Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent
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@Nynrose Very impressed with your rapid response, research and the community around you helping out. This is awesome and I believe in you. To hell with creeps!
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@Dreampipe said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:
Our house got struck by lightning and it bricked the modem, a work computer, and the PlayStation.
“Did you have a surge protector?”
Yes all of it was, unfortunately it was against the power of Zeus.Dropped my PlayStation off at a local repair shop. The store was broken into and it was stolen.
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@Dreampipe said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:
Dropped my PlayStation off at a local repair shop. The store was broken into and it was stolen.
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to turn this narrative into a country-western song.
It will not beat the one about the guy I knew who had an eye shot out with a bb-gun as a kid, the way everyone says will happen but doesn’t, and then, 15 years or so later, had his glass eye fall out in the shower and roll down the drain in a cheap motel outside of Baton Rouge. But it’ll still be a pretty good one.
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So as most people with young dogs do, I have to deal with my pup going absolutely bonkers at random hours of the day and bolting out the back to yip and growl ferociously at a bird sitting at the fence or a particularly aggressive wave of a distant tree branch or some other random nonsense. This is normal, and is usually ignored, because it’s rare enough to not bother the neighbours (most of whom also have yip/growl dogs) and it’s usually something harmless.
Except two-to-three weeks ago it was because a kitten was in the backyard and could not get back out.
My dog, overly energetic pup that she is, would love this little thing to death. Emphasis on “to death”, so I definitely couldn’t ignore what was going on. Not that I would have, that’d be rude. Also dangerous. Somehow got the dog back inside and spent an hour cornering this tiny little adorable thing and getting it into our old cat carrier. I love cats and kittens are objectively the cutest things on the planet so I consider it time well spent.
Whilst nursing my brand new battle scars (I think I look rakish but my wife says I’m whinging over a tiny dot) I heard a yell from over the fence. It’s the neighbour’s cat. Alright, great, not the same cat I know they have but at least now I know where to take this adorable and terrified little bundle of fluff and claws.
So I hoof the cat through the house, ignore the extremely happy and noisy dog, let the kids take a look through the carrier window (not too close, there are rules), and take the cat back next door. This is the part where I become vexed.
The situation with this kitten is as follows:
- Her mother, next-door’s cat we already knew (and always comes over whenever my wife is out the front), is not a desexed male but an un-desexed female. This was a complete mystery to us and the neighbours until it suddenly ejected three kittens in their laundry.
- All four cats are allowed total unrestricted/unobserved free roam. Outside. Where there is bushland across the road. Where there are snakes. And spiders. And kangaroos. I cannot overstate the number of snakes over there.
- The kittens are seven months old.
- The kittens are not desexed.
- The mother cat is still not desexed.
- Existence of kittens = At least one roaming undesexed male.
This is how colonies start. This is how we wind up with feral cat problems and threats to native wildlife. The whole reason there is bushland where I live is because an endangered species of frog lives there. The irresponsibility of it drives me completely up the wall, and the apathy from the neighbours (who are otherwise great!) irks me even more.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, when my pup goes absolutely bonkers at random hours of the day and bolts out the back to yip and growl ferociously, I now have to check every single time to make sure it isn’t a free-roaming kitten.
EDIT: I got to listen to cat-in-heat yowling for a few hours last week, so more kittens on the way soon I suppose.
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@Hobbie I don’t know about the local and national laws for you, but I would probably trap the lot of them and take them to rescue before you have a colony.
If things where you are are not too different from here, you can very likely borrow a cat-trap from your vet. The clinic I worked at had a couple that we let clients borrow.
I am pretty sure that being in heat is a miserable experience for cats, and being desexed is a total relief for female kitties. Poor thing.
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@Hobbie said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:
All four cats are allowed total unrestricted/unobserved free roam
This is becoming increasingly illegal/restricted out here – to the point where the animals being captured aren’t sent to shelters.
If that’s not enough encouragement for your neighbours, there are often free/discounted desexing (along with worming, etc) programs being run by the RSPCA or, if in NSW or QLD, the Animal Welfare League.
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@Pavel I even looked it up. There’s a few rules you have to adhere to in NSW if you want to let your cats roam without copping fines. Roaming cats MUST:
- Be registered with local council.
- Be microchipped.
- Be desexed by four months of age, or have a permit (renewed annually) allowing it.
- Wear a collar with identification when outside the property.
- Be kept away from wildlife protection areas.
I can’t comment on the first two, because who knows, but they’re probably in breach of the third (who buys these permits?!) and definitely in breach of the last two. More than once I’ve spotted the mum jumping the fence into the wildlife reserve to go chase a kangaroo or something.
@Gashlycrumb It’s put me in a pickle because it’s genuinely Not My Problem and I really shouldn’t be adding additional stress to my life. But, but, my brain won’t stop ticking this over.
I would 100% trap the lot of them except I’ve only seen the mum a few times, Minaturized Backyard Invader the once, and a third hiding in my agapanthus when I took the bins out the other day. Never buy agapanthus, they came with the house and they suck.
The other issue is, if I were to leave out traps to catch them, all the neighbour would have to do is look out the window and see them fully visible in my front yard. Even if they weren’t visible, they’re smart enough to put two-and-two together and know it was me because I got all these details about the cats through some pointed questions during the rescue of Minaturized Backyard Invader.
The best way to go forward is probably “Hey, desex your cats and keep them inside or the rangers will notice on their bi-weekly snooping sessions” next time I chat with them.
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@Hobbie said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:
There’s a few rules you have to adhere to in NSW if you want to let your cats roam without copping fines
Individual councils also have their own special rules (because they insist they’re real forms of government) so it may be worth checking those too.
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@Hobbie I dunno, it seems like it’s one of those things that shouldn’t be your problem but is.
I had a similar issue, when there was a horse here. Cats love horses. Sometimes cats try to move in. I haze them (shout personal remarks, jump up and down, throw things. This works better if it’s a coyote or a cougar, that hasn’t already learned that humans are largely okay and has somewhere better to go) and it’s semi-effective. But once somebody elses’ barn cat decided to have kittens in our barn. Sometimes they’ll take the kittens back to their own ‘home’ barn somewhere in the neighborhood, once the kittens are grown enough to make excursions. I kept hoping for this to happen, but noooo. The mother just dissapeared (those coyotes do that) and I had two feral kittens to deal with, and before I could catch them one got the sniffles and died. The horse gave every appearance of blaming us for it and was sulky and uncooperative for days, and I caught the surviving kitten and am the owner of a now-grown cat who can’t be rehomed because he’ll claw the crap out of you for no evident reason from time to time.
ETA: This is a lot less common than it used to be, and it’s all because the humane society will give you a desexed otherwise-unadoptable feral cat for free for a barn cat.
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@Gashlycrumb This situation is more clear-cut. If I trap these cats I am actively taking someone else’s pet with all the legal issues that come with it. They (apparently) sleep the night inside, they just spend all day outside. On the plus side, I don’t envision them deliberately getting into my backyard again now that one of them has had first-hand experience meeting the doggo.
Also there are gaps between our side fences that cats can easily use to escape their backyard. The neighbours know about them and don’t care.
Alas, even though it won’t formally become My Fault if god forbid something happens to a cat at the hands of my dog because she’s kept in an enclosed yard on our property, it’s definitely going to be made My Problem.
@Pavel I referenced the Inner West Council site to find my info. Out in the far west where I am there’s jack-all in the way of stuff besides “go look at legislation”. Mind you, the inner west thing basically just transposed the legislation so it still applies.
