This is the story of a Missouri mother who recently went to jail over the family cat. Andrea Boenker, a resident of Wentzville, was arrested recently, all because her then 2-year-old daughter let the new family cat out of the house. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, Wentzville is a city located in western St. Charles County and has a population of around 30,000.
Andrea is the mother of two daughters and a nurse. Her story began last summer when the family got a new cat. Thriller, a black and white beauty, was let out of the house by Andrea’s daughter Morgan , who was only two at the time. Thriller ended up at the local shelter. Andrea went down to the shelter, where she paid the fines to the shelter and the city to bail Thriller out of kitty jail. She thought that was the end of things.
Andrea recently got the shock of her life when she came home from work and her husband told her two police officer’s had come to their home with a warrant for her arrest. There was an outstanding animal at large ticket, which is given when someone violates a leash law. Many areas now consider cats running free illegal, and not only pertaining to dogs. So Andrea went down to the local police station to clear things up about their cat. The doors locked behind her when she went inside the station, and Andrea was informed she was under arrest.
The problem started when Andrea says a clerk and an alderman told her she wouldn’t have to go to court if she paid the fines. Apparently the information given Andrea was unreliable, and Andrea missed the court date because she was told she didn’t have to show up. She admits receiving the notice to appear, but disregarded it. The warrant the officer’s had come to serve was a “failure to appear,” meaning she had failed to show up for court, which automatically puts you on the bench warrant roster. Sometimes it takes awhile to be served, due to there being so many people out there committing small crimes that police don’t have the manpower to deliver warrants in a timely manner for minor offenses.
Andrea was in jail for less than three hours, but she wants to warn others out there of how little it takes to get locked up these days. KSDK5 News spoke with the mayor of Wentzville, who admitted there are problems with cats being on the animal ordinance. He said the board of alderman will be discussing kinks in the system in the near future.
Meanwhile, Andrea now has a criminal record. If she’s never been in trouble with the law before, she can likely get it expunged by a circuit court judge. I wanted to do this article because so many cat lovers who reside outside the United States don’t realize some of the lame laws we have to put up with. It’s illegal to allow a cat outside unsupervised in many areas. Cat owners who live within city limits usually have more strict rules than those living in a country environment. I wanted to share Andrea’s story so no more cat ladies have to spend time in jail over an escaped cat. If you ever get a citation for animal at large, be sure you know what you’re required to do, and be sure that information comes from a dependable source.
I’m curious what the readers here think of this, especially those living outside the U.S.
Hi Michael. You are missing the point. Just because some people and organizationals claim to be concerned with animal rights doesn’t mean they are truthfully concerned. You might as well say that Communist parties world-wide are concerned with equality and individual freedom just because that is what they spout as a means of garnering the support of millions of fools. These animal rights activists are not interested in animal welfare. You just have to examine their deeds and track record to see that they do anything but improve the lot of animals wild or domesticated. They ride on the backs of true animal lovers, use the same vocabulary, but have a mid-boggling array of stratagems to impose a quite different agenda. Far from what you suggested, they do not want to turn the clock back to before Homo Sapiens emerged. They want the opposite. they want to submerge us and animals in a morass of legislation which they supervise and get rich by. None of this would be possible except for the great mass of brainless naive citizens who provide these evil characters with a non-stop flow of donations. Without that money they could not influence lawmakers or run deceitful advertising campaigns, or operate facilities which are nothing better than slaughter houses. The one’s ultimately responsive are the average Joes and Janes.
Hi Roberta, Thanks for commenting. I see what you mean. What you mean is that hard-core animal-rights activists want to let animals, all animals live naturally and to be distanced from humans. In other words to turn the clock back to the way the world was before or immediately after homo sapiens stepped foot on the planet. I understand that. However, there is a wide range of animal rights people and philosophies. At one end you have the extreme, the sort of people you are referring to and at the other end you have people like myself who simply want everybody to respect animals and treat them properly and decently. So, animal rights includes people who simply want better welfare for all animals and for me in particular the domestic cat. Any decent person should want that.
Accordingly, I do not think you can quote the extreme end of animal rights activism as an example of animal rights as a whole. It is not representative of the whole.
Michael Broad: Animal rights is just a sobriquet for a cult movement whose objective is to destroy all relationships between humans and animals. If achieving that objective takes destroying many animals, that is acceptable to the so-called animal rights activists. The reason for wrecking all human/animal bonds is that humans are so mean to animals, they don’t deserve to have animals, not even to look at at a distance. If it is not possible to destroy all animals, then the next best thing is to spay or castrate all of them, so they will at least die out in one generation. Alternatively, it would accomplish the same worthy objective if all humans were spayed or castrated.
…..No, I’m not making this up. I am not kidding. This is the boilerplate distributed and promoted by Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA, that I first heard at least 35 years ago. IOW, animals really don’t have any rights, except one–to be left alone by humans.
Too many people messing up. If the human population of America was halved there’d be no problem with cats. 😉 The trouble is the world would have to do the same thing. The world works on economic growth and captitalism which works against all animals wild and domestic and it works against the average man and woman but supports people with money.
This shelter condition (to keep adopted cats inside) indicates the different culture between Americans and Brits. We have the same language but we are quite different.
Our cats nap on the cat trees during the day and play at night. So most of them are off the floor for cleaning and that’s a job in itself. The ones who enjoy the floor are placed in the feeding cages and eat during sweeping and mopping.
Many shelter have the adopter sign an agreement the cat must live inside. They have the right to visit and take the cat if its outside.