One of my neighbors got hauled off in handcuffs this afternoon — not an everyday occurrence, but not an unusual one ’round here. Cops followed him into his driveway, pried him out of his car, then set Officer K9 dancing around the vehicle.
I was walking Ava past the place and feared that K9, a cute black lab, would get excited about the passing dog and get the poor guy in worse trouble than he was already in. But those drug dogs are focused. Fortunately this one didn’t alert to anything.
Anyhow, it was only a three-cop bust. Small as things go, business as usual hereabouts.
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I’ve been trapping feral cats this week. That’s a new one for me. Our group does catch-neuter-vaccinate-release. I’ve never been a cat person. Still, I figured this would be a good hands-on project and appropriate work for a hermit.
Ha. Turns out I drew a cat colony surrounded by neighbors who … well, let’s just say really need hobbies. The man across the street watches the traps through binoculars and comes running out every time I check them. Several neighbor ladies are right behind.
Getting away can be tricky. During one visit, as the chief cat-trapper and I were driving off, the man flagged us down. What did he want? To explain that he really did have false teeth, he just didn’t happen to know where they were at that moment. 🙂
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Then yesterday afternoon I get a call from a woman from one of the big cities. Not the nearby berg we laughingly call The Big City, but a real one. One of the ones you’ve actually heard of where they’re all full of social consciousness and stuff.
Chirpily, she announced that she had placed cat traps at my location while on her way to her beachfront cabin and oh by the way, would I take custody of the cat the little neighborhood social group told her she just caught?
“Huh?” I’m saying. “You’re who?” I’m saying. “You’re doing what?” I’m saying.
I’m also saying, “But we don’t catch ferals on the weekend because it’s too stressful for them to be in captivity for days before surgery. We catch them only on days the vet can neuter them right away.”
“Oh, that’s no problem,” says she. “You can keep him over the weekend. My group in the big city does it all the time.”
I’m half laughing, half grateful to have one more adult cat who won’t be breeding anymore, and half flapped that this person — who knows darned well a local group is working on the colony — is placing traps willy-nilly without word one to anybody, then expects local rescuers to hop to it when she needs us.
When I email the other cat catchers, they don’t find it amusing AT ALL. They are livid.
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Today Ms. Big City comes by my place to get her trap and transfer the poor, captive, exceedingly stressed kitty into a carrier. With ferals, there’s an art to that and she wants me to learn it.
When I explain that we never need to do that because we take them to the vet immediately, right in the trap, she starts in about how every, single thing we do in cat trapping is wrong, wrong, wrong. She goes into great detail about our methods being inferior to hers. (Never mind that some of what she insists on is strictly big city; some would make rural rescuers and vets howl with laughter.)
I finally say, “I’m sorry. Under other circumstances we might appreciate having your expertise. But I don’t think anybody in our group is willing to take a lesson right now from someone who went around the local rescuers and trapped this poor animal, knowing full well it would have to live in a box for two days — when we could have saved it all that stress if you’d just let us manage our own project.”
She sniffed that she most certainly did not “go around” us (because after all, she notified me after she caught a cat). And we should be grateful for her “help” — which she felt she had to give because she knew that people in this area had [sniff, sniff] “different attitudes” about animal rescue. (Read: Even the rescuers hereabouts are a bunch of Billy-Bobs who would probably drown cats in the river if she didn’t save them from us.)
Another big city do-gooder who knows nothing about rural life — except exactly how We the Inferior should live it.
—–
Despite neighborhood adventures and continuing deadlines, I got all the absolutely necessary exterior painting done on my house after months of not accomplishing enough. Now the rains can come and I won’t care. Still have to finish shingling one wall, but that I could happily do in a downpour.
And hey, look. The sun’s still shining!
Today, just a few miles down the road from me a cop shot and killed a guy, and then (after cops from all over came to get in on the excitement) left the dead guy lying in the motel parking lot for at least 6 hours. I know because I drove past right after it happened, and then about 6 hours later. And about 3 hours after that, the body was gone but cop cars were still sitting in the area with lights flashing. I figure it must have taken a long time to come up with a story to justify the murder. But, that’s just my anti-cop take on the events.
To me, if you have a feral cat problem you don’t have enough coyote, bobcat or mountain lion roaming your neighborhoods.
