Neighbor keeps feeding stray cats by the mailbox (across from my dogs yard) and refuses to use her own yard. I counted 8 today when I yelled at her again. What do?
Btw mailboxes are by the highway 🤗 🫠
For God's sake! If one more knuckle-dragging schmuck demands my catphobe counsel without first doing their homework, I'm going to flip my friggin' lid.
You're the latest wannabe-vigilante to splat before me not just one but several intertwined sub-dilemmas, concerning cats, shouting, dogs, highways, and mailboxes. All are interrelated yet distinct. Each requires their own analyses and disambiguations. Okay, here goes:
- Are you concerned that her feeding local stray cats will allow them to multiply? Do you consider their superior numbers a bad thing?
- Do you just hate cats in general, and oppose catty propagation on general principles?
- Is it their strayness you despise, and merely wish for all cats to reside in loving homes with loving owners?
- Might you adore all cats, stray or no, and your neighbour's appalling highwayside dindins tactics makes you succumb to pants-shitting dread over their welfare?
- Perchance you suspect her of getting her morbid jollies by enticing stray cats by the truckload into horrid splatty road deaths?
- Perhaps it's not you but her that loathes all cats? And you thirst to punish her catphobia?
- Maybe she's not so much a cat-hater as a nature-lover?
- Maybe she's attempting responsible habitat stewardship and pest control, but you're sneering at her shitness at cat murder?
- Perhaps you fume that her noble-hearted yet bumbling moggy-phobia makes suave and dashing sociopaths like yourself look like total dweeb-0-s? You'd appreciate showing her how a Real Woman exterminates cats?
- You mention you own dogs. Perhaps these packs of hounds are perturbed at this imminent feline tsunami? They're terrified that their years-long run of pan-species neighbourhood dominance is coming to a horrid catty terminus?
See what I mean? I've got zero idea if you find yourself plagued by zero, one, or all of these, or by other woes entirely. All I'm getting from you is "Cats R Poos Lol". And now ol' muggins here is expected to play Twenty Goddamn Questions to extract anything actionable. Geez. Happens constantly. Like, earlier this morning, another client of mine sent me a 1920s-style telegram commanding me to, and I quote, "make rainbows less Jewy". Turned out she'd caught her pubes in both engine intakes of her Sweet Sixteen birthday present Gulfstream Aerospace private jet at 25,000 feet during a particularly raucous Yom Kippur, then started drunk-telegramming me. I still have zero idea what she thinks connects all these, and I couldn't sober her up enough to divulge this, so don't ask. Took hours to straighten out that bullshit. But when finished, (1) the offending rainbow had vanished on its own, (2) this gal decided I'd therefore evidently de-Jew-ed it to her satisfaction (her wording not mine, ugh), but (3) she fancied herself one of those extra-wanky Old Money classic-splendour Trouts entirely too refined to carry physical currency of any kind, GOD how vulgar, so she tried to pay my invoice with the jet itself, so hey, result!
But heigh ho. Nature of the beast I suppose. There's a Reason they call me the Bill Cosby of Bullshit. Loads of Cat to churn through, as you can see. Let's nail further Basics.
If you merely wish to dissuade your feline-fan neighbour from the act of stray-cat-feeding and nothing else, and couldn't give a flying toss about broader analyses or side effects, then here's a fab general tactic. A few years back, I visited San Francisco. And oh good lord I was taken aback at the thousands of homeless people thronging its inner city. Locals retorted that other US state governments apparently maintain policies of dumping and abandoning their own homeless population in California, thus taking advantage of the Left Coast Sunshine State's allegedly generous homeless-support policies. So they accrete. And accrete.
Could we not arrange something similar for every stray cat in the universe? Simply channel every oafish Cool-Comedian's stock material from the last fifty years, and construct the world's most vast and diabolical literal Pussy Magnet. How? Pfft. Fie on you. No-one ever publicly divulges how to build Pussy Magnets. You just know. That's what being Cool is all about, man. You just know. All studly and/or buff Cool Dudes can source and/or construct and/or secrete such objects from spare orifices whenever they please. So just get cracking, you rad badass you. Perhaps incorporate objects into yours that make cats go nuts, like jellimeat, or catnip, or rad '90s laser pens. Then plonk it in your neighbour's front yard. Every unclaimed Tiddles in the galaxy will flock forth in their billions. Now let's see how long Ms. Neighbour will maintain her pro-cat policy when her entire house gets submerged in a billion-cat ocean.
That'll do you for today's article. Next time, I shall enquire: how long ago was this? Is it possible your neighbour was the second half of Siegfried and Roy? Their fabulous Las Vegas performances famously involved dozens of albino lions and tigers and flamboyant magic tricks. They performed the same nightly show for years, until 2003, when one of their tigers physically attacked Roy. Your neighbour, perchance? Are these "cats" lions and tigers? This honestly happens quite a lot. Roy's a menace.
Must I thus deploy the Big Guns? Find out next time, baby.