When he was still around, my old man and family had some acres west of Phoenix where we had cattle and other barnyard critters. The city people would do the "drive by and drop off" their unwanted dogs, occasionally, but especially their unwanted cats.
I guess they figured either someone would take them (usually wrong) or that the coyotes would get them (usually right), but more than a few would always end up at the farm and mix with the "who knows how many" that already lived there at any given time.
We didn't have much money, certainly not enough to take a bunch of stray cats to the vet, and so they usually suffered and died.
I've had to do some unwholesome things to keep the numbers down and never felt good about it, resented it actually, but...at the time...it seemed much less cruel to do what "I had to do" than let nature take its inhumane course, either through predation or disease or both.
These days I get very pissed at the unwitting fools who knowingly or unknowingly let their cats out at night to roam free.
And I also get more than a little upset at the cats that use my garden for a toilet and kill the wild birds at my feeders, along with the various skinks and anoles in my yard, just for fun.
Fwiw, I've had cats and I like cats and so I have, so far, good neighbor that I am, restrained myself from doing harm to any of those cats, but if a cat ends up in my dogs' fenced in yard and are slow or stupid? Well...then it's survival of the quickest. My boy doesn't like cats.
People, if you love your animals, keep them inside where they are safe.
If you let them roam, don't be surprised if they don't come home.
When this story was first posted a week or two ago there was more than one person who denied that well-fed cats would kill or injure a smaller animal just for the fun of playing with it.
Why didn’t you just live trap them and take them to what was probably known as “the pound” back then instead of the fluffier term used nowadays “animal services”? You know, because someone might adopt them, even though there are thousands of cats throughout the country that are never adopted. So many cats that the no-kill and cat rescues can’t take anymore in because they’re full.
My mother-in-law is a cat person. She puts food out for the strays and I am sickened by the condition that I’ve seen some of them in. It’s certainly an unsavory job, but how can quickly dispatching them be worse than ears that are dangling, almost ripped completely off, eyes that are missing or so infected they’ll most likely die of infection, and who knows what other horrible things that happening to them. Or them just being outright killed by coyotes, cars, poisoning, etc.
Some commenting here think you have no business complaining about cat crap in your garden or elsewhere on your property. You should just ignore it. I’m not really certain why we should not be able to use our property as we like.