Lissner should have dropped it at the pound, but instead was cold and unsympathetic by tossing it out to fend for itself. BUT it’s a little overwrought to claim the cat was “defenceless” as it clearly was capable of effortlessly killing other animals and therefore feeding itself. Feral cats are a huge problem where I live and they massacre the local wildlife who are the defenceless ones as they’re not used to such efficient predators.
Yes it was scummy, but you cat lovers need to get a grip. Lissner didn’t throw your own loveable kitty out into the wild, and it wasn’t defenceless, so stop projecting and stop anthropomorphizing animals.
It’s fairly obvious what he (ostensibly) expected: a thread where incidents are laid out and examined dispassionately without passing judgment.
The problem is that the very nature of the topic is guaranteed to trainwreck within the first 10 posts. “Cruel things you’ve done you’re not ashamed of.” We’re talking about morally reprehensible actions that for whatever reason were justified to the poster.
However, at least to my eyes, if the justification is sufficient enough that you could reasonably expect, the action is no longer cruel. Murder with sufficient justification is no longer considered murder, but self-defense (for example). Disciplining a child is cruel if the punishment doesn’t fit the transgression, but not if it does. So posters who have done something that may be considered cruel without sufficient justification, but not considered cruel with, aren’t likely to post to the thread.
Additionally, you have cases where a poster may have done something they truly weren’t ashamed of that may be considered cruel by other people, but they honestly don’t see it as cruelty. For example, we’ve got some folks on the board who see stray cats as vermin and think nothing of shooting or drowning them. To them, it’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of, but they also don’t consider it a cruelty, no more than most of us would consider spraying for insects to be cruel. So they have no reason to post in the thread.
So you have two cases, as I see it, where someone would post a contribution to the thread: when the poster believes they’re justified but realizes they should be ashamed of what they did, or at least realize that not everyone else would accept their justification as sufficient; or they’re straight-up sociopaths who revel in doing evil. In both cases, it is pretty understandable that the result will be social disapproval. I think insisting on a dispassionate discussion without judgment from a non-intimate group of people is simply an unreasonable request.
I realize the above is kind of rambly and perhaps not written coherently, but it’s getting pretty late for complex thoughts.
The cat killed some snakes. The cat didn’t even eat the snakes, so they weren’t “food” they were “toys”. And given that the cat was an INDOOR cat, it’s pretty clear that the cat was unprepared for life outside on it’s own. Not to mention that it was thrown out in the snow.
Since you cleary missed it, here’s the relevant part of Lissener’s post:
Now which part of this can someone use to come to a reasonable conclusion that the cat was capable of hunting and feeding itself? Clue: None.
I’m guessing my 3 cats have better reading comprehension skills than you do. Oh I’m sorry that was rude. My bad.
Perhaps this comes as a suprise, but a house cat isn’t a feral cat. You’re welcome.
The cat was a house cat. It wasn’t capable of living in the wild because it never learned how. Much like wild animal rescues won’t take a raccoon bottle fed from infancy and toss it out into the woods because it will, of course, inevitably die, it’s irresponsible and cruel to toss a house cat out into the streets. Even if you ignore that, if say the cat was somehow able to learn all required survival skills in the span of the few days it had to find food before its liver shut down, even if it miraculously thrived, you now have a cat that’s doing the same shit you don’t like feral cats doing.
You don’t even have to like cats to see what’s fucked up about this situation. You don’t take responsibility for something and then just chuck it out in the worst possible way when it gets on your nerves. That’s a dick move if there ever was one. A decent person handles such commitments responsibly. If you just can’t stand it anymore take it to a shelter. It still might die but at least it will be humane.
lissener’s cat sounds like it was a royal pain in the ass. It sucks but some animals just don’t ever achieve anything resembling acceptable behavior. I can understand an animal like that frustrating you to the point where something has to give. But when that happens, no matter how mad you are at the time, you still have an obligation to do the right thing. Try to find a home with people who will work with it if you can or take it to the shelter if you can’t.
Letting it out into the fucking snow where it will die cold, scared, confused, and hungry is just reprehensible. But even in that circumstance, if he’d posted a thread titled “Acts of cruelty you wish you could amend” I’d understand. We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of. But to look back on something like that two and a half decades later and say you have no regrets for an something that you know and admit to be cruel is just fucking terrible. 25 years since committing such a rotten act and you still feel no remorse, no sense of shame? What kind of person can do that and not learn to do better?
This pitting is as well deserved as just about any I’ve ever seen.
Well, I dig him, and he may be one of my favorite posters. But, that thread* had *to be performance art, as What Exit said. I mean, there is NO way he has spent more than five minutes on this board and not know that the thread would only get the cat people all worked up into a lather.
The point of all of this isn’t that Lissener was wrong to get rid of the cat. Some cats just turn out to be not suitable for living with people. Throwing the cat outside was simply the wrong way to deal with the situation. Just take the cat to a shelter and explain the problem. The cat may be put down, but it will be done in a humane way so that the animal doesn’t suffer.
In Lissner’s case, the cat would have been scared, cold, in an environment it isn’t familiar with and quite possibly incapable of taking care of itself.
All that said, what really chaps my ass and what prompted this pitting was the “yeah, I did it and I don’t give a damn” attitude from Lissener.
Honestly, there is simply no defending what Lissener did.
You know, I inherited my brother’s father-in-law’s cat when said father-in-law died–I’m the only person in my family not allergic to cats, and no one on that side of the family had the means to take care of one.
This cat was widely regarded as evil. It maliciously attacked anyone it could see who wasn’t the father-in-law, it hissed and spat and peed on things, it wasn’t careful about where it walked so it was perpetually breaking things.
I owned that cat for six months. On a new diet, with a clean litterbox, and with someone disciplining it with a squirt gun and a shake can every day, she turned into a relatively docile little lady, and even started being a cuddly purring lap cat.
Unfortunately, since said father-in-law had let her be an indoor/outdoor cat and didn’t keep up with the cat’s vet visits or shots, she was carrying feline leukemia and it went full-blown, so we had to put her down.
My point is that I have never seen the cat that can’t be trained into being a good pet with a little bit of patience and supervision. Certainly we confined this cat to a room in the basement with no breakables and her own food and water–because we are not idiots (unlike, apparently, lissener, who’s reaction to “my cat pisses on everything and breaks things” is “I’ll let it run around the house unchecked some more, hurr hurr”. If you can’t handle training your cat, and not everyone can, then take it to a fucking shelter and let it die humanely or be adopted by someone who can handle it.
And all you fuckers who “don’t understand” are arguably worse than lissener, too–at least he clearly (by the title of the original thread) understood that what he did was cruel. Cruelty is almost by definition wrong. Getting rid of the cat wasn’t wrong, the method clearly was and that’s all there is to it–even shooting it or drowning it in a barrel would have been more humane.
**Guin ** has, it seems, never once failed to show up at the pitting of a fellow poster. Peering over the shoulders of the crowd, she assures herself that the object of derision has been sufficiently subdued by the mob, and then emerges to bravely poke at the carcass with her plastic sword. It’s all the fun of a pillory in the public square, but with no need to leave one’s own basement!
How funny that a few years down the road, Lissner would be the one being thrown out on his ass. I also call bullshit on him claiming he’s not ashamed of it. He is, and it’s that type of guilt that probably contributes to becoming a depressed hoarder loser. The fact that he brought it up and started the thread shows that he’s seeking e-punishment for his cruelty. He is probably at this very moment flogging himself with a cat o’nine tails that he knitted himself out of yarn salvaged from his trash heap.
:mad: