The question
I live in a rural area and I like to feed the birds year-round. My motives are mostly selfish: I think they're pretty and I like to look at them. My neighbours down the street have a cat they "look after" after the cat was abandoned by a third party. They feed and house it, but stop short of claiming ownership. They treat it as a "stray that we just took in … not really ours." The cat has taken dozens of birds from my feeders, as cats are wont to do.
I've spoken to the "keepers" of this cat explaining both the cat's actions at my feeders as well as the dangers of allowing cats to roam free (where I live, they are sometimes taken by birds of prey on the wing, or shot by farmers and such), but they refuse to take responsibility for the animal's actions, saying, "Well, it's not really our cat."
This has been going on for about 10 months now and I'm at my wits' end. The feathers under my feeder are piling up fast.
The answer
You had me at "I live in a rural area."
The rules are a little different in the country. As someone who used to live and work on a farm, I've always found our citified approach to animals a little precious.
I remember once the farm-dad of the farm accidentally ran over a puppy in his driveway. The puppy was badly injured, so he reached into the back of his pickup truck for his shotgun, mercy-killed it and buried it with a minimum of comment.
(Mentally, I contrast it with the heartbreaking note my youngest son, Adam, put in the coffin of his pet rat Thunder, hoping she had a good life and berating himself for not taking better care of her.)
Or one time the farmer had shot a Canada goose (which were pests to his crops) but only wounded him. It was flapping around in the barn. He handed me a hammer and said: "Better finish him off, Dave."
Now, I recognize these stories are probably abhorrent to my urban readers, but it tees up the advice I want to give:
Let the cat catch the birds.
It's sad, but it's the way of the world. If you think about it, the birds are even less your property than the cat is your neighbours', so this is really a battle between the cat and the birds, not the human and the other humans.
As to the cat being on your property? Here, too, rightly or wrongly, I tend to sympathize with the cat and its, uh, caregivers.
Even downtown, where we now live, we had a cat, Squirly, that would jump from roof to roof, wander in and out of our neighbours' backyards, even into their houses, where sometimes, full of kitty chutzpah, it would eat their cats' or dogs' food.
Our neighbours took it in good humour – but what would I have done if they hadn't? I'm not sure. I guess apologize profusely but otherwise not much. Squirly was definitively an outdoor cat and it would have been a crime against her nature – sheer torture – to keep her inside.
The whole issue of indoor versus outdoor cat is a discussion for another day – and I do have on my conscience a cat named Lucky, who we let outdoors but probably shouldn't have; Lucky came back a three-legged cat and I do feel guilty about it – but Squirly was definitely an outdoor cat.
She was also a huntress. She would catch a bird in our backyard, wounding it and then try to use the wounded bird to tempt its distressed partner to swoop down and save it – so she could leap up and catch the partner. It was tough to watch and I always steered my animal-loving kids away from this spectacle whenever it occurred.
But what can you do? It's "nature red in tooth and claw," as Alfred Tennyson put it. Your neighbour's cat is a predator, you can't change that.
That said, here are a couple of "stray," no pun intended, thoughts/ideas.
You could get a dog. A big, snarly Rottweiler, say, or a lean, hungry Doberman. Let it hang out in the backyard. That'd give the cat second thoughts before wandering into your backyard.
Alternatively, you could stop feeding your beloved birds. I get that you "like to look at them," but think of it this way: You're also luring them, in effect, to their deaths.
If you're not up for either of those, I don't know what to say. If it were chickens, say, and part of your livelihood, I might suggest you zap the cat in the leg with a slingshot or BB gun, send it a little "message." As it is, though, I'd just let nature take its course.
Are you in a sticky situation? Send your dilemmas to damage@globeandmail.com. Please keep your submissions to 150 words and include a daytime contact number so we can follow up with any queries.