While I applaud the catch-neuter-release efforts I wish there was a reasonable alternative to the release portion of that trio. Even though neutered, those released feral cats are still going to kill a small mountain of other animals. I appreciate the fact that feral cats will kill and eat urban vermin, rats, mice etc, but I hate the fact that they will also kill songbirds, dove, quail, small raptors, baby bunnies, non-poisounous snakes etc. Those same feral cats can also carry distemper, rabies (vaccines eventually run out) etc that can be spread to wild and domestic animal populations.
Thankfully it wasn’t a weekend in Chicago. LOL
There is a woman in a city in my state who operates a compound for feral cats, http://www.operationcatsnip.org/register.html . She and volunteers furnish food, and housing/protection of various sorts, on the property for about (last year) 30 cats. Occasionally they die, or others are brought in, but they have their needs met without human contact. I think this is one step better than most catch-neuter-release programs.
I would say any birds, baby rabbits, etc. that they catch are on their own in that compound.
I live in a pretty rural environment for being 60 miles from NYC, 1 cop, no streetlights, no fast food or 24 hour store, 3rd world electric reliability, etc. But being “in the sticks”, we have no gangs, no crime, no litter and low(er) taxes. Its a committment to go shopping from here (its either over the mountain or down into civilization), so when we go, the goal is to fill up the truck before we return. If we get home and don’t have it, well then, we don’t need it that bad and will make do with an something else thats on hand til we make the shopping trek again. Its funny, even before prepping became the fad we kept 150 lbs of sugar, 100 lbs of flower, 50 lbs of chicken, 50 lbs of fish, 20 lbs of butter, 50 gallons of gas, etc. in stock all the time. Its just part of rural living, we thought.
I used to get a kick out of the city folk who move here: “My old town had streetlights” “My old town had 24 hour police” “My old town had sidewalks” “My old town had ballfields and a community pool” “the chickens wake me up” “It smells like manure” “My old town was the best”
Well then, why the hell did you leave your old town and come here to my town? We farm here. Animals make noises and smells. Tractors drive slower than cars. We don’t have ANY of that stuff you left in your last town, and will you fight tooth and nail to prevent it from coming here!
City folk. Bless their pointy little heads, they’re so silly to listen to.
Of all the places I’ve lived, feral cats or dogs have never been a problem,other than the ocassional stray. Most of the pets I’ve had are rescue/strays that showed up, or were dropped off at my place. My cat, Sir Louie, is a rescue.
On my way to work, I saw 8 cop cars parked along my street-but no cops. I have no idea what was going on. It was as if they parked their cars and walked off. A mini-mystery.
Just Waiting-one place I lived as a teenager had the old rural electrification program single wire ground return system-where the ground itself was neutral. During dry weather, lights got dim and the TV picture shrank-dry ground is a poor conductor. Things brightened up when it rained. Very unreliable-the power went off during almost every thunderstorm.
In Florida, a lot of my neighbors were transplants from New York, New Jersey, and points Northeast. They complained about everything that the edge of the swamp didn’t have that their home city did. Sooo..why did you move?..
I live on an island on the east coast, where we do have a feral cat issue.
There are two groups here, each with their own ideas and methods.
One does the catch-cut-release, as well as feeding stations to minimize a cats natural desire to kill massive amouts of small prey, be it for food or fun, cats like to kill for “fun” sometimes, not always about the yum-yum inside of its victim.
The other group, will trap and kill. The trap and kill folks have a license to trap, and the catch-cut group does not. In this state, you need a license, and the animal may not be released once trapped.
So, which is the best method?
I like all animals. My indoctrination into statist thinking would dictate that this animal is a mass-killer and should be destoyed. At the same time, its behaviour is that of a politician, and should be voted for and given tremendous power to foul everything up for its personal gain.
So the question still remains: catch and cut, or, trap and kill?
I also have a house (a summer cottage, not my permanent residence) on an east coast island, and we do have a serious feral cat problem. They terrorize the summer residents’ housecats (and small children) and get into houses during the winter and do tremendous damage. I like animals, too, but these are vicious wild creatures, not cuddly pets. They are dangerous, disease-ridden and destructive. There is no point in permitting them to remain in populated areas, and it’s certainly not worth the expense of neutering and relocating them. My vote is most definitely trap and kill.
“Another big city do-gooder who knows nothing about rural life — except exactly how We the Inferior should live it.”
*GRRRRROOOOOOWL*
Yeah … lots of ways to view feral cats. Not being a cat person, and seeing them as natural-born sadistic killers, I can grok the “catch and (humanely) kill” philosophy. I just couldn’t participate in it. One of the cats I brought in last week was pregnant with eight (OMG) kittens. I was thrilled that we caught her before the litter was born, but I also felt guilty about all those itty-bitty kitties being aborted because of my work. At least there will never be more.
Pat, it’s too bad that 30 cats is such a drop in the bucket. Our group looks out for about 10 feral cat colonies (incredible for an area this small). I don’t know the number of cats, but probably well over 100. They’re not fenced, but they’re fixed and vaccinated, and either we feed them or neighbors do. So they tend to stay in one location, despite being free to roam. Of course, all this accomplishes is to keep the problem from spreading. It’s not an ideal situation. Sometimes we place them as barn cats; that at least makes them useful.
City people. I have to resist the temptation not to stereotype them as they so often stereotype us rural “Billy-Bobs.” Yeah, we hear the “why don’t they fill the potholes?” lines here, too. Also “why doesn’t the government build an animal shelter?” At the same time, a significant number of the locals (including the animal-rescuing locals) are city-bred and doing just fine. We have a former Berkeley professor who’s having a delightful time keeping bees, attending grange meetings, and prowling garage sales. And a pair of California bankers who, though they still have a bit of an uppity manner, have put their uppitiness to work running various charity and community projects. And … um … I was raised in a Bay Area suburb, myself.
The problem is the ones who not only start out clueless about rural life but who are so very, very certain of their own rightness that they don’t adapt.
On behalf of cats everywhere, I object to the pejoratives thrown about here. 🙂
Cats are not sadistic, neither are they “vicious wild creatures”, nor do they “like to kill for fun”. They are just… cats. This is the nature of a feline. They “play” with their prey in order to practice their stalking, chasing, catching, and killing instincts. They need these abilities to survive. Cats are closer to the wild than dogs – they’ve not been domesticated that long, comparatively speaking – and they still insist of being themselves, *whether we like it or not.*
My experience with a feral kitten last year has led me to change my thinking regarding pets; I’m not so sure we should even have pets if they can’t retain and use their natural instincts. Domesticated cats are pets, they become dependent on us, and enjoy that dependency; feral cats never learn to relax or trust, they insist on being free and independent in spite of us. (Libertarians at heart?)
Feral cats are no different from domestic cats, they’ve just become fearful and have gone into survival mode. Cats don’t forgive so easily as dogs, so, once feral, may never be domesticated.
The symbiosis of animals with humans will never be reversed, so I don’t have an answer for how to handle the pet problem – but for myself, I don’t anticipate getting another cat until it can live closer to its nature, closer to its instincts. I’ve lived with a real cat – and loved him! – and I don’t want a “pet” as a substitute.
(I’ve never liked zoos, either, because of the way the animals are caged and/or manipulated. They were not put on this earth for our entertainment.)
“On behalf of cats everywhere, I object to the pejoratives thrown about here. 🙂 ”
You know, Pat … cats being cats (which is quite a bit like four-legged, furry, psychotic libertarians), if they could type, thousands of them would probably be commenting right now, yowling, “How dare you claim to speak for me! I’m an individual!” 🙂
Oh, I asked their permission… Being busy elsewhere trying to spread terror around, they granted me a one-time dispensation to speak for them. 🙂
I’m a cat AND dog person, I love each species for its own uniqueness …. TNR is actually much more effective in managing the feral cat population than catch & kill. For more info, contact Alley Cat Allies.
I’d rather be a two-legged, somewhat furry, psychotic anarchist and not even I could speak for myself as I disagree with everyone.
You’ve probably missed this before, but I’d rather have this dog than a cat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPyP_7Xuqr0&feature=youtube_gdata_player
It’s not Parkour, it’s Barkour. There’s no fencing in this guy. This dog can walk on walls.
Cats are model libertarians and Freedomistas, whats not to like?
Claire, I’m just wondering – when Ms. Big City came by your place to get her trap & that cat – did you have some heat on your hip when you answered the door? I think if you had answered her knock while wearing sunglasses (inside) & with a .357 S&W on your hip, she might have been less uppity.
Ha! Jim, I didn’t even think of that. All I was packin’ was some pepper spray where she couldn’t even see it. Drat! Missed opportunity.
Hard to imagine that woman being less uppity, but I sure would have confirmed her prejudice against all us rural dwellers. “My god, they’re not just stupid, they’re violent, too!”
“The problem is the ones who not only start out clueless about rural life but who are so very, very certain of their own rightness that they don’t adapt.”
This is why I consider “city people” a seperate group from “city rats”. One refers to a location, the other refers to a mindset.