Posted on 08/12/2005 12:07:43 PM PDT by kiriath_jearim
PET ATTACK: Gun curb call after cat shot
A WOMAN whose beloved cat was shot with an air rifle has branded the perpetrators as "barbaric".
Helen Porter is now too afraid to let her other cats play outside her house in Mewburn, North Bretton, Peterborough, in case they are targeted by gun-wielding youngsters.
Miss Porter (24) was horrified to find her black cat, Jenny, crying in pain outside the back door, with blood running out of her back leg.
She quickly rushed the pet to an emergency out-of-hours vetinary service, just after the incident on Wednesday, August 3, at about 9.45pm.
Luckily, the vets at the city's Broadway clinic, saved Jenny's leg – but she now has to hobble around with a metal plate in it for the rest of her life.
Miss Porter, who has three other cats, has now called for tougher rules on the teenage yobs she believes committed the crime, and for parents to have better control over their children.
She said: "We are now trying to keep our cats in. If these youths are willing to shoot one cat, I am sure they will not care about shooting a second. "What they have done is barbaric and I cannot believe they have done something like this.
"It is easy to say the police should do more to enforce the law, but I do not know what the answer is. "Perhaps one step would be to make sure people are licensed to use every gun, including airguns.
"If I was a parent, I would not allow my children to wander around with airguns."
Miss Porter said she and her partner, Miles Shepherdson (43), often saw teenagers playing with the guns and firing them in the street. She added: "How long is it before these people take a gun into a school and cause someone injury?"
Sarah Cooper, spokeswoman for Cambridgeshire police, said: "We treat all firearms offences as serious offences.
"People do not need a licence to own an air rifle, but if you are caught with one in public and you are misusing it, it will be seized, and you could face up to six months in prison."
I like cats, I like dogs, but I think these kids need .22's or shotguns.
If you own a cat or a dog, keep it on your own property and make sure your dog doesn't bark all the damn time at every noise or visual.
And make the parents pay for the vet bill.
If they could be trusted to shoot only cats, it would be no big deal. A kid who's so irresponsible that he shoots the neighbor's cat, though, cannot be trusted with a gun of any kind.
Is an air gun a "firearm?"
I see that the kids are being blamed. Did anyone actually see anyone shoot the cat?
Actually the Alice in Chains song youre referring to is about band member Jeff Cantrell's dad who they called the "Rooster" when he was in Vietnam. They were coming to snuff his Dad, not a rooster literally.
On a lighter note, wasn't his chicken choked?
I have a neighbor with cat traps all over her yard. Any kitties captured go to the local animal shelter.
My wife and I rescue cats and dogs and it would disgust you guys why some people want to dump their animals; too inconvenient, they need a daily med the people don't want to pay for, and the great granddaddy of them all, they have a new baby and they're afraid the cat will smell the milk on the baby and smother it. If you can't handle a cat, you probably shouldn't reproduce.
One guy got rid of a beautiful Abyssinian because he thought it didn't get along with his dog.
Finally, most of the animals we see, are already spayed/neutered so unless they were part of a feral catch and release, it means some family abandoned them.
Yeah, they come to snuff the rooster, yeah, yeah. Don't know the 'artist' but I hear it almost every day.
Was this cat tresspassing?
People that let their dog bark constantly are a serious pet peeve of mine. No pun intended.
Shut the damn dog up!
Better than a zot would be a festering, open-wound cancer or leg-rotting diabetes for a person who would take a gun to a neighbor's cat in a suburban setting.
Farms are different.
Our neighbor, who gets busted for DUI at 9:30 a.m. and thrown out of the neighborhood bar before noon, shot our cat.
Oh, the horror, the horror.
If you own a cat or a dog, keep it on your own property and make sure your dog doesn't bark all the damn time at every noise or visual.
I agree.
Some years ago I while waxing my new car, I noticed scratch marks on the fenders.
I had no idea what caused them. As time passed, I noticed more and more scratch marks.
Then one day I looked out my window, and there was the neighbors cat sunning himself on my car's roof.
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