Another point I keep meaning to mention: You don’t want to contribute to the feeding of coyotes, even indirectly. Saying that the coyotes will keep the cat population in check assumes that the coyote population is a stable one. Coyotes are not animals we need to encourage, especially in non-native areas like Ohio.
Julie
The simple fact is most people read the word cat and see pet…on a farm it isn’t like that at all. The fact someone dumped off their family pet on our farm does NOT makes us totally responsible for the care and feeding of these animals. Many of which you couldn’t get within 30 feet of and most will not even go in the barn if any human is in there too. Often the only way we know they are there is the food we leave for them is eaten.
The ones that MIGHT be considered “pets” ARE given shots and names but even they are often several levels removed from what is usually considered a pet.
jsgoddess I’m glad you do understand however that was your job and thank you for doing it…it is not my job though.
Why should I have to deal with the castoffs from boneheads who think leaving their pets to fend for themselves is doing them a service? Do they honestly think those animals are going to have a life like in a Disney movie?
The fact we have to feed OUR own cats enough to feed the strays too just so ours get fed doesn’t in my mind make the farmer responsible for their welfare.
Think of it this way…if I feed birds in a feeder every day that doesn’t make me responsible for making sure all the wild birds get veternary care. Many of the birds do work on a farm eating insects too and we like to encourage them to stick around by feeding them stale bread or seeds. This doesn’t make them any less wild creatures nor me any more responsible for their wellbeing.
As for spaying or neutering them…do you realise how unwieldy this would be even IF we could capture them they only stick around for perhaps 6 months then move on and another bunch are dumped off. We would be constantly spaying and neutering over and over(I counted around 100 cats that came and went during one year)
No, the people who dropped them off are very responsible. Unfortunately, we can’t find those bozos. If you benefit from the cats, then yes, I’d say you owe them something as well.
My “job”? I have never gotten paid for my work in any way aside from knowing that I’ve spared some cats from death. It is my “job” because humanity has created a problem and humanity has the responsibility of fixing it.
[quote]
**Why should I have to deal with the castoffs from boneheads who think leaving their pets to fend for themselves is doing them a service? **/quote]
Why should any of us have to deal with messes other people made? Because it isn’t right to abandon others, whether the others are people or whole species.
And I would very much doubt any of the boneheads think anything of the sort. What those boneheads are thinking is probably something along the lines of: “Why should I have to deal with this cat? I didn’t make it be born.”
Doubtful. They probably just don’t care. You can emulate them if you want.
[quote]
The fact we have to feed OUR own cats enough to feed the strays too just so ours get fed doesn’t in my mind make the farmer responsible for their welfare.
[quote]
Did you know that the feline leukemia vaccine has about a 25% failure rate? Neither did I, until my mother’s cat died of it despite vaccination. Your cats are at high risk of encountering an FeLV carrier. Just thought you might want to know.
If your feeding of the birds encourages and enables a growth in their population, then yes, you are responsible for them. Veterinary care is wildly impractical for wild birds. The same cannot be said of cats, feral or not.
Yes. Okay? YES, I bloody well DO realize how unwieldy it is. A bunch of irresponsible jackasses have dumped their problems on the rest of the world and IT WILL NOT GET BETTER until people suck it up and do what has to be done. Many areas offer free traps and free spays and neuters for feral cats.
http://www.lovethatcat.com/spayneuter.html
The whole blasted POINT is that the cats may move on and more are dumped off. The cycle will continue until people start to take responsibility, and sometimes that includes accepting the need to clean up some loser’s mistakes. I currently have 9 cats, all rescued, including a cat whose ears were cut off by some abominable cretin, so I know a little about trying to clean up the messes other people have caused. It sucks.
Julie
Bah. Sorry about the quote fu.
Julie
Cat talk brings out the bitch in me.
Coyotes are native to the landmass. All 49 state and then some.
I sympathize with people who live in rural areas where services are few and far between. Tommyturtle, I don’t know where you live, but I can guess that perhap if you called your county animal control and asked them to come out and pick up cats, they would laugh and laugh, and then ask you to make the request again so they could share the mirth one more time.
j.c. Yes that is true the place I had to take the dog was over 40 miles away from home and that was the closest.
In our area they expect us to “take care” of it ourselves…this is a BIG problem around here and NO one would think badly if we simply shot any strays as soon as we saw them.
jsgoddess
This is where we disagree…YOU say it is not impractical to give each and every wild cat veternary care and I who have lived on a farm most of my life say it is VERY impractical. There is an enormous amount of work on a farm and we cannot be spending significant amounts of time and energy-not to mention the money it would take to care for all of these cats.
I love cats more than most and have always had a special one my whole life but to get too close to some of these cats when I KNOW many of them will end up dead is too much of an emotional drain if several times a week I was finding a beloved pet dead somewhere. It is simply too much to ask.
If they make it past a week I will tell our dogs not to kill it…I will feed it(not enough alone to survive)…if it’s gonna be here it can get rid of pests and I will give the animal shelter and not actively try to kill it. That is as far as I am prepared to go.
I’m sorry if you think this is heartless but it is my reality.
Well, I hope your cats never get rabies and in their addled state scratch or bite you, because if they do you are in for a horrible, painful, near-certain death. No cure for rabies, and by the time you notice the symptoms in yourself, it’s too late to do anything. You just lie down and wait to die while your brain deteriorates. If nothing else, that’s one reason to get your cats vaccinated.
