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I do think jail time is a bit of overkill for this. Saying that, she did have 4 citations. At what point do you decide there has to be a stronger message? I would think fines would be a bit more effective, and not quite so newsworthy.
Laws need to be followed. We all dont like all laws; if you dont like them, get them changed. But just because you dont like them doesnt give you reason to break them over and over. There has to be consequences.
I do think jail time is a bit of overkill for this. Saying that, she did have 4 citations. At what point do you decide there has to be a stronger message? I would think fines would be a bit more effective, and not quite so newsworthy.
Laws need to be followed. We all dont like all laws; if you dont like them, get them changed. But just because you dont like them doesnt give you reason to break them over and over. There has to be consequences.
I’m sorry but once you start feeding cats they come to depend on it. It’s hard for a person with compassion to see them rub up against her legs and cry and beg for food on a daily basis. The city should not have put this requirement to somehow harden herself into some sort of cruel person who can ignore hungry crying begging animals. They should have caught them or called in a feral cat rescue group to.
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"This too shall pass. But possibly, like a kidney stone."
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ocnjgirl
I’m sorry but once you start feeding cats they come to depend on it. It’s hard for a person with compassion to see them rub up against her legs and cry and beg for food on a daily basis. The city should not have put this requirement to somehow harden herself into some sort of cruel person who can ignore hungry crying begging animals. They should have caught them or called in a feral cat rescue group to.
I completely agree. This is a failure of the Animal Control dept.
There was a woman in my old neighborhood who couldn't take her cats to her new home, so she set them loose and fed them in a field near her old home. She'd been doing it for about 5 years when I first heard the story.
I moved out of that neighborhood 15 years ago, went back on a visit this year and she's still feeding cats in the same spot; I saw her surrounded by cats.
It's been at least 20 years, I expect her original cats died years ago, but she's maintained a feline population.
I felt sad for her when I first heard the story. Now I feel like she's irresponsible as all heck, and making a bad situation worse.
Sadly, one of the articles said near the bottom that she did try calling various shelter groups and animal control for help with the problem, but no one would help her. I can see both sides on this one. Of course feeding feral cats and allowing them to breed (creating more feral cats, as happened here) is a problem. But it's also cruel that the neighbor dumped her pets and left an elderly lady to watch them slowly starve while the city has zero animal control services that might help get the pets trapped/neutered/sheltered/adopted.
If the city wants to do the right thing, they will go out and trap the cats and get them into a shelter, which is what they should have done in the first place rather than issuing citation after citation.
Sadly, one of the articles said near the bottom that she did try calling various shelter groups and animal control for help with the problem, but no one would help her. I can see both sides on this one. Of course feeding feral cats and allowing them to breed (creating more feral cats, as happened here) is a problem. But it's also cruel that the neighbor dumped her pets and left an elderly lady to watch them slowly starve while the city has zero animal control services that might help get the pets trapped/neutered/sheltered/adopted.
If the city wants to do the right thing, they will go out and trap the cats and get them into a shelter, which is what they should have done in the first place rather than issuing citation after citation.
Good points, especially the last one brought up earlier by Fluffy. The real bad guy is the person who abandoned the original cats.
From the article: “Animal advocates and the Garfield Heights Animal Warden have visited the property the past several days to remove stray cats and kittens.”
Which should have happened in the first place and the whole stupid thing could have been avoided. How does it help to just keep issuing citations? Clearly they could have done this much sooner.
“All the people that are outraged have to understand that we're trying to get these cats off the street,” Hackett said. “If she just would've stopped feeding months ago, years ago, this problem wouldn't be existing right now."
If they had been doing their jobs and taken the cats off the street in the first place, she wouldn't have been able to feed them. There would have been no cats for her to feed.
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