Some of you might remember the “Justice for Vinny the cat” case in Taumaranui 3 years ago. A guy was walking his cats on the golf course when one of them was shot by the greenkeeper. There was an ugly confrontation in the car park afterwards which was videoed and published to Facebook. What followed was a very interesting saga, where militant activist cat owners poured hate on the shooter, whilst funding attempts to have him charged and locked up. This well known local guy was named, his address posted, he was getting numerous hateful threats on social media and the cat activists were keeping pressure on police, the MP, SPCA, ministers.
Turned out that Vinny’s owner was a bit of a weirdo who took in strays from all over town and further afield, allowing them to breed on his property which backed onto the golf course. His social media profiles were chockablock with a long history of dozens of cats & kittens at his home. He was very unpopular with his neighbours who were being swamped with cats whether they liked it or not. A couple of FB pages popped up to argue that there was no protection for them in law from this guys’ stray cat activities, and that birdlife in their gardens and on the golf course had been decimated. If they posted on his Facebook he just deleted the comments. I found all this very interesting.
It didn’t take this guy long to work out that he had enough support from the cat militants to get them to chip in for all the cat-food & vet bills. Pretty soon money was being donated to fix other stray cats, which when recovered from whatever filthy lurgy they had, were often released.
To the best of my knowledge no legal action was taken against the greenkeeper and he is still going about his business today. Maybe someone local on here knows more about the eventual outcome.
What I got out of following this saga was just how vitriolic the militant cat owners are. Organisations like Predator Free New Zealand 2050 have got a real battle on their hands to contain and control the media focus on the cat owners’ feelings and views. Having read quite a lot of content from the cat owning activists I am quite convinced it’s going to be a vicious battle should more councils (local & regional) attempt to pass cat control legislation. From what I’ve read, the nuttiness of it all, I reckon the cat militants are a bunch of idiotic loons which tells you which side of the fence I’m on.
We’ve already had a taste of how problematic cat control is in this thread.
