Wow, thanks for all the info. I saw that statute yesterday but I wasn’t sure if it applied or not in this case. I read in one of the articles that bow hunting a cat is illegal, and the only legal euthanizing method is injection, but I can’t find a government cite to verify that. If true, the method of death is not legal, no matter how quick or painless it might have been. Would that qualify as cruelty?
I imagine the sheriff wanted to drop it in the DA’s lap because of all the publicity, so no way to tell if there’s really enough evidence to go forward. We’ll see.
Thought so. Thanks again for the research.
IMO, if someone harms a pet with the intent to hurt the (human) owner of the pet, they should be liable for emotional damages to that person. Probably not applicable to this case, unless you expand it to negligence for not checking if the cat was chipped before killing it.
BTW, I think I misspoke about markings not being like fingerprints, and DrDeth is most likely correct. It appears to be true for the big cats, so it probably also applies to the domestic tabby. I couldn’t find a reliable cite for that specifically. There is so much conflicting information about cats on the internet.
I tried to look up cites for how many cats in the US are chipped, and this is the best I could come up with:
I googled the source for that statistic, which seems reasonably reliable, but you have to pay to get access to the original source.
12% is low, though I’d expect the percentage to have risen a lot in the five years since then; chipping had only been around for a few years by 2010, after all.
It’s still a high enough percentage to mean that trapping a cat, then scanning it before making any other decisions about it, would be sensible. Not finding a chip would not prove at all that the cat wasn’t a pet, but it would, if a chip were found, prove that the cat wasn’t a feral. Fewer pets would then be killed.
Kiling with a bow and arrow takes away that chance.
If it were known that non-chipped cats might be put down, cat owners would have extra impetus to have their cats chipped. It’s not very expensive and some charities offer it at an even lower cost, or free, sometimes (my local cat charity has a free chipping day every year, regardless of income, and will do it any time of the year for a very low fee).
Portable scanners are commonplace - I take my cat to a mobile vet and they use one.
He has said that he’d have no problem taking his own tomcat to her, yes.
The AVMA statement means that this vet’s employers really had no choice. And the AVMA statement about the vetinary oath does sound like she was going against it. I wouldn’t be surprised if losing this job is only the start of her problems.
If this vet hadn’t published her picture herself then it’s possible no-one would ever have known. If she hadn’t added the comments she made, she might still have been able to claw her way back (heh) into her profession. But those are not the choices she made: she chose to kill a cat using an illegal method (that she should be expected to know was illegal) without even checking if it was really a feral, then brag about it publically, then not back down. I’m amazed she ever made it through vet school with that level of stupidity.
This is still, despite what the OP claimed, very different to other cases of trial by internet. She did something that was actually illegal, connected to her job and likely to lose her employers business.
And she enjoyed killing a cat, grinning, posing and boasting about it; that’s not exactly the same as posting one ill-advised tweet.
I’m sorry, but I don’t even agree it’s true for the big cats.
In A tiger cannot change its stripes: using a three-dimensional model to match images of living tigers and tiger skins, by Lex Hiby , Phil Lovell , Narendra Patil , N. Samba Kumar , Arjun M. Gopalaswamy , K. Ullas Karanth, Biol. Lett. 2009 5 383-386; DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0028. Published 11 May 2009:
(emphasis added).
From this study we learn that the local population size is highly relevant to the accuracy of the image matching, and of course we already knew that low-quality, blurred images do not permit confident assessment of similar types. This is true for the big cats, and I can only accept that it’s at least as true, if not more, for felis silvestris catus.
We also learn from the study that the matches are not anywhere near as exact as fingerprints. In the illustration on the top of page 384, we see that the model finds and uses approximately six to seven points of comparison.
Fingerprinting is also not an exact science, but a fingerprint examiner who testifies in court that two fingerprints match each other use at least 12, and sometimes are required to have as many as 20, minutiae points of comparison. (There is also a method called the “holistic” approach).
Based on the foregoing, I disagree that it’s remotely fair to claim that domesticated cat stripe patterns are as unique as fingerprints and thereby as reliable for identification purposes, especially when the source photo is so blurry.
I’m reasonably certain the answer is: “no.” The reason is that the statue itself defines cruelty as “…a manner that causes or permits unjustified or unwarranted pain or suffering.” So a concededly quick and painless death would seem to me to be outside the ambit of the cruelty statute.
Any prosecution has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt each and every element of the crime. So the correct question, when discussing a potential prosecution, would be, “What’s the source to establish that the death was accompanied by unjustified or unwarranted pain or suffering?”
