OK Hit this Poll: Should it be legal to shoot ferel cats.

BillCA:

Your point is well-stated (unlike my own earlier attempts to articulate my concern). Actually, in many places there is a law prohibiting animal abandonment. As with most animal cruelty laws I have been familiarized with, they are antiquated, vague, and largely unenforced, if not unenforceable. I average about ten calls a day from people who, for various reasons, want to get rid of a "disposable pet." Typically it goes something like this: "Hello, I'm moving tomorrow and I need someone to take my two cats, because they are not allowed in my new apartment." When we refer them to the animal shelter, they reply "oh, I don't want to take them there. They will just put them to sleep." So, guess where the cats end up; the owner blithely assuming that someone will find the hapless felines and give them a good home. Right! That will happen when Gwenth Paltrow invites me to be her sex toy.
Ultimately, it leads to the question: should stupid and/or irresponsible people be allowed to have pets? guns? kids? anything? They are the ones who create messes for the rest of us to clean up, and their numbers seem to be steadily growing. Imagine a day when you will only be allowed to continue living if you can demonstrate some usefullness to society. If you are useless, by virtue of stupidity or lack of character, then they kill you and harvest your organs (assuming they haven't been ravaged by drug use or venereal disease). If that day comes, there won't be a population problem, nor much need for a prison system. Guess I'm glad I won't be around, but the supporters will someday surely get fed up supporting the supportees and do something rash to put a stop to it. Zeesh! listen to me rave on. I know this isn't much help, except to articulate my overwhelming frustration.
 
Teddy Rex Patton:

I'd have to say you are pretty much right on in terms of relative threats of feral cats vis a vis feral or just free roaming dogs. In many cases, free roaming dogs, even though owned, can form into hunting packs that are a serious threat to anything they can bring down. Although the etiology of "wild dogs" in suburban and rural areas may be similar to that for feral cats, the problem is apt to be a lot more serious. You might argue against shooting a cat because they were on your property, but it's hard to argue against the shooting of an implacable dog that is attacking you while you are out jogging or whatever.
 
Teddy, you might try a water pistol filled with ammonia. Works for me. I don't like to shoot dogs even when they are hanging around my chicken yard. Dogs may be a problem but they tend to scare the coyotes away.

But back on the subject of birds and cats, starlings are an imported nuisance bird and not a native songbird. The birds in trouble are bluebirds, indigo buntings, song sparrows, thrashers and the like. Cats will kill adults when they get them, maybe a third of their diet will be birds, but they really like the babies during that day or two when they are out of the nest but can't fly well.
 
If you want a law, let's allow the shooting of the people dumping these animals into the wild when they're unable to really fend for themselves.
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I agree with that 100%. However, in the interim (which is forever since a law like that will obviously never happen) the cats are going to bear the brunt. BTW, it's rare for "hunting laws" to apply in urban areas, so I suspect your concerns about this making it more likely that your neighbor will "whack" Fluffy are unfounded.
Cats may scare off a few singin'birds, but I've yet to see one climb our feeders and catch a Tweety-pie! Get real!
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Either you have very fast birds, very slow cats, or you're not watching at the right time. My folks have witnessed the neighbor's cat hunting at their feeder repeatedly. He's caught a good number of doves--his success rate is very high. One of my coworkers came in just a week or so ago with a story. His cat caught a bird and brought it into the house still alive. It escaped and the cat recaptured it and killed it. The story was only unusual because the cat brought the bird indoors--it regularly kills birds outdoors. Furthermore, one of the pioneering studies on this topic was performed in England and was based on cat owners telling surveyors how many animals and birds their cats caught in a given time period--not estimates or speculation.

People will believe what they want to, but the threat to birds and other wildlife posed by feral cats is real.

Feral dogs are a far greater threat to humans than are feral cats. They also need to be eliminated, but that isn't really the topic of this thread.
 
Cats may scare off a few singin'birds, but I've yet to see one climb our feeders and catch a Tweety-pie! Get real!
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I don't see cats climbing feeders either... there is no need for them to, they jump and swat the little varmints right out of the air.

Talk about getting real... :rolleyes:
 
Not so fast in Wisconsin

If that's about the Wisconsin issue, it's ALREADY LEGAL to shoot feral cats there. In fact, there's in unenforced law on their books REQUIRING hunters to kill feral cats.
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I don't think this is correct. I was at the Fox News site, and just viewed a news video about Wisconsin ferrel cats. A state panel has yet to vote on the issue, and then the state congress has to pass a law allowing it. According to Fox News, cats are a protected species in all states, including Wisconsin, with the only states without a cat protection law being MN and SD.
 
" I just hope they can tell the ferals from the escaped house pets."

I wonder how many feral cats were strayed pets or their descendants.

Let me preface the following by saying I've had pet cats, dogs, fish and hamsters. I'm not a monster.

Many people have pet cats and are against killing feral cats.

But what gives a cat more of a right to live than a pig, for instance?

