this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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Were they at least told to keep their cat inside? Or on their own property?!?
Laws vary from county to county, city to city, but in most places cats are free to roam, legally, and deliberately harming a cat for nothing more than trespass exposes you to animal cruelty charges punishable with fines and/or mandatory anger management and other counselling.
Obviously I don’t know the specifics of this situation, but if a cat jumps into a fenced yard with a dog and gets chased, that seems pretty unfair since the dog owner is being responsible. But maybe that wasn’t the case here.
I am a responsible dog owner. The guy was just a jerk, and he still is.
Every case needs a proper, unbiased, investigation - and we won't be getting that here tonight.
My snowflake neighbor came crying to me about his chickens being murdered and how he saw my cat on his camera and if he ever saw my cat again he was going to shoot it - nevermind that cats don't murder full grown laying hens in their pen and the fact that we have raccoons, hawks, owls, and coyotes which DO murder full grown laying hens at any opportunity. I had to jump a hoop (get an ear clipped) to get my cat protected as "free to roam" in our county, which is a little weird, but now that he's protected legally as a "community cat" anyone who brags about shooting him is eligible for an open and shut animal cruelty case, $500 fine and court ordered anger management counselling. We passed this information to the snowflake through his landlord, and have not heard peep out of him since - 2 and a half years now.
If you ever get another cat, name it Snowflake and make sure to tell your neighbor you named it after them 😁👍
Not about your specific situation, but Cats can definitely kill hens. I used to live on a small farm and we had issues with some wild cats.
Lots of other issues with other predators, but it’s entirely possible, especially at night.
Yeah, we've got a vicious killer on our hands here, he's a big orange/white floof and about 6 times in the 7 years we have had him, he'll bring a baby squirrel, or little fledgling bird to us. Nothing approaching the size of an adult squirrel, much less a hen. I suppose if he were hungry enough he might try, but... with all the other wildlife around it's irresponsible to not protect your henhouse with hardware cloth to prevent predators from digging under the wire in the night (which, somehow the camera surveillance managed to miss - although why snowflake didn't just make his coop more secure like the neighbors do is just... a him thing.) His next door neighbor watched a hawk grab the wire on the top of their run, in the middle of he day, and try to fly up with it / lift it off. We have had a young hawk grab a hen from the new neighbors' open run that was a little too big for him to carry far, made it 100 meters to our driveway and set down there, as I rounded the corner I spooked him away and he left his prize, 15 minutes later he had returned to take it away.
So, yeah, bruiser the cat is capable, but about as likely to bother with his hens as he is to attack the FedEx delivery guy.
Maybe you like, don’t let the cat wander free?
Maybe we like, lock you under house arrest - not house and yard arrest, just house arrest. You get a box of clay chips to relieve yourself in and are never ever allowed to go out and touch grass for your entire life, we'll just let you look out the windows at the world you can smell and hear but never touch, while the rest of us come and go freely as we please, sometimes staying away for days. Oh, I forgot, you do get to "go out" locked in a tiny cage, transported in a way that makes you nauseous to go visit a clinic full of fear stink where they poke you with needles and force feed you foul tasting things, or maybe this is that special visit where they make you unconscious and you wake up having been surgically altered, then it's back to the house via the vomit box for you.
Not at all surprising that they shit in your shoes when you do that.
Allowing cats to free roam is a ecological disaster, but sure
Yeah, so, like I said, about once or twice a year, our ecological disaster kills a bird or a squirrel - usually a tiny baby one that had already fallen out of its nest. Meanwhile, if you watch, the hawks and owls are cleaning up, multiple kills nightly just in our yard. Raccoons will eat whatever they can get ahold of, Coyotes are a real hoot... even the turkeys eat more lizards than our cat.
You may be aghast at the statistics of what the 150 million cats, collectively, kill each year in the US- I'm aghast at what we've done to our wild spaces where vastly more killing is part of the natural order which dominated this continent until the last 200 years or so. This is what really needs to happen if we're going to have an ecology: https://eowilsonfoundation.org/eowbf-archive/half-earth-our-planets-fight-for-life
Whataboutism at its finest.
Doesn’t matter what wild animals do. Your domesticated animal should not be allowed to kill indiscriminately. What you see the cat bring back isn’t the full total of its destruction.
Your cat will also push out other predators and has no need to compete for resources with wild animals.
How many acres of habitat have you and your domesticated humans destroyed for your home, farmland to support your appetites, strip mines, highways, etc. Sure, my domestic cat kills the occasional vulnerable creature in my yard - it is part of the suburban ecology. If you coddle your baby squirrels that fall from the nest and nurse them back to health, that's your hobby - which is "better for the ecology" is a matter of opinion. Neither is significant.
Strip mines? Highways? What?
I’m not sure what you are going for? If I am reading this correctly, you are saying farm cause strip mines?
Yeah… not going to debate this with you if you are spouting nonsense
I'm saying people cause strip mines. People who use coal, and aluminum, and yes: phosphates for farms. How many people live in your house? The land your house is on isn't the only impact to the global ecology of your existence, you're also contributing to the construction of roads and the rest of the infrastructure that supports your life in that house, your job wherever you may work, the clear-cut tree farm used to make the toilet paper you use, all of it.
