Not many people are neutral about cats. They either love them or hate them. So it’s no surprise that a recent proposal in Wisconsin to allow the hunting of feral cats attracted as much attention as it did.
When the fur had finished flying, the governor squashed the proposal flatter than road kill. “I don’t think Wisconsin should become known as a state where we shoot cats,’ said Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat.
It was a flawed fix to a flawed law. This often happens in lawmaking, where it is known, appropriately in this case, as “dog and cat’ legislation.
The flawed law was Wisconsin’s granting of protected status to feral cats, which are just like house cats, except that they’re wild. Protected status apparently was to prevent indiscriminate killing of roving house pets. But it doesn’t make sense to grant protected status to an animal that is capable of producing 420,000 descendants in just seven years.
The flawed fix was to try to put cats in the same unprotected category as skunks or gophers. Anyone with a small-game license could have hunted them legally – including any house cat that wasn’t under its owner’s control or any cat without a collar.
That clearly could have led to a lot of dead pets and hard feelings.
The issue came to a head last week, when members of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress, a group of outdoor enthusiasts, voted 6,830 to 5,201 in favor of removing the protected status. South Dakota and Minnesota already allow wild cats to be shot.
Some of the agitation for laws like this comes from bird lovers, who point out that cats kill millions of songbirds every year. Of course cats also kill lots of mice and rats and large, ugly bugs.
But the governor said he wasn’t going to let it go any further. “What it does is sort of hold us up as a state that everybody is kind of laughing at right now,’ said Doyle, who neither hunts nor “owns’ a cat, The Associated Press reported.
“Owns’ is an imprecise verb when applied to cats. One doesn’t really “own’ a cat, of which there are 77 million in U.S. households, compared with 68 million dogs.
Cats are notoriously independent. Physically, they’re low-maintenance. They use litter boxes, they wash themselves and they amuse themselves.
Emotionally, though, they’re high-maintenance. You’re not going to get much affection from a cat unless you give it some affection first.
By comparison, dogs are easy. You can be a total jerk and your dog still will think you’re fabulous.
Colorado law generally is friendly to cats. Every now and then, some benighted city council member somewhere will propose a leash law for cats. But it was a cat, the much-celebrated “Westy,’ whose torching by teenage vandals led to a law elevating some cases of animal cruelty from misdemeanors to felonies.
“It’s kind of a tough situation,’ says Doug Kelley, Denver’s animal control director. The prosecutor has to show that the attack was meant to “needlessly inflict violence’ and that the animal felt pain. “That can be a little bit of a challenge.’
There are laws against shooting pets, but they don’t recognize any special status for Fluffy or Fido. “Unfortunately, in Colorado, animals are considered property,’ said Kelley.
Even in a civil suit, the plaintiff doesn’t have a chance to collect for pain and suffering caused by the killing of a pet. Kelley says it isn’t legal to kill any domestic animal in Colorado, unless there’s a threat to health, life or safety. You do have a right to trap an animal on your property. But it’s illegal to discharge a firearm in most cities.
And, Kelley, points out, there’s “a big difference’ between a pit bull attack and a cat pooping in your kid’s sandbox.
He and other animal control authorities say the best advice is to make your house cat just that – a cat confined to the house. They live longer, they don’t pick up diseases, and they don’t have a chance to kill birds, which is what really ruffles the feathers of the anti-cat lobby.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
