Cat whackers and iresposable pet owners and crazy cat lady syndrome

[N6YG]

Where to start. Apparently I insulted a "well respected" member of this forum when I didn't immediately fall in love with his pet cat. Apparently not falling head over heals in love with his cat makes you a bad guy and opens you up to a barrage of racial insults.

In order to understand the situation A little back ground info might be in order. We are pet owners at one time I had 14 birds and two cats as well as dogs and fish. Now we cringe when we see a cat outside. Of course this might have something to do with living next door to a friggen crazy cat lady.

Thankfully she was finally evicted and her kids are having her mentally evaluated. We aren't really sure exactly how many cats there were in total. We have personally re-homed 53 of them and trapped well over a 100. What's scary is we weren't the only family in the neighborhood trapping these cats. Although I do believe we were the only ones re-homing them, I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the neighbors might have just been making them disappear.

We have spent a small fortune of our own money having cat's fixed and immunized. I have donated to all the various organizations who promised to help of course none of them did. Hell I donated $1000 to the SPCA and like the rest they just took our money and never returned any of our calls. hell a lady I met on Cragslist was far more help in re-homing then any of the cat rescue organizations were.

What is it with these crazy cat people. What would posses someone to place 50 pound bags of cat food under their home to feed stray cats. And how do they get used to the smell of a 100+ cats pissing and shitting everywhere.

It was so bad around our home that we couldn't even open a window. I would come home and there would be a dozen+ cats camped out on my front porch. They were destroying everything in sight and every square inch of my property smelled like a big litter box.

At first we started burying chicken wire under all the windows and in the flower beds to keep the cats from crapping in them but that didn't work. So then I built a bunch of custom bug zapper for cats and placed them under the windows. Anytime a cat stepped on one it would lightly shock them (similar to a bark collar) We had some success with it and were finally able to open the back windows. Unfortunately the front of the house only has a small fence and I didn't want to risk putting the anti cat zappers in an uncontrolled area.

After re-homing 53 cats and sending at least 50 or 60 more to the pound we were finally down to less then a dozen strays and we finally thought we were on top of the situation when a new cat whacker moved in down the street. ARGGGGG once again there are cat bowls outside and some moron cat whacker is feeding stray cats. I fear the worst because yesterday when she drove up at least a dozen or so cats came out of the wood work and ran up to her to get fed.

What is it with these crazy cat people.

[PA5COR]

We're crazy cat people.
2 of our 3 cats are taken in abandoned cats, all cats are neutered directly get all shots and each year checked up at the vet.
We don't put out food for cats, our cats can go free to roam the neighbourhood, but carry the address of us, if there would be damage, it will be paid in full.
Now, dogs....sh*tting on our lawn, squirrels eating our food put out in the winter for the birds, rabbits eating my vegetables in the garden, birds sh*tting on our clean washed stuff hanging outside to dry, bats sh*tting around flying round the house eating up flying pests, mouse trying to get shelter in our house damaging stuff, etc, etc, etc.

I just clean up, i even might grumble in my proverbial beard, but i never put it on the animals or people.
Live and let live, mostly a good friendly conversation with th owners clears the problem.
Most my neighbours have no problem with my antenna's on the roof or in the backyard, which for them are also prominently visible.

just my 2 Euro cents.

[N6YG]

We're crazy cat people.
2 of our 3 cats are taken in abandoned cats, all cats are neutered directly get all shots and each year checked up at the vet.

2 or 3 cats is nothing! we are talking more then you can easily count. When they cleaned out the cat ladies house down the street they found something like 15+ feline skeletons in the house and the cat shit was piled up on counter tops that hadn't been cleaned in years. You could smell the house from the street. It took close to 5 years to get it taken care of. I would come home from work and a dozen plus cats would scatter off my porch. I once forgot to roll the window up on my camero and it cost me a small fortune to have the seats cleaned. That smell never seems to completely go away and the car still stinks, I haven't driven it in 2 years because of the smell. I'm simply going to have to replace the seats when I can afford it. So Like I said if your a responsible pet owner 3 cats is nothing. Hell when we had our ranch we had more then 3 ranch cats. And trust me our ranch cats were big BUFF Kitty's :) they weren't lap cats by any sense of the imagination.

