Cat breeder dumps FeLV positive tortie cats in a field to die

A Cats Protection volunteer was angered by what very much appears to be an informal cat breeder dumping FeLV positive cats in a field to die. FeLV positive cats are those that are suffering from the feline leukaemia virus which can't be cured in which usually is fatal within four years.

Fearful, dark tortie cats with FeLV dumped in a field in the UK to die. Two have been euthanised. Image: Breckland Cats Protection.

It's a killer and a lingering death and what happened is that the Cat Protection charity euthanised two of the cats because the disease was too advanced, they say, and a third is too ill to be blood tested at the moment. 

Feline leukaemia virus is transmitted through saliva, blood and other body fluids. The allegation is that there is an informal cat breeder out there (there are too many) near Didlington, near Mountford, in the UK, who bred what appears to be dark tortoiseshell cat informally and because of bad management the cats contracted this viral disease and then he or she decided to simply throw them away which they did by putting them in sealed crates secured with zip ties and placing those crates in a field in Dinnington.

Fortunately, the farmer found them on October 17th and they were taken into the care of Breckland Cats Protection.

The volunteer, Ms Lardner, who I refer to is urging anyone who has recently bought kittens from this breeder to take their cats to veterinarian for a checkup because it seems very plausible that other cats from this person have also contracted this fatal disease.

Lardner said: "I'm just so angry, I can't get over it. This is the result of breeding and the market being so saturated."

Yes, the last thing that British society needs is a person informally breeding cats to make a few quid and doing it in such a bad way that they cats are unadoptable and have to be put down. And even if the cats were healthy, it's wrong. There are too many cats in shelters needing homes for an irresponsible, unscrupulous person to create more.

Final point: I have referred to "an informal breeder" because there are non-purebred cats i.e. moggies. If there were purebred cats this would have been a formal breeder, normally registered with a cat association and they would then be complying with much higher standards. It is the ad hoc cat breeders trying to make a few quid who really are a problem. It is not illegal to do this but it should be.

The report comes from the Eastern Daily Press.

Location: Didlington, Thetford IP26 5AT, UK

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P.S. please forgive any typos. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Cat killed on road after parents screwed up when cat-sitting for daughter

This is not Kylo but another tuxedo cat. Image: MikeB.

I want to ask the readers (not many I guess!) who they think is most at fault in this story. I'll say right away that I'd apportion blame at 50:50. What do you think?

Here is the story:

In America, a young woman (26) with a full-time indoors tuxedo cat, Kylo, asked her parents to take care of her cat while she moved to a new state to live with her husband. She gave her parents strict instructions that Kylo was an indoor cat because her previous cats had been indoor/outdoor cats who'd come to early, unnatural deaths such as being poisoned and a hit and run.

Her parents agreed. But they had three dogs and liked to keep the backdoor open! Not good and I guess she might have foreseen what was going to happen and it did.

Kylo escaped the home and was hit by a car outside and killed. Her father telephoned her to inform her that her cat had been killed and she yelled at him: "I told you to keep him inside!". His response was, "Oh stop, it's just a cat". Not good.

This made things worse. She'd had begged her parents to keep Kylo inside but despite their promises they failed to respect her decision. The parents said that Kylo was curious and hinted at that they wanted him to satisfy his curiosity.

"I constantly told them 'no, Kylo is an indoor cat, keep him inside'. I begged and begged them to respect my decision with my cat and I had thought they had…I received a phone call from my father saying that Kylo was hit by a car and killed today. In the midst of sobbing and yelling at my dad, 'I TOLD YOU TO KEEP HIM INSIDE!!' my dad said 'oh stop… it's just a cat' so I promptly hung up on him and immediately called my best friend (26f)."

Comment: Not good enough. The parents failed her terribly. It highlights the problems of getting relatives to cat sit. It is very risky. There is a huge responsibility on the cat sitter to protect the cat or cats. I don't think they realise the responsibility sometimes. But the cat's owner failed her cat too I am afraid. She has ultimate responsibility for her cat. She made the decision to leave him with her parents who apparently were unsuitable and not up to the task.

One issue is failing to recognise the value of a domestic cat. The father clearly didn't. For him it was 'only a cat' which is sure to lead to carelessness.

The response from the daughter is to ban her parents from baby-sitting which is sad but understandable.

The daughter said:

"After a good cry and a stern talking, my husband and I decided to keep my parents from watching their grandchildren without us there, no matter the circumstances. If they can't respect my one wish for my cat, what is to say they will respect my wishes for my children? So, am I the a**hole for not allowing my parents the chance to babysit their grandchildren?"

The source of the story is Reddit.com. 

