There are two ways to deal with this.
Criminal Aspect
If your neighbour treatens to hurt or kill your cat it is a threat to damage your property and in the UK is a crime (Criminal Damage Act 1971 — 1971 CHAPTER 48). You should call the police and they should interview your neighbour and that may be enough to stop him or her. However, it will obviously create even more tension between you and your neighbour and may make your relationship intolerable.
In the USA I suspect that the law is very similar to the UK and therefore it is certainly a crime to threaten to hurt or kill your cat.
This is because the cat is considered a “chattel” or a possession, no different to any other item possessed by a person. Hurting a cat is tantamount to criminal damage. Therefore in the USA you should call the police if you want to deal with the matter in that way. But below I recommend an alternative way to deal with the matter which may help to keep on reasonable terms with your neighbour if this is possible.
Proactive Steps – Non-criminal
My neighbor threatens to hurt my cat. How can I stop him? Not an untypical question, but, I hope, reasonably rare. The sensible answer is to be proactive and prevent your neighbor making threats. There is little point calling the police after he has hurt your cat. It may bring some satisfaction but the objective is to stop your cat being hurt. Also getting police involved in general is not a good idea, neither is antagonizing your neighbor even more. However, it would obviously be a crime to hurt or kill your cat in all countries in the West. You’ll just have to prove it and that might be tricky.
If your cat is irritating your neighbor either the neighbor hates/dislikes cats and/or your cat is roaming around his garden irritating a fairly normal person. Perhaps your cat is defecating on your neighbor’s garden? A lot of people hate that.
No matter how much a person loves cats and wants their cat to be content by behaving normally, the cat owner has to think of other people and comply with the law.
In America, the answer might be: keep your cat inside as a lot of cat owners do. In Britain the answer might be: if you have a garden of sufficient size, build a cat enclose. Or in both cases, if and when your cat goes out, supervise the trip or put your cat on a leash. Also, it is more socially responsible to pick up feces if he defecates in a public place, although I understand the difficulties of doing that. Your cat should be prevented from going onto your neighbor’s property if he strongly dislikes it.
All of this may sound tough, even impractical, perhaps, but the first call upon a cat caretaker is the cat’s safety and if your cat is unsafe wandering around outside because of threats to his health and welfare something has to be done, proactively.
Also it is important to try and keep on good terms with your neighbors. Neighbor disputes are the worst kind. They make you miserable. There are no winners. It is lose-lose.
In many neighbourhoods people won’t mind a wandering cat. Many people accept it and like it. It creates a more human and friendly feel to the neighbourhood
In this case someone does mind and you can’t take the risk that he is just making an idle threat. People sometimes trap a domestic cat on the premise that the cat is a stray. They take him to the pound or shelter where his lifespan might be only a matter minutes. Or they might put down poison. It is almost impossible to catch people poisoning cats or prevent people from hurting a companion animal. Shooting at cats is another nasty pastime for some people.
Would you mind clarifying what you mean? My article is saying what I think you are saying that people should be responsible cat caretakers, yet you seem to be criticising me. Why?
That simple-to-understand comment is only incomprehensible to you because you too have that blind-spot. But I guarantee you this, ALL your neighbors perfectly understand it. It’s so simple, so clear, to everyone else who isn’t blinded by their cats.
I have no idea what the point of your comment is. You comment is incomprehensible (that word means your comment is gobbledegook in case you were wondering).
Wow. Even when a neighbor puts up barbed-wire to let you know that they will not tolerate what you value in life destroying what they value in life — you still somehow manage to blame everyone else but yourselves. Astounding! Simply astounding. A built-in bind-spot bigger than your own brains. Then is it any wonder why people are shooting and poisoning your cats for you? You won’t stop your cats, so you force others to do it for you.
Having unreasonable cat hating neighbours can make you feel suicidal. People like that you just can’t reason with, I asked them nicely to stop their harrassment of us and our cats, that only made it worse.
When they put up the barbed wire I actually phoned the police and the RSPCA and was told nothing could be done until a cat was injured!
Being not only worried sick about our own cats but the other cats in the neighbourhood too we felt we had no choice but to move house quickly.
The day we moved they took down the barbed wire!
Our cats had never bothered them, like we have here we had an earth patch dug in our own garden for the cats to use.
Yes our cats safety was our priority and that’s why we researched this house and neighbourhood here and found it a safe live and let live cat friendly place.
My only advice to anyone in the same position would be to do as we did and move, if at all possible!
We lost a lot of money on our house having to almost give it away to be rid of it, we still heard from time to time the misery those people were inflicting on their neighbours.
Cat haters are cold hearted unreasonable people.
Having lived through this now more than 14 years ago at our previous home,I can tell you it’s the most traumatic and horrible thing to live through. Our ex-neighbours decided they objected to our cats(not the two we have now) even being in our own garden, mostly through spite against us,it began with us realising that our female cat had been shot in the head with an air rifle, thankfully it had lodged in the skin and didn’t do any serious damage and Ruth was able to deal with it using her veterinary experience, we couldn’t prove it was them and they pretended to be sympathetic and said someone had been seen with an air gun nearby(we lived near a large field and open spave beyond that) but we later found out it was one of the sons.Then there was a period of throwing chicken bones over the fence to tempt them to eat the dangerous bones and setting their huge dog to bark at them whenever they were in their own garden, they finally put up a bird feeder above the party fence and fixed barbed wire to the fence so that if a cat jumped on the fence he/she would be injured.It got so bad at the end that whenever the cats were out day or night we had to have the patio door open and stand outside to make sure they were safe. By now it was open warfare and there wasn’t a civil word between us. In the end we gave in, gave up the home that we had bought and paid for and moved away to where we are now where people seem more inclined to live and let live, and thankfully we’ve never had any troubles over the boys we have now going out and about. Thinking back to that time still makes both of us feel really stressed, it was a nightmare.