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.
In this case I have see the cats kill many birds, including a pair of mockingbirds that used to come to my back yard where I would watch them out the window.
The cat owners have bird feeders behind their house, on their fences and all around their yard to attract more birds, and then their cats kill the birds.
Once again I blame the people. The people put the cats there and the bird feeders and so on. It is all mismanaged by people.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for responding. I doubt the police would do anything, though I have wondered how legal it is to keep forty cats in their yard, plus they attract a lot of other cats too.
Why do the cat people always talk about killing people who are just trying to keep the cats off their property? I see this in every discussion of the cats running loose.
These people have a mentality like their cats, and maybe there’s some transference between them. Woodman made the point that the cat people moved his property lines, which is the same thing the cats do.
The cats kill birds, mammals, reptiles, and the cat people threaten the lives of people just trying to keep the cats off their property. It is the very same thing. I feel there is a house of predators living next to me, not only the cats but also the people.
Like I say, the cats are innocent victims because they just act naturally. The cause is irresponsible people allowing their cats to breed and then not being able to properly care from them and also failing to respect neighbors and the community generally.
These people should be banned from keeping cats and indeed any animal. That would solve your problem except your neighbors would still be a huge pain in backside to you because they are horrible.
All domestic, stray and feral cat problems are caused by people. Attack them. Find ways to hurt them and pin them down.
People do far, far more damage to wildlife than cats. Feral cats keep down rodent populations and are part of the ecosystem.
There is no hard science that supports the view that cats decimate wildlife. There really isn’t. I have done lots of work on this.
Woodsman,
Thank you so very much for your posts in various places on the internet.
We moved into this neighborhood more than years ago, and it was always a very nice peaceful place to live. I used to walk with my black lab every morning. About ten years ago a couple moved in next door and within two weeks my black lab had been poisoned and was dead. He suffered for a week, not being able to get up off his back legs, and he died while I was petting him and still trying to save him.
My back yard is enclosed by a six foot fence, and my black lab was always inside when not out walking with me.
It turns out the new neighbors brought fifteen cats with them, and released them to my beautiful gardens to defecate and destroy. I very politely told the new neighbors about this and asked them to keep their cats out of my yard. One of them wouldn’t talk to me, and the other said well how can they keep them from jumping the fence? I said well try keeping them on a leash.
Two years later I got another dog, a cute little border collie, and soon after he was poisoned and died after a week of suffering, while I kept trying to save him, the same way as the lab. Now I was beginning to suspect the neighbors with the cats, which by this time had grown to forty of them.
I had never done anything to hurt them at all, just asked them to keep their cats out of my yard, which they never did, they are coming back in all the time now, but I am sure they poisoned my dogs.
Beyond this, I was in my side yard one Sunday morning, took out some trash, came back in, and all of a sudden my vision was washed out, and my body was moving in stutters. I was worried about losing my sight, then it came back but by then I was concerned about dying! I got in the shower and washed all over with soap and rinsed out my eyes. About an hour later I finally began to feel better, thank goodness, however then I looked at my glasses and they were spotted all over from some type of spray. I had cleaned them that morning, so the only spray they could have gotten would have been from the neighbors next door.
Thinking about this in retrospect, I think they tried to kill me for asking them to keep their cats from my yard, in fact I am rather convinced of this now, especially after reading through messages on several sites from both sides of this issue and seeing the many death threats that the cat people make. I am convinced that they tried to kill me, and I don’t feel at all safe living next to them.
Hi Jes, your story concerns me a lot. However, please don’t praise Woodsman. He likes to shoot cats or he claims to. He is just a nasty troll. Your problem is the people next door. This is nothing to do with cats. They just happen to be irresponsible cat owners but it is their attitude that is at fault.
On the face of it you have a good reason to contact the police. Poisoning animals is a crime as is poisoning people or attempted poisoning. You need to try and collect some evidence and then call the police. In some states keeping more that a limited number of cats is illegal.
Also they may be committing a crime with respect to the management of their cats – neglectful etc. That might need to be investigated.
Tackle these nasty people and be careful. However, I realise it is hard to do that. Sometimes the best answer is to move to get away from them.
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 would like my cat to go to sleep and never wake up. How do I accomplish this and make it look natural?
Sorry, but you are either mad or bad. Don’t do it. If you don’t want a cat and have one, act responsibly and find a new home for him/her. You are asking, “how do I kill my cat without it being noticed”. Crazy. And horrible. Please act decently and responsibly.
I am guessing but it would seem that Woodsman is using multiple IP addresses. This may indicate that he works in a place that needs multiple IP addresses (more than one network card per computer). He may be sending these emails and making comments from work.
That begs the question what sort of workplace needs multiple IP addresses and an internal and external network. A pretty large organization at a guess.
Michael, I just came upon your web-site while trying to track down information on Woodsman001. He has posted on every web-site that deals with cats (and even hunting sites). He has dozens of aliases and often uses two or more of his identities to “talk” to each other. I have googled some of his often used phrases to find where he has been. There are others out there that are very aware of what he is doing and alert the other commenters. I’ve been trying to figure out how to expose this psycho but not only am I not very computer savy but, I only have an old dial-up computer. It was animal advocates that first tracked down Luca Magnotta, I hope that this guy can also be found. Thank you for the work that you are doing to find him.
Thanks for the comment. I think he can be found actually. It just takes commitment. I wonder if he does the things he does. It could all be hot air. But it is damaging to the cat.