[WØTKX]

That's because of a lack of birth control.

[PA5COR]

Of the 50 or so cats i/we have/had 1 was bought, the Maine Coon we have now as 1 of 3.
All the otthers came from the street/animal shelter/other source as unwanted animal, yes i'm a sucker for that.
They all had a good home, food and love and died of old age or with dignity if they were terminally ill by the hands of the doctor.
Costs? no idea, 1000's in the 40+ years.
The birmese cat alone was 2500 euro's in operations and aftercare.
Getting a cat from an animal shelter costs 100 euro, for that it is neutered, gets all shots it needs too.

And yes, i trust animals more as humans and care more for them too.
Sometimes you just get that proved by reading fora.

[kc7jty]

We have spent a small fortune of our own money having cat's fixed and immunized. I have donated to all the various organizations who promised to help of course none of them did. Hell I donated $1000 to the SPCA and like the rest they just took our money and never returned any of our calls.

A quote from The Silence of the Lambs concerning your take on crazy cat ladies,

Speaking to Hannibal Lecter agent Starling says:

But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself?

[WØTKX]

Ummm, I believe this is in order after Bill's post...

HA! ;)

[W4GPL]

This is a very bizarre thread..

The things people choose to focus/dwell on, eh?

[N6YG]

This is a very bizarre thread..

The things people choose to focus/dwell on, eh?

Its hard not to dwell on such a giant problem. I don't think you fully grasp the severity of the problem at its pinnacle. When they finally evicted and institutionalized this cat lady they found something like 15 cat skeletons in the house and the kitchen counters where piled high with cat shit that hadn't been cleaned in years.

How can you not focus on a problem when you can't even open up your front door and leave your own home without first kicking it to scare all the cats away that are camped out on your door mat. How can you not focus on it when you can't open up the windows because doing so fills the house with the smell of cat piss and shit..

How can you not focus on it when you are scraping the cat ladies dead cats out of the road with a shovel. It's an over whelming problem and now I'm learning that there might actually be a medical reason behind "crazy cat lady syndrome" and "cat hoarding" and that people who hoard cats might actually have mental issues caused by brain parasites that cause them to have an unnatural and unhealthy attraction to cats. Its just not normal or healthy for someone to live with 50 to 100+ cats

[W3WN]

Its hard not to dwell on such a giant problem. I don't think you fully grasp the severity of the problem at its pinnacle. When they finally evicted and institutionalized this cat lady they found something like 15 cat skeletons in the house and the kitchen counters where piled high with cat shit that hadn't been cleaned in years.

How can you not focus on a problem when you can't even open up your front door and leave your own home without first kicking it to scare all the cats away that are camped out on your door mat. How can you not focus on it when you can't open up the windows because doing so fills the house with the smell of cat piss and shit..

How can you not focus on it when you are scraping the cat ladies dead cats out of the road with a shovel. It's an over whelming problem and now I'm learning that there might actually be a medical reason behind "crazy cat lady syndrome" and "cat hoarding" and that people who hoard cats might actually have mental issues caused by brain parasites that cause them to have an unnatural and unhealthy attraction to cats. Its just not normal or healthy for someone to live with 50 to 100+ cats

The core issue is that you had a neighbor (and, as I recall from another thread, have another neighbor) with hoarding issues -- possibly suffering from one or more mental illnesses, which only a doctor can diagnose.

The cats and kittens are a secondary issue, as they are the manifistation of the primary issue. That is to say, without the primary issue, the secondary one would not exist.

I am not unsympathetic to your problem. There are other solutions. Have you contacted your local Humane Society or Animal Shelter(s)? Or any of a large number of animal rescue groups? And I don't mean ones connected to The Government... there are hundreds of such groups around. You may not know how to contact them, but the local shelters will. Especially the "no-kill" ones... they use these groups to relocate the poor animals.