Letters to the Editor
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Maggii, your advice is inhumane
First off, the LW rescued the kitten when it was one day old. That is not a feral cat by any stretch of the imagination. I rescued a bunch of kittens (and their scared stray mother) who were about 5 weeks old, and we placed each and every one of them, and all of them are happy and "normal" pets. We kept the mom, and she's become a loving addition to our home.
More importantly, your advice to "drive the cat out to the country to place where there are lots of barns and horses and release it" equates to this: doom the cat to a slow and painful death from starvation, disease, or predation by another animal or scummy human. This cat has ZERO experience living on its own in the wild. All this cat has known has been living with people in a house and getting fed from a can or a bag. Don't delude yourself: the people who dump animals out in the country are committing acts of heartless cruelty.
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Clues Free for the Asking
Although the OLW had good intentions, she created this situation by "rescuing" the kitten in the first place. She brought it up outside the company of its own kind, with no one to show it how to be a cat. What did she expect it to do? It's not all all nature, you know, nurture counts.
Now that she has ruined this cat by saving it, she's in anguish over how to minimize the effect on her own life. The only rational and humane solution is to put the poor thing down. It can never be a normal cat. It has been mentally damaged through improper upbringing and socialization into the ways of cats.
Next time, let nature takes its course.
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Wild Moggies
I adopted an alley cat from the SPCA. He's a dear cat. He was weaned too early. At 10 weeks, he started to terrorize me. He bit my ankles, he stalked and hunted me, he divebombed me at night. The advice I got (from all people, my shrink!) was "Get another cat."
I did. They spend happy hours sparring and wrestling. My ankles have been unmolested since the second cat's arrival.If you get a kitten, get two. Never get just one.
Once the cats hit about 8 years of age, by the way, they stop being tiny terrors and act like proper housecats.
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This worked for my cat Salem
First, we got him declawed. Yes, I know, I know. We did it because my partner had a much older cat, ailing and small, and we were terrified of what my aggressive monster kitty would do to her.
Second, we introduced them. He adored her. They played continually and she experienced a year-long renaissance from all the attention. After she died, we got a fireball of a new kitten and the wild playing and romping started all over again.
Now Salem is mostly rehabilitated. His biting has disappeared, replaced with gentle love nips, very soft. He occasionally sits on laps and no longer attacks people. When he gets moody, we let him go to his "fortress of solitude" (the garage) to be by himself until he feels like dealing with people and his sister kitty again.
Of course, every cat is different, but Salem just needed a feline companion. In hindsight, I think the declawing could have been avoided if the companion had come first.
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buy another cat so he can learn to behave
dude buy another cat so he can learn to behave
Well, I do not like cats but they do not bother me unless they are aggressive. My ex had 2 cats. One was very peaceful, she never scratched me or bit me and I really liked her. The other one was so aggressive that every time I tried playing with him he would try to use his nails to bruise me. I had many cut on my hands just by trying to play with the cat. So I really disliked him while I loved the other cat. I do not know if you had similar experiences.
But anyway what really gets me is the hypocrisy of the so called "cat lovers" or "dog lovers". If you are a cat lover and are concerned with cat feelings then you should also be concerned with the feelings of all of the animals in the animal kingdom. Try for example pigs or cows. How can you discriminate between cats dogs, pigs and cows?
Logically you cannot. You can only say that culturally you have been brainwashed to like one and protect it and kill the other and eat it. Like many things in this world it really does not make logical sense.