This is a news/opinion story, please note. It comes from Dilworth in the USA. In that town in Minnesota the police have been responding positively to residents who have been trapping cats (domestic? Feral?). The police have been taking the cats to the pound were of course they can end up being euthanised. From now on, they say that they will not assist residents in this trapping process if the traps are baited. I find that statement very confusing.
How are cats going to go into a trap unless the trap is baited? But the police are going to stop helping residents who trap cats. These cats are considered a nuisance but the story published in the inforum.com website does not explain to us how the residents of this town distinguish between domestic cats and feral cats. It appears that they may be trapping someone else’s cat and that cat will then end up being euthanised. That is obviously unsustainable and immoral, and I would argue an illegal state of affairs. And the police have been involved in it.
Apparently – and this is quite common – some residents are making a habit of trapping cats and they call the police several times a day asking them to retrieve the traps. The point that I’m making is that there is always somebody who dislikes cats wandering around the neighbourhood and want to trap and get rid of them. It is unfortunate that the police have been involved in this process because it is potentially illegal.
The police said that they will stop taking the traps to a pound because it takes too long to do it. They said that they are not concerned with the cats being trapped (they should be) but that they are being trapped in cages baited with food. As I mentioned, I don’t understand this at all because you have to bait traps to catch cats.
It’s been made clear that the police will always try and reunite lost cats with their owners. It is said that they have a method to reunite owners with loss cats.
I think that it is probably time for mandatory cat microchipping and for the citizens in any part of the USA to have access to microchip scanners so that they can check whether a cat wandering around the neighbourhood is owned or not. It is perfectly legal and should be acceptable to allow domestic cats to wander around outside. That is the current state of the law in the USA despite some people finding it objectionable. There needs to be a method to distinguish between owned cats and unowned cats. Without such a process people open themselves up to illegal behaviour because trapping a cat which is owned by somebody and then taking it to the pound where they are killed is a civil wrong and is probably theft (a crime).
I am extremely surprised that the police have not realised this.
It is legal to let cats wander. You know it and you know that what you are advocating is illegal, crimimal and cruel. You should be ashamed but you don’t have the character for it.
And this, precisely your stating that, “It is perfectly legal and should be acceptable to allow domestic cats to wander around outside.” is why we just shoot or poison your cats now. So simple, so effective, so permanent a fix, and there’s not one damn thing that you can do about it. LOL 🙂 Cry and wail all you want, your cats get poisoned or shot no matter what you do! LOL
AND IT IS __*** YOUR ***__ FAULT.
I think I’ll give the name of “Michael” to the next 10 cats that I shoot, in your honor. I dearly hope that some of them show signs of nursing (as some had in the past), then it means that another 5-8 vermin kittens will cry at night and feed the wildlife with their usually useless carcasses. One 1-cent bullet can provide as much as 9 dead cats!!! ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!