orpheus wrote:Seth wrote:orpheus wrote:Blind groper wrote:I was in exactly the same position about 20 years ago. No gun, of course. We had a feral cat in our street, and it had a litter of kittens in my back yard. I collected the kittens, put them in a plastic bin, and drove them to the SPCA. I got treated by SPCA staff as if I was the devil incarnate, and they extracted $50 from me as a fee for humanely euthanasing them. My whole visit was soured by their general nastiness.
I went out and bought a cage trap, and set it up for the mother. Caught it within a few days with a bit of meat as bait. I put the whole trap in a plastic rubbish bag, and tipped chloroform onto a rag and put it in the bag also (not in physical contact with the cat) and sealed the bag. An hour later, I buried the dead cat. My attitude now is that I will not ever touch the SPCA again with a 40 foot barge pole. Arseholes!
You could instead have had the mother cat spayed and released. No need to have killed her, and she wouldn't breed any more kittens. This is often done here.
Dude, feral cats are pests, just like rats. Why waste public funds spaying or castrating a cat? Just shoot the damned thing and be done with it. Costs a dime that way.
Your empathy for other living creatures is something to behold, Seth. A dime, huh? Compared to those public funds you don't want to waste on the animals? How much of your tax dollar goes to organizations that do the vast majority of this work, such as the Humane Society/ ASPCA? Oh, that's right - they're non-governmental, non-profit organizations.
Your economics are off too.
I have plenty of empathy for other living creatures, I just decline to anthropomorphize them. That I have no problem killing feral cats doesn't mean I have any interest in offing Fluffy, or Rover. Just because I think the BLM should issue hunting licenses for feral horses (a non-native species that's devastating public lands all across the west) doesn't mean I want to abuse Seabiscuit. Just because I've whacked tens of thousands of prairie dogs in my life doesn't mean I want to exterminate prairie dogs. Quite the contrary. I spent most of my life MANAGING the prairie dog population on my ranch precisely so that I could keep a healthy, reasonably-sized colony that could co-exist with my livestock and with the other wildlife I chose to protect and preserve. This required regular culling of the population because in constrained habitats prairie dogs will eat themselves out of house and home, overpopulate, become weak and diseased, destroy the ecosystem and eventually be totally wiped out by Yersinia Pestis.
Anthropomorphists refuse to understand the important distinction between species conservation and saving every single individual fuzzy creature. Conservation often requires killing members of a managed species in order to keep the population healthy, and in the case of feral cats to keep OTHER species healthy and free of a ravenous predator that, by way of example, kills millions upon millions of songbirds every year.
Killing feral cats is just as reasonable and necessary as killing rabid raccoons or Norway rats, or any other pest that's unbalancing the ecosystem.
Almost nobody (except the PETA fuckwits) complains about trapping mice and rats, or killing wasps and spiders because they aren't cute and fuzzy and aren't domesticated. But try to kill a feral dog, cat or horse, or even a feral hog, and the ass clowns who think that every animal is sacred go ballistic, even when killing a feral domestic animal helps to preserve other species and habitats that the feral animals are destroying.
So my empathy lies with healthy ecosystems and populations of animals that are supposed to be there being unmolested by artificially introduced predators and ecosystem destroyers that just happen to be cute enough to tug at the heartstrings of mindless idiots.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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