After that cat passed, we tried to adopt a dog from the local shelters. All required an interview and house visit, with random unscheduled visits within the 6 months after. We bought a puppy from some random kid.
edit: "any indication that you would let the cat outside" and "outdoor cat" are not the same thing. I failed because I said we had a patio we would let the cat sit on, in nice weather, on the second floor, or because we were going to see if we could leash train it (my friend had with his cat). I don't know, the lady seemed very angry the whole interview. The leash training failed before it made its way outdoors, but the sun was enjoyed.
A house visit to adopt a dog seems excessive. But this might be organizational scar tissue: mentally ill people adopting and hoarding animals, for example.
Depending on the jurisdiction, any adoption contract that says you have to allow unscheduled visits 6 months after may not be enforceable. Treat your adopted pet well and tell anyone who interferes to f off.
- Cats are natural, suburb density is probably not. Homestead cats have a place as long as we stock food.
- Anything involving money to support AN org should have stringent red tape.
- telling people to fuck off is okay
Most domesticated cats demonstrably have no issues thriving while feral. They are not well-adapted to every environment they’ve been introduced but they do pretty well in many. Their main issue in places like North America is prodigious predation in the wild, which is mitigated when living near humans.
In some parts of the US outdoor cats are an essential bulwark against rodent invasion. It is healthy for the cats and very effective organic rodent control. They do get some birds but the bulk of their activity is rodents. There are places you can’t live without them.
Depending on the situation, outdoor cats can also live a long time. We had farm cats when I was growing up that spent a large part of their time outdoors during the day. They were smart, social, and typically lived 15-20 years before old age caught up with them.
Predation mostly impacts cats that are either obviously stupid or aggressively anti-social in my experience.
Domestic cats are only a part of civilisation, not nature.
As much as red tailed hawks are. And crows (which I've watched eat songbirds).
The other thing about shelters is they often deal with animals from abusive or neglectful homes. Random visits are likely excessive, but they are just trying to prevent the animal from enduring the same situation with new owners (and likely trying to ensure the new owners can handle an animal that has a history of being abused).
Eventually we took the one with the outdoors obsession to the vet who told us we could either put her on Prozac or start letting her out. At that point we started letting her out (in our quiet suburb nowhere near a major road), and she instantly became an extremely happy cat. Her sister lived as a happy indoor cat, while she would go out during the day and come in at night. She came back every night and they both lived to pass of kidney disease when they were 15.
I know a lot of people are extremely against cats going outside, but compared to some of my college friends who kept "emotional support" cats in minuscule dorm rooms, I would much rather let a cat out than imprison it. I don't really buy the songbird thing in built up suburbia.
> According to Wissner, his dog was wearing a collar with a rabies tag and a halter bearing a plate with his name, address and contact information.
> The sheep were still grazing on the other side of the fence, but their guardian had vanished.
> ...
> According to Wissner, his dog was wearing a collar with a rabies tag and a halter bearing a plate with his name, address and contact information.
The caption for the photo:
> Shepherdess Brittany Cole Bush with a herd of goats on the Arambel Ranch in western Wyoming. (Brittany Cole Bush)
Either there’s a huge lack of common sense at many places here or this story is leaving some details out.
Wording could be taken either way, and I could be wrong, but it almost sounds like the dog was not on the property of its owner, and was over the fence in the neighbours property?
We have a huge problem with pet cats that stray from their properties and eat birds/fish/etc in neighbouring properties... if one turns up on my property, I trap it and send it to the shelter specifically so the owner gets fined, even though I know who owns it. It's what our local council/government recommend we do considering the owners already know it's illegal for pet cats to be off their property here (or even outside of their house after dark, which is almost always when we trap them in our yard).
So, is it deliberate that this is indistinguishable from making outside cats illegal? Otherwise how the heck are owners supposed to ensure cats stay on their property?
Sounds like that's their problem to figure out, and I think that's right. I would 1000 times rather have more birds at my feeders than the neighbor's cat pooping in my yard, hunting birds and bothering my dog.
Let them put in a good fence, electric collar, leash with one of those zip line things - whatever they have to do.
you know how crazy you sound?
I have an electric fence; cats sense it and avoid it. 20+ years without a cat getting off the property.
If you'd like that pleasure, you're welcome to it. You just don't get to inflict your particular masochist tendencies on your neighbors.
> In Faith's case, Wissner said, the neighbor apparently didn't realize the fence line and property line weren't the same
The concept of being on ranch property gets a bit nebulous in Wyoming when you realize much private land is checkerboarded with blm land and the ranchers have long term blm grazing leases. The dog being outside the rancher's private property doesn't mean it's not out doing its job.
I don’t know the full story here, but have you tried talking to your neighbor? Like, really tried in a way that takes their perspective seriously? Because what you’ve described here is essentially guaranteed to make the relationship worse and likely to cause other problems down the road. Heaven forbid you ever truly need this person’s help, you’re going to be in a tough spot.
There's a big fluffy white dog in my neighbhorhood who has a talent for jumping the fence. I've returned him 3 times. This is not hard... once you determine he's friendly and just on an adventure the phone number is on his tag.
He's a good boy.
Friendly is irelevant, some "friendly" dogs are quite dangerous!
I would like the think a tagged dog in the shelter has zero risk of not being put down… But this story doesn’t give a great data point.
Perhaps the biggest bug in the human firmware.
Maybe because the incidence of actual neglect and abuse is non-zero; and if you have an affinity for them, it’s hard to turn a blind eye. But I suppose it results in some situations that aren’t perceived accurately.
Doesn't help that pet dogs spend much of their time laying down, with perhaps a couple brief respites in the form of a gentle walk.
They gain weight.
A healthy dog can often look malnourished to pet owners.
Our neighbor's mom called the animal warden on us for not feeding him. He eats better than I do.
Her dog is a morbidly obese miniature collie.
Most people's perspective of ideal animal shapes is incorrect.
relatable
Dogs are smart and learn outer boundaries and roam looking for predators, stock are kept bounded and once an area is cropped (to some degree) they are moved to another grazing area.
We had one dog growing up that liked to commune with a particular herd of cattle (in a friendly way) in a distant field on occasion, and nobody and nothing could stop it when it had that inclination. Dog on a mission.
Kinda sounds like the guy that stole the dog — and endangered a herd! — should get the fine.
Of course the collar needs to be a physical product that actually works, but if it doesn't, you can have AI hallucinate the coordinates. See, there's even a pretext for bringing AI in the mix, so why isn't this solved already?