Cat hunting banned in German region

Taz.de a German newspaper reports a snippet of cat news which surprised me. I have been unable to verify it on the Taz.de online newspaper because it’s in German, Google translation isn’t that good and I can’t find their article.

They said that a shooting ban has been put in place for hunters in the Northrhine-Westfalia (NRW) region of Germany. The ban has been extended to include cats. By cats they mean domestic cats! Domestic cats are owned by people. You can’t just shoot domestic cats willy-nilly, I thought, but you could have in this region of Germany until the ban. And this refers to sport hunting it seems to me because they also said that 7,595 domestic cats were shot in NRW in 2013-2014. Hunters are protesting. I have a feeling they are actually referring to feral cats and have made a mistake in reporting. Even that is clearly unacceptable.

The new hunting ban does not go far enough said the environmental organization BUND (Friends of the Earth Germany) because hunters are still allowed to hunt 29 specified animals.

As Germany is a part of the European Union you’d have thought that there’d be a unified law regarding hunting and a European-wide ban on hunting domestic, feral and stray cats but apparently not. There should be exactly the same laws across Europe regarding animal welfare. Hunting domestic, feral and stray cats in the UK is a crime.

Map attributed to: “Deutschland Lage von Nordrhein-Westfalen” by David Liuzzo – Erstellt aus Material des gemeinsamen Datenangebotes aus dem gemeinsamen Portal der statistischen Ämter des Bundes und der Länder (DeStatis). [1]. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 de via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deutschland_Lage_von_Nordrhein-Westfalen.svg#/media/File:Deutschland_Lage_von_Nordrhein-Westfalen.svg

Source: Cat hunting banned in German region| euronews, world news