The words ‘legal’ and ‘cruelty’ should never go together in one sentence. But they do in many places on the planet. One reason will be because there are no laws to protect the cat against human abuse. The classic example is China. China is a country that will do anything to get ahead and they do not give a damn what other people think. Incidentally we feed that attitude by allowing them to manufacture the world’s goods as we are addicted to consumerism in the West. In China they farm tigers for tiger parts and half kill domestic and feral cats before killing them for fur and food (cat meat).
Enough of China. Neighboring countries such Vietnam are similarly cruel in their general attitude towards the cat. I say ‘generally’. There are people in these countries who are protective of the cat and good caretakers but if the law allows cat cruelty then the people of that country allow it. Although I also recognise that it is a big challenge to change dictatorships.
Another reason why cruelty is in effect legalised is because of a lack of enforcement. Mexico is a classic example. They have decent animal welfare laws as a shop window of respectability. In reality there is widespread animal abuse and wild animal smuggling. This is all due to a lack of enforcement.
In Britain there are good animal welfare laws and they are enforced (sort of). The hard part in enforcing animal welfare laws against cat cruelty is finding the perpetrators. It is very easy to kill a cat secretly and get away with it (e.g. mothballs). The following are factors that allow perpetrators of cat cruelty to get away with it even in countries were there are decent animal welfare laws and enforcement:
- Lack of real commitment from police to prosecute animal cruelty. Animals are third class citizens.
- A domestic cat might be a stray. He has no ‘owner’. There is no one to look after his welfare and interests.
- A lack of relations and networks. Humans are connected to other humans and those connections are easy to trace. Often crimes against the person are committed by people who know each other. A domestic cat has no human relatives other than the ‘owner’.
- A cat has no voice. They can’t speak the language.
- The final reason is that there is a culture that has developed that overrides the strict law and makes the law passive and almost obsolete. If an act is illegal under the law but the perpetrator is rarely punished the de facto position is that illegality becomes legal.
The last factor is present in parts of the United States of America in my humble opinion. And, please, I don’t want people saying I have no right to criticise other countries. This is one planet and we are all on it.
We don’t know but as a guess, I’d say that that hundreds of thousands of feral, stray and domestic cats are shot by Americans with .22 rifles and other guns every year. People do this for fun or to stop the cat wandering onto their land or because they hate cats. It could be any reason. One of these people calls himself “Woodsman“. Woodsman has aliases, unsurprisingly. One of his internet names is: Reality Czech. Reality Czech made this comment:
It wasn’t until I STOPPED arguing and did what needed to be done, SHOOT ALL CATS, that my land, all the wildlife, and my life itself started to return to normal. I no longer have to go out twice a day on cat-patrol to shoot more cats nor waste more time and energy burying them to protect wildlife from the diseases they carry. You can see the full comment thread on this page.
Another of his names is Nature Advocate. He writes this in a comment:
EVERY cat; kitten to adult, male & female, collared or not, stray or feral; that touches paw to my land gets instantly sterilized with a .22. Problem solved 100%. This is the post.
Others prefer to poison the cat and they get away with it too.
These ‘shooters’ are often so arrogantly confident in their distorted behavior that they brag about it online. They declare their hatred for the cat and support their perverted behavior through spurious and distorted ‘evidence’ and partial and inaccurate quotes of the law. They are on a mission to save the world from the all conquering cat! They admit to animal cruelty. It is as straightforward as that.
These people are never prosecuted. Sometimes the police chief joins in….
THAT’S when he himself advised that I just shoot every last one of your lousy invasive species cats. Not even HE could reason with people like you. (Woodsman)
Is shooting cats classified as animal cruelty in the USA? Well, yes, in my opinion but like many laws it lacks clarity sometimes. Also in the USA each state has its own animal welfare law, which complicates things. But commonsense dictates that shooting a cat will cause pain even for a short time before death and the willful inflicting of pain on a cat without due cause must be animal cruelty and the animal welfare laws in the USA are advanced laws so must include the above.
Just taking two states at random, Pennsylvania and Colorado. Shooting cats in these states is a crime. See the relevant law: Colorado and Pennsylvania.
Unless someone can correct me, I will presume that shooting cats without reasonable reason or defense under statute (and a cat trespassing on someone’s land is not a good reason), is a crime across all or most of the USA.
When a person such as Woodsman on this website brags and rants about shooting hundreds of cats and others brag about poisoning them on the internet, why aren’t these people traced?
Every computer has a unique address; an IP address. Police can trace people through their IP address. In the UK, the police can trace twitter trollers who make defamatory remarks against another or commit internet harassment of another person. It is an up-and-coming area of the criminal law. Some rioters from the Tottenham riots last year in London were apprehended after they incited riots on the internet. I think it was Facebook.
Woodsman IP address is: 72.251.115.192. He also uses: 66.19.234.52. His email is woodsman.001@gmail.com. Why can’t the police find him? Can someone in the USA report his comments and IP address to the police? Is there a specialist department in the USA who are able to investigate? Perhaps in the USA the police don’t deal with animal cruelty. It does not matter. The law needs to be upheld.
His IP address tells me he lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. Using another online tool, that appears to be more accurate, I have discovered that Woodsman lives in Clearwater (Minnesota) in United States. This is near St. Paul. St. Paul is part of the Minneapolis/St.Paul conurbation (sprawl). See the map below. Note: this is a small area of a dozen or so streets. The IP Postal Code (IP Zip Code) is: 55320.
There has got to be a way of tracking him down. Shooting cats is a crime. It is morally indefensible. It should be stopped. The police have a civic duty to stop it.
Note to Woodsman: Please leave another comment as your IP address will be automatically recorded again so if you are using a different computer we’ll know your other locations.
I know that your post is quite old, and I’m sure that you will never read my reply, but there are so many suspect statements you’ve made that I simply have to reply.
You state that your neighbors poisoned two of your dogs? Might I ask why you didn’t ever take your dogs to the vet? They could have been saved, but you neglected them, preferring to let them die in agony from what you merely “suspected” was some sort of poison that your neighbors presumably “sprayed” into the air rather than get them the veterinary help they needed? That, sir, is animal abuse on YOUR part.
Also, you claim that your neighbors “sprayed” this “poison” into the air (presumably targeting your yard) yet neither they nor their “forty” cats were ever affected? Really? Are your neighbors magicians of some sort so that they can limit the effect of air currents to limit the area of exposure to only your premises?
I’m sure that you’ve heard the term “animal hoarder” haven’t you? If your neighbors actually had “forty” cats (btw, how did you manage to count all these cats, since I assume that you wouldn’t be trekking onto their property to take a feline census) they would be guilty of animal abuse and hoarding, and instead of complaining about the situation on an internet forum, you should have called animal control. Forty cats in one house is cruel to the poor cats that must have been un-neutered and breeding freely.
Seems to me that you are either totally exaggerating the situation (or, perhaps, making things up?) rather than addressing the situation by doing something to help those poor cats and, worst of all, by refusing to seek veterinary help for YOUR animals. Hopefully, you won’t get any more dogs…for their sake.
I think if he has killed as many cats as he boasts he has, there wouldn’t be any cats left around his area.
It’s all in his sick mind.
He comes to a cat site thinking to upset us cat lovers, he is pathetic.
Thank you. Well said. Mind you, after a while you get to know Woody, as we call him, and he is a sad idiot but if he kills cats as he says he does, I’d like to do something nasty to him.