I wonder- if more people owned pigs as pets- would it be illegal to kill feral hogs?

The old lady across the street fed every darned feral cat running loose in the neighborhood (probably stray pets). She considered it a form of charity, I guess. I considered them her adopted pets.

As much as I like cats, if I could have shot the "adopted pet" that sharpened its claws on the roof of my '71 Riviera, I would have. Seriously. When I complained to the neighbor she said there was nothing she could do about it. Luckily, the cat stopped sharpening its claws on the roof. Instead, it started sharpening its claws on my windshield. Nice.

It's my opinion that any animal, pet or not, if it wanders onto someone else's property and presents a threat to people, or their health or property, it ought to be considered a varmint.

There are limits to this. When I was a young kid in a rural area in Indiana we had two family dogs, a german shepherd and a dachsund. When our neighbor found that the shepherd was eating his sheep, he told my dad he would shoot it, and he did. I feel he was justified. On the other hand, when he shot the dachsund because it was "sniffing around" his cows, I feel he wasn't justified.
 
cats are a protected species in all states
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That's not even a good lie--I'm surprised at Fox.

TX has no law protecting feral cats, nor any other feral animals. I just did a search of all the TX Statutes and investigated all incidences of the words: "cat" "cats" and "feral". ZIP on any laws protecting them. That's exactly what I expected. I'm not aware of any state that has such a law.
 
Sounds like a snow job to me. This is what government does best, defining a natural right as something which is given as a government favor.

People have been killing cats since Og found a medium sized one trying to eat Baby Og some 250,000 years ago.
 
Dogjaw,

Here's my take.

Currently it is legal in TX to shoot feral cats if you don't break any other laws while doing it. That's because there is no law AGAINST it, not because the game laws specifically list cats as an "unprotected species", or because there is a law on the books stating that it's legal to shoot feral cats.

In this country, things are only illegal if there are laws AGAINST them, you don't need a law stating something is legal to get busy.

What they're proposing is the addition of feral cats as an unprotected game species in the game laws. It wouldn't really change anything in terms of being able to shoot them, but it would make it absolutely clear that a hunter can shoot as many as he wants without fear of being molested or otherwise hindered in the process.

Furthermore, anyone who DIDN'T know they could shoot feral cats would find out when they picked up a copy of the game laws when buying their license.

It's not about legality, it's about publicity.
 
Let me preface this by saying that I am probably one of the greatest animal lovers of all time. That said, there is a cat that has taken up residence in my backyard. Every night when I pull up at some ungodly hour in the morning, I see the same cat go shooting away from my carport. I live in Tennesssee, and haven't looked at the legalities yet, but if I did not live in the city, that would be one very dead cat indeed, if I could ever catch it. My neighborhood is absolutely crawling with cats, and I can honestly say I have never seen a bird or even squirrel in one of the neighborhood trees. This is kind of strange, because I live right beside a college campus, and birds and squirrels are numerous there. I wish I knew where the cats are from, and I wish I could help cull the population.
 
Dogjaw, I read an article in one of the "Big Three" (Sports Afield, Field&Stream, Outdoor Life) about the Wisconsin study. Also mentioned in the article was the problem on the campus of the Univ. of South Florida, where feral cats are killing off an endangered species of burrowing owl--but the animal rightists won't allow "corrective measures".

Anyhow, as I mentioned in an earlier post the article stated that Wisconsin has or had a law on the books which required a hunter to kill feral cats upon sight. I take it for granted this means out in the boonies, since most folks don't hunt in town. :) And, as the article stated, the law is not enforced (How could it be?).

Art
 
no need

any cats that dont stay on the farm here dont live very long. the yotes keep em thin in this neck of the woods. neighbors went from around 30 to 2 in less than 2 weeks.

even the two tame cats around here might not be very well protected unless they stay off of my truck with their muddy paws. :mad:
 
Wish they were good eatin'. Ha Ha I wonder how you idenfity a "feral" cat from one that is just loose and without a collar? Frankly, in my neighborhood, the cats hang out in my back yard because I feed the birds constantly year around. I really hate to see them waiting to ambush a bird that doesn't pay attention. I throw ice cubes at em... a constantly replenishing supply of ammo from my frig!
 
No and not for the reasion you might think

Shooting or killing ferel cats should not be allowed, its just one more negitive mark on gun owners.
I can see it on the news, some beer drinking slob with a M16 out shooting poor little cute kittens.
Lets face it people thats the way the news always protrays us. Same in the movies.
They never talk about the bird population thats in danger, or the desiese that they carry, or the damage that they can do.
NO all you will hear and see is some one killing poor little kitty
 
hmmm

I didn't know that any cats were "domesticated"...

Feral animals, in Washington State, anyway, have no limit, no season, and no rules about hunting them. I'm guessing that that rule in the hunting regs would also apply to cats.

Where I live, though, the coyotes, hawks, eagles, owls and buzzards ensure that the population stays low enough that it takes no human involvement.
 
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