Can a university student on campus successfully own a cat when the cat remains at home with their mother (who does not like cats) and sisters?

Rehoming can be the best solution sometimes. 
Image by Daga_Roszkowska from Pixabay 

Can a university student on campus own a cat successfully when the cat remains at home with their mother and sisters? The actual question on Reddit.com is: Mom is threatening to give cat away because she’s scared of cats and afraid, he’s gonna scratch the furniture.

This is part of her post:

My cat is a year old and he’s mostly chill but has his moments of just running around. My mom is the type where she stays locked in her room when the cat is out and when she’s out she makes my cat stay in my room. I live on campus but come back every weekend so my sisters take care of him in the meantime. 

The following is my answer to the enquiry. Please tell me what you think in the comment.

This is another post from Reddit.com which is about people disliking cats. In this instance, a woman who I believe goes to university has to leave her cat at her mother's home when she is on campus. And her mother says that she doesn't like cats and doesn't want the cat to be around her home. The university student has sisters who also live with her mother at her mother's home. They look after the cat when she is away at university but it doesn't work very well because, as mentioned, the mother doesn't like cats. She is threatening to get rid of the cat so what can the university student do?

And my conclusion is that this young woman, the university student, is not in a settled enough world of her making to currently live successfully with a domestic cat. The situation is too fragmented and unmanageable particularly with the mother who dislikes cats and is concerned about scratched furniture.

The answer in my view is to rehome the cat into a nice home with a loving family where the cat feels welcome. That, in my view, is the responsibility of the current cat owner. When a person adopts or buys a cat, they take on the responsibility of caring for their cat for the cat's life and if things don't work out for whatever reason - and there has to be genuine reasons to give up a cat - the final responsibility of the owner is to rehome the cat carefully.

It is a last resort but sometimes it is the best solution. I think people should be open to that solution but it does hinge on careful rehoming. They might rely upon a good rescue center to do it but great care should be taken because some rescue centres euthanize cats if they can't rehome them. That would not be an option in my view.

I don't think that it is a failure or a weakness to give up your cat to a good home if you genuinely believe it is in the interests of the cat. If that objective is kept in mind, it is fair and sensible. If the objective is to make life more convenient for the owner, then this is not a good reason. That said, if a cat owner is that laissez-faire and uncommitted to cat ownership as to consider getting rid of a cat because they are annoyed by their presence then they probably should rehome them in any case.

Stupid risk averse Westerners don't set off fireworks like this!

Take a look at this. I know that it is not directly about cats, but it is indirectly because it is about being risk averse.  Risk aversion goes to the heart of everything we do and achieve. Modest risk aversion is good but being overly risk averse is bad as it stunts development and experiences. It leads to less of a life. This philosophy affects how we care for our cats. 

Risk aversion is part of decision making in cat caretaking - Michael

In fact, it goes to the heart of the debate on full-time indoor cats and indoor/outdoor cats. I am not saying that the full-time indoor cat life is bad. Far from it. Often it is very sensible. I am saying though that a lot of the time the reason why cat owners confine their cats to the home is for peace of mind. It is primarily for the benefit of the human and not the cat.

This guy (not living in the West) is not risk averse. No sir. Image: Screenshot from video. Sorry the quality is so poor.

And there has to be an 'and', when domestic cats are confined to the home for their life, they become zoo animals in effect. The owners do not compensate by entertaining their cat sufficiently. The environment is insufficiently enriched. 

I can think of only one example where the cat owner truly committed to designing the interior of their home half for the benefit of their cat companions and half for themselves. And I have seen tens of thousands of pictures and examples.

This is the big, hidden failure of the full-time indoor cat argument. If all homes with full-time indoor cats were built half for cats and half for humans plus a large catio, I'd accept it. But it is not like that.

Humans moan about feral cats, but human carelessness created them

Every day on the online news media - every damned day (yes, I am annoyed) - we see hundreds of articles on local, state and federal newspapers and from other countries particularly Australia, about feral cats and the nuisance that they cause. The biggest complaint about feral cats is that they kill birds. But of course, they kill other animals too, sometimes native species, which really irritates local authorities and going higher up to federal authorities.

This sort of picture annoys millions of people, and they blame the feral cat. Let's go one back and blame the people who are careless cat owners. Image in the public domain.

They moan and moan and they criticise feral cats over and over again. The dreaded feral cat is a constant concern to the authorities. They speak of feral cats as if they are monsters from another planet. They just arrived out of the ether, and they are a damned nuisance.

The old saying 'don't shoot the messenger' comes to mind. The feral cat is the bringer of bad news to people in the community. They don't tell citizens the bad news through vocalisations but by their presence. The bad news is that careless people created the feral cat.

