MissMorrigan
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Joined: 1/15/2005
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MmeGigs
There are limited options for dealing with strays, and most of them suck in one way or another. A number of farmers around here have a shoot-on-sight policy for dealing with strays. I couldn't do that - I could shoot a possum or racoon, not a dog or cat - but I can understand why they do.
Removing the emotive element from this, some research and a night spent pondering all of the points made throughout this thread, I can also understand why some people resort to shooting stray dogs provided it's not done as a pasttime and to sate someone's need to simply destroy a living creature.
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ORIGINAL: MmeGigsI think they're acting a lot more responsibly than the person who dumped the pet.
I adore animals, I won't say what happened to the miserable bastard that took delight in poisoning cats in a local neighbourhood or befriending them before maiming and leaving them on the owners' doorstep, suffice to say that when he was caught he regretted the misery caused to each animal prior to its passing (I didn't have anything to do with that and if I came across the person that did, I wouldn't point the authorities in their direction), but I can see a huge difference between the kind of person above killing animals, than a farmer or other rural homesteader shooting dead a stray dog.
I got my cats sixteen (will be almost seventeen later this year) years ago from a residential three-bedroomed house where twenty-five adult cats and several litters of kittens lived. The house was filthy, excrement with evidence of worms littered the carpets up and down, the whole house was used as a toilet. The woman was an alcoholic with UMs and clearly not coping. She began receiving help to clean the house up, but each day started pretty much as the previous one began, awash in worm-riddled diarrhoea/urine and with the homeowner sinking into her alcohol instead of helping to clean up. The day I and another person went in there one of the cats had died from flu-related symptoms, basically its lungs were full of pus and it suffocated. That was the mum of the female kitten I adopted that day, Ishtar. The little man I adopted, Genghis Khan, was in a serious condition, as were some of the other kittens/cats. My friend and I took them to the vets, some had to be put to sleep and the vet began making up the injection for Genghis. A person that connects with an animal can tell if its their time to go or not and I knew it wasn't, so despite the severe flu which took Ish's mum also ravaging him, the chlamydia that blinded him in one eye and fused both eyelids closed, he was saved. He was one of the lucky ones that day and despite my having been into hospital on the odd occasion, we haven't spent time apart. He's been my darling for almost seventeen years. The woman the cats were rescued from received a visit from the RSPCA and social services regarding her UM. I don't know what happened regarding the latter, but the RSPCA told her that she needed to worm the cats and provide more litter trays (at the time, there was just one which looked like a large papier mache sculpture of a landscape... who'd have thought it was actually cat excrement!). I don't know who she knew or why the RSPCA were so lenient but the person learned nothing regarding consequences and the neglect continued. It was necessary to tell this story for one reason only, quite a few more of those cats died, either by disease or neglect, none were inoculated and passed on the flu virus and FIV, and to be honest, I would rather the whole lot had been put to sleep than be subjected to any of that.
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ORIGINAL: MmeGigsI don't know what I think about Firm's "relocation" of dumped animals now that I've pondered it a bit. I have nothing but bad things to say about the people who dump animals off out here, I don't care what their reasons are. I believe that taking on a pet is a life-time commitment. These aren't Firm's pets, though. I don't know that his relocating them is any worse than my shooing them away.
They may not have been Firm's pets, but the responsibility for them was taken the moment they were rounded up and shipped to another area several miles away - even if it was for them to become soemone else's responsibility. That kind of behaviour is reprehensible and I don't understand the 'rationale' of discriminating between one dog and another.
_____________________________
The Tooth Fairy who teaches kids to sell body parts for money.
A free society is a society where it is safe to find one's self unpopular and where history has shown that exceptions are not that exceptional.
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RE: "Dropping off" an animal ... - 
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