Words fail me.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/12/30/cat.killed.ap/index.html
Mouthbreathers rule, evidently. It’s too hard to go get a humane box trap and put some food in it; it’s just easier to tell off a couple of flunkies to go get a gun and shoot the thing.
Are we to expect a Nuremburg-style “I was only following orders” defense?
“This kind of action is completely inconsistent with the way we do business,” she said."
I’m guessing there’s more than a few Mom & Pops out there that would disagree with that assessment.
Okay, this really fucking pisses me off. :mad: :mad: :mad:
People who abuse and murder animals for “fun” or because they don’t like them, need to be hung by their toenails, skinned alive, and acid poured on their raw, skinless flesh.
Fucking dicks. Rot in hell mother-fuckers. :mad:
Unless there’s some evidence that they tortured the cat or something, this doesn’t bother me. Killing an animal quickly and humanely doesn’t equal animal cruelty in my book.
I don’t see the problem. If the cat is a feral animal that is causing a problem then shoot it. Unless it’s done unsafely or something then I have no problem with it.
Farmers have the right to shoot “nuisance animals” but I don’t think city slicker business managers do, though IANAL so don’t know all the details of the regulations. IIRC, people in the city have to call animal control to come get rid of nuisance animals, be they pidgeons, raccoons, stray cats, or feral dogs. Firing a gun within city limits isn’t legal. They must have found the corpse and autopsied it to find enough evidence to actually charge them with Federal animal cruelty. It takes a LOT of evidence to accomplish filing charges.
What Zabali said. In the vast majority of cases like this, you don’t get to shoot animals just because they’re on your property. The cat could have been someone’s pet, with an owner desperately hoping it’d turn up at the shelter and checking repeatedly. The shooter (was he licensed to shoot a gun? and almost certainly not in that area) could have only wounded the cat, who could have fled and run around suffering. The shot could have ricocheted and damaged property/injured someone else.
Essentially, there are a whole mess of reasons why your average person not in a very rural setting doesn’t get to just shoot undesired animals. Contact Animal Control and find out what to do from there.
Yeah, and as I said before, the charges filed aren’t just state/county animal cruelty, they are at a Federal level. What must they have done in order to merit charges of that severity? :eek:
I’ve trapped dozens of ferals cats. If they couldn’t get this one to come out of the trailer, they didn’t try very hard.
The article doesn’t mention any gun charges, so I imagine that there probably weren’t any problems there.
I’m woefully ignorant of animal cruelty laws, but is it really likely that the difference between whether someone is charged with violation of federal laws vs. local ones is dependent on the level of cruelty? That doesn’t strike me as being consistent with what I know of other jurisdictional rules.
I actually don’t think the level of cruelty has anything to do with whether the charges are federal or state. If someone, for instance, shoots a seal, which is protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, then he is charged with a federal crime, in addition to any applicable local/state laws against animal cruelty or discharging a firearm.
I’d bet if the shooters are charged in this case under a federal statute, I’d guess it’s because either the “cat” wasn’t a domestic housecat, or it was an escaped CDC research animal (just guessing), or the trailer itself was federally owned or located on some kind of federally protected tract of land.
Quick story. One year I was staying in Sturgis in a rented room. The home owner was a really nice guy - big as a bear, very kind-hearted, and he opened his house up to me like I was a relative. Every morning he had hot coffee for me, and I’d sit at their table and chat with him and his wife about the world. Super nice people. They lived in town, as opposed to outside of town, but near the edge of the town limits.
One morning, I was awakened by a loud gunshot just on the other side of the bedroom wall - maybe 15 feet away. I didn’t know that it was a gunshot - I thought it was some kinda backfire or something. All the bikes running around and all…
I get up, get some coffee, and the gentle bear-of-a-man tells me in a very matter-of-fact way that one of the neighbor’s cats had been constantly harrassing his penned-up dog, and that after numerous conversations with the cat owner with no results, we just went out that morning and plugged it with a .357 handgun. No embellishments - no swagger - just plain talk, and a casual apology for possibly waking me from sleep.
He gave it no more thought or consideration that one would give the telling of a story that involved killing a roach or a fly.
It was sort of disconcerting.
Probably the Federal charges were able to be filed in part because they proved that a gun (owned by them, legally? or not, if it wasn’t registered that might be enough) was illegally fired within city limits come to think of it. And yes, the difference between a Federal and a State/County level crime is dependant on the severity/circumstances involved with the commision of a crime. For example, IIRC it goes to a Federal level of crime if a murder involves another felony like rape, kidnapping, or carjacking etc. so it is reasonable to suppose that these…freaks took disposing of a feral cat to a whole other level of cruelty in order to allow SUCCESSFUL Federal charges to be filed against them. It’s hard to “prove” animal cruelty in the first place, much less such a serious count of it. Hope I’ve explained it well enough, if not, can someone else please clarify?
Doesn’t Wal-Mart sell guns? I wonder if they didn’t just take a gun from the store and use it, then it wouldn’t have been a registered weapon, right?
Most animal shelters do have humane traps they can loan out in order to help people trap strays, heck Wal-mArt may even sell them. There was no reason or excuse for this.
I don’t see what’s wrong with this, either.
I mean, shooting a cat seems far more humane then trapping it, stuffing the terrorized furball in an animal control truck, taking it to a shelter, caging it for 2 weeks, and then killing it.
No, it isn’t.
You have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about.
Well then, don’t leave people hanging, clarify. I did request, that if someone could see that I was mistaken, that they please clarify. Was the example I gave entirely wrong? Words, explain. At least I tried, and did admit I didn’t know it all. Until you speak up and clarify and show you do have understanding of the subject, you aren’t demonstrating a deeper understanding, only smirking in an unattractive way.
How can you be so sure the cat would have been put to sleep after 2 weeks? You can’t possibly know that that would happen. Nor could the people who shot it have known.
It doesn’t matter that the cat might die anyway. There are laws against shooting animals merely in order to remove them from your property. Just because someone doesn’t feel like following the law because he believes the end result would be the same doesn’t make the act he is engaging in acceptable.
In case you aren’t familiar with animal-trapping methods, just let me explain:
Like I said, they couldn’t have tried very hard to get it. It’s pretty easy to trap a cat that is already in an enclosed area. Instead they decided to take one of their Wal-Mart guns and shoot it.
You know, there ARE some people in this world who think it’s cruel to shoot an innocent animal. I think it’s MORE humane to take the animal to a shelter, see if it belongs to someone, and if it doesn’t give it a chance to find a home. There are also plenty of no-kill shelters too.
Now, if someone’s little brat kid wandered onto my property . . . 
(just kidding of course)
It’s a complicated issue, and I don’t have a deep understanding of it. But what I do know is that the severity of the crime isn’t really an issue–the issue is “did you break a federal law, a state law, or both?” There’s no law that says “If you murder someone, it’s a state crime, but if you murder someone in a really mean way, it’s a federal crime!!!”
No, if someone says something that I know to be false even if I don’t have a deep understanding of the issue I’m perfectly justified in calling someone out. If you say the solution to “x^2 - 2x + 3 = 0” is “bannana,” I’m gonna say you’re wrong even if I don’t have the quadratic formula handy.