Um, missbunny, if you’re bitten by an animal that may have rabies, you go to the hospital and get shots.
:rolleyes:
I agree that one should get their animals all their shots, but spreading false information doesn’t help.
Um, Guin, there are lots of people who are too effin’ stupid to go to the hospital after getting bitten. Or they don’t realize that the animal is rabid. Or they think nothing bad will happen.
Maybe you should do some research yourself and you’d discover that not all rabid animals are frothing at the mouth, running around, and acting bizarre. If you’re going to call my information “false,” then back it up. Which you cannot do.
Um, I have to say that there was no false information in Missbunny’s post. There is technically “no cure” for rabies. Once you come down with symptoms and all the doctors go, “You have rabies”, that’s all she wrote.
The vaccinations only work if you get them before the onset of symptoms, which may take 2 to 12 weeks. And a feral cat with rabies may show no symptoms at all during the weeks it’s incubating the virus, same as you. And you may not connect that nip from a feral cat weeks ago with your headache, fever, and irritability today. And by the time you do connect the dots, it’s too late.
This is why if they’re not sure whether the animal was rabid or not, or whether that neighborhood dog that bit you had its immunizations up to date, they give you the shots anyway.
DDG, thank you.
Also, you don’t even have to get bitten - if you get saliva from a rabid animal in your eyes, nose, mouth, or in a wound, you get rabies. How many people rush to the hospital if a cat licks them? Just a wild guess, but I bet not many.
missbunny
If your post is in any way directed to me I have to tell you any wild cat that tried to get close to me when it’s normal behavior is to run if I get within 30 feet I would regard as suspicious and probably shoot it…if one of our dogs hadn’t already killed it(they have had their shots)
I honestly doubt any sick wild animals would even get close enough to pose a threat to the tame cats either before our dogs found it.
Also I know what rabies look like since I have seen many skunks and raccoons with rabies before.
Our tame cats rarely ever go beyond 100 yards of the barn but the tame ones have had their shots too.
Rabies is a risk any farmer has to deal with whether it is one of the wild cats or any other wild animal…it isn’t feasable to vaccinate ALL wild animals.
You do make a valid point though about cats…they can get diseases that they can transmit to humans beside rabies and you have to be careful…that said there are a million more immediate threats on a farm and as bad as rabies is…as a risk it’s not even in the top ten of dangerous things on the average farm.
Well, perhaps-but she should have said, “IF YOU DO NOT GET SHOTS/TREATED.”
Tommyturtle, in no way did I mean to imply that you were too stupid to go to the hospital or not know the signs of rabies - I just meant people in general. Sorry that it came out that way.
I also understand the difficulties of trapping and vaccinating wild cats. But I guess I’m confused - some people here (not necessarily you) have said that they “get” a cat whose job is to keep down the rodent population and when that cat dies, they “get” another cat. Where do these cats come from? Where did the first one come from? If someone is “getting” it from someone or somewhere, then the cat is most likely in a carrier and most likely not wild, and therefore can at least be neutered.
The point is, whoever is using the cats as tools - not something I agree with but I don’t pretend that all animals are pets to all people, either - is starting off with one or two, and unless those two are appearing out of thin air one day, then they are coming from some kind of situation that allows them to be neutered before they are turned out to kill rodents. So I can’t understand why someone wouldn’t do this. People should realize that their actions or inactions don’t affect only them - by not neutering one’s cats, tools, whatever they are to someone, that person is contributing to the huge homeless cat population in this country. They don’t all get eaten by coyotes. They don’t all end up staying in the barn someone has provided for shelter (if they get even that) and never wandering anywhere else to start yet another homeless cat colony, for someone else to deal with.
Excellent point, missbunny. Sorry I was so snarky there before.
Ditto missbunny
I might of seemed defensive too but these cats are dropped off by people who decide they don’t want them anymore and are scared…most often we don’t even know they are here until they have gotten wild out of necessity. By then it is too late to care for them in a way they deserve.
We like most people have TRIED to give good homes to some of them if we can catch them but anyone in our area have all the cats they want or need already by idiots dumping them in the country.
Every kid in the country probably goes through a phase where we badger our parents to put an ad in the paper to get rid of some of the cats…before we realise no one wants them. We also TRY to care for them ourselves too…this also turns out to be more trouble than we can handle. It is one of the hard facts farm kids have to learn early.
I think we have a common enemy…those who don’t care for their pets and think dumping their cats(and dogs to a lesser degree) on a farm is providing a happy life for them. I agree with most of what has already been posted in this thread. It is just I have gone through that “phase” myself and remembering the pain of having kittens I had grown to love die because their mother had been killed or TRYING to tame a cat down who is justifiably frightened of any human then later finding her dead.
After awhile you try NOT to get too close to these animals for that very reason.
Occasionally there are success stories though…I found a big tom cat in our garage who had mange(from his shoulders to his tail he had no hair) He had been neutered but also declawed…he could barely move and cried when i picked him up. I really thought he was a goner…I took him to the barn fed him gave him a shot of antibiotics and put medicated cream on the hairless part of his body and believe it or not he lived. However even he once he was well enough to get around on his own would not let anyone touch him after that…I don’t blame him.
But far more often the animal dies and it hurts and eventually you learn to keep out of all but cases where you KNOW you can help.
It sucks but the enemy here are the boneheads who dump their animals not the farmers.