Cat News Is Bad News

Sorry if this is a bit miserable. I often look around the internet for cat news or something that catches the eye. I am looking for something that is positive and constructive; something that improves the lives of cats. Yet at a rough guess about 50% of the cat stories reported in online newspapers are about cats being shot or some other form of cat abuse or cruelty. The classic cat story is about cats being shot. That might sound bizarre but if you'd seen as many cat stories as me, you'd understand what I am getting at.

Are these cat shot stories the tip of the iceberg of what is happening on the ground or is it the newspapers picking up on criminal type news because it is more popular with their readers?  Perhaps the online press are exaggerating the number of cases of cat cruelty. I hope so.

A classic story is "Cats Shot in Yolo County" (13th May 2012). It is thought that there is someone who dislikes cats and goes around shooting them. This unsettles the community. There is a long time between shootings. It is probably a neighbor of a cat owner. He dislikes cats and doesn't like them wandering around outside because they mess up his yard or something like that. Rather than deal with the matter in a civilized way he discretely shoots the cats.

It is almost impossible to find out who did it and so it continues. Sadly another form of bad cat news that is often mentioned is feral cat populations and how to reduce them or the overcrowded animal shelters who have to euthanise a large proportion of their animals. Like I said it's often bad news which involves killing cats. If it is not bad news it is funny cat news. The cat becoming a source of amusement. I don't know. Am missing something? Do I have a jaundiced view of the cat world? Perhaps, but most of the I search for cat news it is bad cat news.

If it's not bad cat news, it's sport news! This is because a lot of the teams within many sports name themselves after wild cats, usually the largest and most fierce.