But it would help if the people who moan about feral cats sat down and counted to ten and reflected on why feral cats exist and the reason is...wait for it...human carelessness and negligence. They should then moan about the people who caused the feral cat problem! And leave the innocent, persecuted victim - the cat and the messenger - alone or at least treat them decently unlike the bloody Aussies.

If the news media and the local authorities are going to moan about feral cats, they have to moan about people as well because they are the root cause of the problem.

And I want to see some more moaning about people and I don't want to see the feral cat victimised over and over again by ignorant journalists who don't really get to the bottom of these problems. They simply regurgitate what they read on some other online news media site. The articles are often written by a person with very skimpy knowledge of cats and without an opinion of their own.

Let's drill down and see why feral cats exist. It goes back to the beginning in Australia when migrants came to the country, but the problem has been perpetuated and exacerbated to further carelessness in domestic cat ownership and therefore when you talk about feral cat nuisance and that they need to be either eradicated or humanely euthanised after being trapped (or just shot), you have to talk about proactive steps to stop more feral cats being created. 

That can only take place through education. It has to be widespread education, probably part of the general school curriculum if you really want to get to the bottom of the problem.

You have got to change attitudes, fundamental attitudes in a small section of society because it is only in a small section of society, perhaps around 5% of cat owners, who spoil it for everybody else by not spaying and neutering their cats to ensure that they don't procreate. And by limiting the number of cats that they possess. In short, showing some self-discipline and demonstrating to others that they care about cat welfare and are not self-indulgently simply acquiring cats willy-nilly without proper controls and management.

There are even some people - even today - who believe that a female cat needs to have babies before she can be complete which is pure mumbo-jumbo. If all the people who think that that their female cats need to have babies, you have a cat problem and some of those kittens will grow up to be adult cats that are unwanted and some of them will become feral cats.

The more you read about domestic and feral cats the more you have to conclude that the domestication of the Middle Eastern wildcat has been a failure. This is because half the world's population of "domestic cats" are actually feral cats. So, if there are 500 million domestic and feral cats in the world, there are at least 250 million feral cats and that might be a conservative number.  It was never meant to be this way, but humans have learned to reluctantly accept feral cats which means they accept a ton of misery in animals that were created out of negligence.

Although we do not know the number of domestic and feral cats in the world. We have to guess. But my guess is that there are more feral cats than domestic cats when looking at all the world's domestic and feral cats.

This is because in Asia and specifically in India the majority of cats are 'community cats'. They are semi-feral. They are not true domestic cats. They are sometimes fed but they are not taken the veterinarians when they become sick. There is little or no medical care. The level of care to community cats is average-to-poor to very poor.

Irresponsible cat owners TAKE ADVANTAGE of rescue centres

NEWS AND COMMENT-EVANSVILLE, INDIANA, USA: This is not an untypical story of the dumping of nearly two dozen cats at the Vanderburgh Humane Society shelter in Evansville, Indiana, USA. Clearly, the "owner" decided to get rid of all their cats in one fell swoop so they drove them down to the shelter, when I guess no one was there, in cardboard boxes and left them outside the building. Actually, it was on their back porch.

Nearly 24 cats dumped at humane soc. This is taking advantage of a rescue facility,

The shelter facility has no space. The Humane Society has "been keeping our heads above water lately thanks to our awesome community. But this has put us over the edge today and it's time to sound the alarm."

They are happy that the cats are in good hands i.e. their hands, but they say that "dumping animals off to them was not the right decision."

The shelter has done their best to manage unwanted cats which are currently at a level beyond their capacity with, as they say, the help of the community and "then situations like this happen where someone totally takes advantage of us. Yes, they are safe. Yes, we are glad they brought them here instead of dumping them in the country. BUT. That does not mean that this was the right way to get rid of unwanted cats."

The right way is not to allow cats to breed in the first place. The right way is to exercise more self-discipline and more responsibility, which is not a very hard thing to do. The person who did this is very ill-disciplined and irresponsible. They lean on the good people to mop up their mess. They count on somebody else to fix the problem which they have got themselves into. That is the definition of an irresponsible person and an anti-social person.

These sorts of people need to contribute to society rather than lean on it to support their irresponsible ways. The Vanderburgh Humane Society is asking for help. They want people to come forward to foster an animal or donate and finally to volunteer.

There are takers and givers in society in all countries. The person who dumped their cats is a taker.

I guess they have dealt with the overflow of animals at their facility through local people providing fostering services.

I think that the irresponsible people who do this should be punished to teach them a lesson. The hard part in that achieving that objective is finding them as they dump their cats surreptitiously. They avoid shelter staff.