They are doing you a favor by keeping down the snakes and mice and you repay them with death. You are just as sick as she is. If you don’t want them on your land, use a live trap and set them free off your precious ranch.
Ok as someone who lived out in the county, grew up with cats, likes cats, but has put cats down let me hit the cat lovers with reality:
Mr. puddings, your lovable house cat is a fierce predator. very nice if you want to reduce the number of moles and rats, but not so nice if you like songbirds and ground nesting birds.
Now if you watch a cat at work you will not be so enamored of them. They like to torture their prey and they enjoy it. Not like dogs at all, unless they have gotten to taste for sheep. Watch them torture a rat for 20 minutes and you will realize there is a bad side to all predators, humans included. (I personally detest rates and will kill on sight)
Wildfowl hunters will kill any cat they see, as cats will kill, for fun, any nesting bird they can find. Having raised a duck, they are very social creatures and suffer when Mr. puddings decided to kill their young, just for fun.
Now as to putting down Feral cats: My mom had a family of cats, male, female and kittens. A feral cat came around and decided to make the territory his own, which meant catching and killing each and every kitten, killing or driving off the male and then taking over the female and the territory.
Now the male of my moms family was an ex-feral cat and any time I had a rifle out it departed. Did not like guns. Yet it knew, somehow I was out to hunt its enemy. Came up to me and was all friendly while I waited rifle in hand and eventually shot the intruding cat. Was always my best buddy after that, any time I visited he would sit on me and purr and generally be a very nice lap cat. Was very fond of him. The ex Feral ones show a lot of character, there is a lot going on inside their heads.
Back to the arrow cat. From the article the exact reasons she dispatched him are not known. He could have been a Mr. Puddings that spent his leisure hours divesting the neighborhood of every living bird, such animals are by no means uncommon. Such a cat, choosing to live by the claw has no complaint when they are dispatched in kind. The picture says nothing, if I was sitting on a pile of dead rats I would have a smile on my face as well, my anti-rat world view started when my wife had a baby, all of a sudden such rodents became my mortal enemies, even though from observation I know rats are very social animals.
There is a lot to cats, they are interesting creatures and I have liked a lot of them, but folks wanting to destroy a persons livelihood when they do not know the larger picture are........well off as much as this women may be.
“You are just as sick as she is.”
Over the top. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with killing feral cats, as long as it is done humanely. Your idea of trapping them and letting them loose elsewhere just passes the problem along to someone else. Eventually those cats will probably be killed anyway, whether it is by predators, starvation, disease, automobiles, or being poisoned/rounded up and killed by the local government.
You might love cats, but your subjective opinion doesn’t constitute a moral rule that anyone else needs to follow. If you really care about the plight of these cats, do like Bob Barker and encourage people to sterilize their cats so that they don’t contribute to the public nuisance.