pick them up, so what is the point of going out in the garden at 2.30am in subzero temperatures? What's he meant to do, lasso it?

The fact that she was young and distressed ? Ostensibly it was about the cat but she was clearly desperate or she wouldn’t have knocked at that time. We can’t know what’s going on with other people - she may have been under other stresses and this was just the catalyst (no pun intended) for her distress. Yes, that’s not OP’s business but a little care and concern wouldn’t go amiss. I hope OP isn’t in need of help from her neighbours any time soon. You know what they say about Karma.

Which doesn’t ring true as she knew it was a neighbour from the back of the house, and confirmed that she was calling to it out of an upstairs window later on. Why does that represent a threat to her family ?

No wonder this country is in such a shit state if we can’t have basic empathy for someone else once in a while

Yes- I feel the same could be said about selfish cat owners who think nothing of disturbing their neighbours sleep and pestering them for ZERO reasons at all

Why is it nasty or arrogant to point out that a young neighbour in obvious distress had knocked for help at a late hour, and OP went out of her way not to help. No empathy for the distress and no care for the person - to the point where she yelled at her DH for offering to go into the garden and look for the cat. No wonder this country is in such a shit state if we can’t have basic empathy for someone else once in a while.

Cat people. Omg. The entitlement. If you can’t handle your cat going into other people’s gardens or being fed by strangers or repeatedly getting trapped in outhouses or run over by cars then look after your bloody animals.
if dogs roamed free and shat in everyone’s gardens an walked into people’s houses and ate from other dogs’ bowls and kept getting hit by cars there’d be uproar.

right to roam is an outdated and unsafe concept for myriad reasons
if you are unwilling to take your cat out on a lead or train it properly at all then you need to keep it indoors.
sick of the entitlement

Wait, why aren’t you reading the OP’s response? She says that she didn’t stop her DH from helping and said to close the door as she suspected it could have been a danger to her and her family. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

She bothered the OP twice (once at 2.30 and once at 5am) and also sent a letter to all her neighbours about her cat's perfectly normal behaviour.

That's not "only" bothering someone once. Its a pattern of selfish entitled behaviour

It does in the context it's always used here though. #Bekind because you never know what someone is going through. But sometimes their situation doesn't excuse their actions.

Anyone in distress and crying when they have not bothered you before is not annoying, unimportant or irrelevant.

Yet again ‘be kind’ doesn’t mean ‘be kind no matter what’. There’s a difference, and that tired old hashtag isn’t as clever as you think it is.

Or we can not deliberately and unkindly annoy our neighbours when they are fast asleep and have work the next day for completely irrelevant and unimportant reasons. That is also unkind.

Or we don't care.

Works for me.

I don't always feel the need to #BeKind. Especially not to someone ringing my doorbell at 2.30am, because their cat is in my garden!

You do you though.

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Not a chance on MN. We got the gist early on. Don’t ‘enable’ other peoples’ mental health problems. No-one is saying it’s reasonable to knock neighbours up at that hour but the girl was young and clearly distressed. The lack of concern here for fellow man, above what’s inconvenient for ourselves is really concerning.

You can help and care about your crying neighbour in the night AND still let them know that you don’t appreciate the wake up call and to not to it again. Both can happen. You can also not shout orders at your husband not to help them too if that’s what he wanted to do.

Urgh! WHY do people always put this insufferable phrase on here?!

#BeKind !!!!!!!!!!!!! Just NO. I would have gone nuclear on someone waking me at 2.30am because their CAT was in my garden.

For fuck's sake. 🙄

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What time after that ? I said OP needed to explain this was a one off and not to disturb her in the middle of the night again.

Or we can care about distressed people and understand the problem.

I mean we can speculate… still don’t know though.

What happens the next time and the time after that? Jog off with that idea.

Yes this and when it suits. It’s like on one thread, the consensus is grow a back bone and tell them. But when you do, you’re unfair and unkind!? If this was a post asking if she should have said something in the moment at 2am it would have been a hard yes.