Sigh. No they don’t - if you try to find any valid statistics on this tired old saw, you’ll be pissing into the wind.
Can be, yes.
Regarding the OP, I think there is culpability in both camps:
The old bat shouldn’t have poisoned the cats. She knew they were pets of her neighbour, and there are any number of other actions she could have taken before the poisoning: trap and take to animal control, use deterrents (sprays, etc.), squirt the cat with water whenever it entered the yard, and so on. It is legal for cats to roam, and - it seems - illegal to poison legally-roaming pets. To poison an animal you know to be someone’s pet is a somewhat psychotic action.
OTOH, the cat owner has some blame, too. The neighbourly thing to do would be to restrict the cat’s access after receiving complaints, or otherwise try to reach a compromise with the old biddy. Or failing that, shoot her.
The thing is, if you can think clearly like that, why couldn’t the old lady? If she was so fond of her song birds, she could have done what you suggested. Two wrongs not making a right and all that.
I can feel differently about pet we keep in our house and the other dumb animals we eat at dinner. Its not too hard to consider someone’s emotions is it? There are situations where we feel that the law is correct in allowing one human being to kill another, one life being more or less valuable than another, similarly a pet can be seen as something different to a pest on a certain level.
If you didn’t get your reply in first, I was fully expecting a few posts falling into the following categories:
‘You were joking, right? Right?’.
Posts stating that shooting the woman is wrong, because a human’s life is worth more than any cat, and that the person doing the shooting would jailed, jailed I tell you!
Indecipherable but upset posts, liberally sprinked with emoticons.
Why is my husband a tool? The neighbor is new in town and didn’t know about the leash law. Should he have let the dog lay out in the sun all day without water? It’s possible the neighbor expected his kids to take care of the dog, and they didn’t.
Hubby was nice – not confrontational. He and the neighbor are friendly (we gave him a BBQ grill), and the dog is being better taken care of.
People who allow their cats to roam free are irresponsible pet owners and are culpable in whatever misfortune might befall them outside their own home. I am baffled by the belief of some cat owners that they are somehow free from obeying leash laws.
When I moved into my house I built a 6 foot privacy fence enclosing the back yard to keep my Jack Russells in. Signs posted all around say “No Trespassing” and “Beware of Dog.” When cats wander in and are killed their deaths are on the heads of the owners!
It is my belief that many people own cats because they are relatively “maintenance free.”
If you do not know where your pet is you are doing something wrong.
Given that we don’t currently have any good candidates for the position, and your husband sounds like a consummate diplomat, I’d like to offer his name, so that we get a non-tool ambassador instead of Bolton.
According to Madison ordinance, it’s illegal to let your animal poop on someone else’s property unless you immediately clean it up. While I don’t see anything in their ordinance that expressly forbids letting your cat roam, I think that clause implicitly forbids it. (I’m guessing there’s an anti-roaming clause in the county ordinance or state statute, but I’ll leave that research to someone else).
Your pet that you allow to be a pest on someone elses’ private property deserves no better treatment than any other pest. Your emotional attatchment to the animal is irrelevant.
YOu’ve not yet answered the question why you believe that living property such as cats enjoys less protection from vandalism than does nonliving property such as cars.
Hear, hear! I have two cats, and I love them very much, so they are not allowed to go visiting (and there’s the whole cat bylaw thing). I am a responsible pet owner; it’s really not that difficult.