Not cost effective. Any of these crossbow packages would be suitable, if one was wedded to the idea of using a crossbow. Here are some guidelines for those who prefer a regular compound bow. Either way, you’ll want to equip your arrows with proper broad heads.
Unless noise is a concern, I don’t think archery tackle is the way to go with this anyway. Arrows, whether carbon fiber or aluminum, aren’t cheap. Neither are broadheads. You won’t be getting multiple uses out of too many arrows. Loss or breakage is to be expected on pretty much every shot.
IMPO, the ideal tool for the job is a scoped .17HMR rifle. It is so perfectly suited to the job that it almost seems like it was designed especially for the purpose of culling feral cats. Savage makes some excellent .17HMR rifles. They are accurate, light, handy, have such refinements as adjustable triggers, and are not particularly pricey.
But my assertions are made in the context of a discussion about whether the cat’s death was “cruel” as a matter of Texas law.
Nonetheless, I would agree that the cat’s death was likely quick and painless under an ordinary use of the phrase, because the cat was killed by an arrow through the head. So far as I can tell, that’s something that would have instantly killed the animal.
Bricker has already admitted that he’s playing lawyer with this. Next stop is that we can’t enter the picture of the cat with an arrow in it’s head into evidence because the shooter was not warned of her rights first.
It’s just ridiculous leagalese at this point - no bearing on what actually happened.
He’s essentially treating this whole thread as if the question is" Is there reasonable probability that this vet could be successfully prosecuted in a court of law"
But that is not the question. That’s only how he is wanting to frame things.
This was made in the context of whether veterinarians are held to a higher standard of “cruelty”. You made a positive assertion here, not a statement that cruelty was unprovable under Texas statute.
I’m sure you can provide a cite that an arrow through the head is universally instantaneously fatal.
Here’s a article with a picture of a child with an arrow through his head, who is still alive (spoilered for potentially disturbing image):
Yes, it’s a person and not a cat. But clearly one can survive an arrow through the head.
More to the point, how do you know what led to the arrow through the head? All you have is a photograph of the aftermath. If we can trust the mother (who took the picture), then we know that she was in the yard practicing. That’s it. You seem to be assuming that she simply saw the cat and took a single shot that took it in the head. You have no evidence that this is how it went down. Maybe she took an initial shot that wounded the cat, then she made the kill shot. Maybe she caught the cat and hung it from a branch for a little target practice. I don’t know. And neither do you.
Hmmm, so how is that a refutation of the DrDeth’s claim that cat markings are “almost as good as fingerprints”? The study you cited describes the reliability of a specific pattern recognition software program, but does admit that the markings are unique to an individual animal, which was the original contention.
What we don’t know is how reliable other methods, or visual comparison of two photo samples by an expert can be, especially when factoring in the white bib and leg splash patterns in addition to the tabby markings - which are clear enough even in the quality of the photographs available. Add to that the proximity and timing, and I contend you increase the likelihood to near certainty it is the same cat as the one that went missing.
And according to some of the articles, even if the couple who were fostering the cat don’t want to come forward, the animal rescue group who placed the cat with them are apparently willing to claim and identify the cat and say they did not give permission to kill it (I admit this is speculative at this point).
I’m still not convinced that using an illegal method like bow hunting to dispose of the cat isn’t considered cruelty, irrespective of the ownership issue. If bow hunting a cat is not legal, then what is the charge and penalty for breaking that law?
The point that in this specific instance it may have been a clean shot and quick death is not enough to consider the method itself humane, when there is such a great possibility that a bow kill can go wrong and lead to a slow painful death or injury. As fachverwirrt noted, there are many cases of non-lethal shots to the head, even in cats:
It was a long bow. There may be some regulations about what animals you can legally hunt and when, but to my knowledge nobody’s cited a specific regulation.
So far the pictures of Tiger and the JusticeForTiger campaign have all been put out by Amy Hemsell, a professional pet sitter from Brenham. All information has come from Amy. She says the owners (Tiger was not a foster cat, simply a barn cat that belonged to some unknown couple) want to remain anonymous. Amy continues to state that the dead cat has not yet been confirmed to be Tiger, nor has the body been recovered.
Kristen Lindsey is coming in “sometime next week” with her lawyer to talk to the DA.
A civil suit is unlikely.
No clue about her license.
Just to dump my additional research, the animal hospital was located in Brenham, same place the pet sitter lives, which is in Washington County. All reports are that the authorities dealing with this are from Austin County, which is at least a few miles south. Everything between Brenham and Bellville, the next closest town, is very rural. Lindsey doesn’t have any property on record in either county, neither does Hemsell.