8.32 billion people on this planet, currently negatively impacting 75% of all land on Earth, that's 3.3 acres per person.
You want to make a difference, work from home, or go vegetarian, or choose not to fly when practical. Bitching about whether cats are inside or outside on the internet is about as meaningful as criticizing Brittney Spears' choice of eyeshadow color.
So Strawman or whataboutism (too tired to decide which one of those). Your debating techniques need some work, my friend.
How do you know I haven’t addressed these things in my life?
Either way, the best one can realistically do is to minimize harm. I don’t think allowing your cat out is minimizing harm. In fact, since you are actively choosing it, I would argue that it is worse than secondary or tertiary knock on effects. It might not have the same level of impact, but you are vehemently defending it. That’s much worse on my opinion
You are absolving guilt through ignorance, while that may be the social norm, it's far more insidious.
I actually care about the quality of life of my cat, and the cats we had before this one. What's a normal day for the spider is a calamity for the fly, this is life - everywhere - all the time. You can't save them all, I consider the negative impacts on my cat of keeping it indoors to outweigh the early termination of a few of the tens of thousands of creatures that pass our home, merrily eating each other as they go.
You can't give ignorant humans a pass for the damage they do and then hold a cat lover to task for the price of their cat's happiness.
Your example of the calamity of the fly and spider can be applied broadly to other scenarios like strip mining. Same with you can’t save them all. You are being hypocritical.
Dude, cats don’t know if you just keep them inside. You are actively choosing to hurt animals around you, that’s callous and selfish. Cats aren’t more important than other animals (I’d argue that non-native cats are lesser than native local animals).
Your argument is basically you bending logic, facts, etc to suit your point of view. Don’t be so entrenched.
Anyway, this is my last reply because you are behaving irrationally. It’s not that you won, it’s that I don’t care about someone who is so callous to animals.
That's what you think about your cats. I've had a dozen cats over the past 60 years, about 4 of them "inside only." In my experience, they most definitely know. The persian who wasn't really possible to let outside most definitely responded to things like flea-dipping, us not being home on time to feed him, etc. Overall, I see much more happiness and friendly disposition in the outdoor cats, but you do you. Box trained dogs "don't know any better" either, but does that really make keeping your big dog in a box 90% of its life O.K.?
Is that any worse than passively choosing to support the abuse that takes place in chicken factories? I can't stand modern chicken meat because it's disgustingly bloated, flaccid and flavorless - then think about how that chicken was raised, bred for fast growth and pumped with hormones to grow faster. If you ever have the stones, go visit a chicken factory and look inside one of the sheds - but wear a respirator, I wouldn't want you hurt by the toxic air.
On the greater scale, the (very few) animals around me that are getting hurt by our cat are out there in the wild, getting eaten by all kinds of other wild creatures in their environment. Just tonight, I encountered a large skink in the yard - they're in the yard now, far from the house, because we have a cat that spends his time mostly in and near the house the skinks don't take up residence in the living room anymore (like they did when we first moved in). They're not all dead, they're just living in places more protected from our (and our neighbors') cats.
Your argument is basically you bending logic, facts, etc to suit your point of view. Don’t be so entrenched.
Anyway, this is my last reply because you are behaving irrationally. It’s not that you won, it’s that I don’t care about someone who is so callous to farm animals.
I would probably buy a gun and shoot someone if they shot my cat. Humans aren't more special than animals. That's like the one thing that would get me riled up enough to commit a crime of passion is hurting my cats.
When I was 9 years old, our neighbor boys used our cat for target practice with their air rifles, back in those days apparently the air rifles were powerful enough to put a pellet through a pelt, our cat crawled up inside the engine bay of our car to hide, got caught in the belts when we started it, but it wasn't the belt that killed the cat, it was the pellet hole in its torso. I never acknowledged their existence again except to be rude at any opportunity, I doubt it changed their cruel dispositions.
Sure, but there's a difference between deliberately harming a cat and your dog chasing a cat.
Agreed, idiots abound.
…and even country to country.
Cats are free to roam here. He wasn't a nice guy to begin with. He was renting and I own so...problem solved.
what does this have to do with anything?
tenants have just as much rights in their homes as anyone else
He moved, I didn't.
He was temporary, I was permanent.
The "problem" solved itself.
We have several of those temporary neighbors here, too. I wish the one next to me was a renter. Or, maybe I don't. I suppose having a new neighbor every year or so has it's downsides, too. You never know what you're going to get. Although, rent is so high now, renters pay more than most owners pay on their mortgages here. In my case, renting a house here is double what I pay in mortgage.
All the houses in my neighbourhood have sold to some kind of commercial endeavor. Rental or airbnb.
A lot of people live here but no one "LIVES" here.
You're right, what does your comment have to do with anything? Tenants can be just as big of idiots as homeowners.
they really shouldnt, cats on the outside are likely to live shorter lives than indoor cats.
This is a VERY rural area. Population 3.000.
When my "outside" cat passed (cancer), the vet had 17 years of medical history on him.
I live next to a highway. That cat would cross the highway to get mice in the field.