#269 Laws have Mercy

When I was reading the article about the lady who poisoned her neighbor’s cats I was struck by how willing people were to believe that the lady was an ogre. The article was written from the assumption that anyone who would kill cats was of necessity in the same class of psychopath as Ted Bundy or Charles Manson. There was only one line in the entire article that was at all sympathetic and it was hearsay. The lady‘s friend said “...she loves people and she loves animals...yes the cats did die but she didn’t mean for it to happen.” Sympathetic yes, unfortunately it sounds like the drunker driver defense: “He didn’t mean to wipe out that busload of kids he was accidentally drunk.” I think the salient fact here is that the lady did indeed put out chicken soaked in antifreeze. Why? Perhaps she was annoyed with the whole pet-ism thing. It’s okay for cats to roam but not dogs. What if her neighbor’s pack of three pit bulls were always roaming into her yard? My dog got loose once. He managed to trap and kill a neighbor’s cat in an empty lot. Even though neither of the animals was on its own turf, I got fined. “How come,” I asked the animal control officer, “the cat was loose too.” There was a leash law for dogs. So I have a question that the news story didn’t address in all its animal cruelty hand-wringing. How many times had she asked the neighbor to keep his kitties out of her yard? I don’t know about you, but when a pack of crazy cats comes stalking onto my porch, I feel threatened.
Nonetheless, everyone I’ve told this story to instantly assumes the lady was a despicable wicked cat killer. No possible motive on earth could be sufficient to justify poisoning poor pussies, even if they were pooping in her pansies, scratching up her screen door, or shredding her summer hyacinth on a nightly basis. Well, let’s examine the non-fatal reasons she may have had. (1) She thought it was cold outside and wanted to help the cats warm up. It appears to work for bums. She’d heard about alcoholic bums drinking antifreeze on a cold winter night and apparently surviving. (2) She wanted to deter the cats from their trespassing ways and she didn’t think it would kill them. She only wanted to give them a taste of bad medicine. Aversion therapy is rarely painless. But with dumb animals it’s often more effective that horse-whisperer type training techniques. Hitting a puppy on the nose with a newspaper, rubbing his nose in his poo and etc are long-standing aversion techniques. Perhaps the lady figured antifreeze would taste so terrible the cats would never come back. (3) It was an accident. Noticing that her neglectful neighbor’s cats were always scratching themselves, she tried to help. Tragically, she was a poor reader. She thought the bottle said anti-fleas.
America, ya gotta love it.