November 16, 2007--Fanaticism XCVII: A Cat In the Bush
While frantically switching back and forth earlier this week between the cable news networks and Court TV in an attempt to keep up with the Breaking News about the OJ Simpson trial in Las Vegas (never mind that Pakistan was unraveling), another significant trial was beginning in Galveston that was barely noticed. We can, though, depend on the New York Times to cover all the news that’s fit to print.
The newspaper of record reported that in south Texas on Tuesday one James M. Stevenson, founder of the Galveston Ornithological Society, was placed on trial for shooting, with the ”intent to kill,” a cat who, he claimed, had been threatening endangered piping plovers. (Article linked below.)
According to court documents, the policeman who was called to the scene and evacuated the cat to the Humane Society (it died on route) testified that the cat “was in terrible pain when he arrived at the crime scene.” Among other things, the defense team will attempt to ask how the policeman could reliably “asses the cat’s state of mind.” It will be interesting to hear what he has to say. If convicted on charges of “animal cruelty,” Mr. Stevenson could face a fine of $10,000 and up to two years in jail.
This all seemed open-and-shut to me until I investigated further.
First, under Texas law animal cruelty only pertains to doing harm to animals “belonging to others”; and in this case Mr. Stevenson, who does not deny he shot the cat, contends that the cat was feral, that it did not belong to anyone. Though the prosecution counter-claims that the toll keeper of the bridge under which the cat lived fed it regularly and even gave it a name—Mama Cat—and in effect it/she belonged to him and was thus not wild.
On the other hand, it is not contested that Mama Cat did in fact chase after birds on the Galveston beach. That, after all, is what cats do. No? But, and this makes things all the more complicated, the piping plovers Mama most loved to hassle are indeed endangered and therefore legally protected. If you, a human, drive on the beach in some four-wheel drive gas-guzzler and run over plover nests, killing any or destroying their eggs, you are subject to prosecution.
But to equate a cat, whose natural instinct it is to chase down and eat birds, with a luded-up SUV jockey may not hold up in this court. Unless you can make the case that the drivers are also doing their natural, instinctual thing.
As you might imagine, birders and cat-lovers who learned about this legal battle are at each others’ throats. Mr. Stevenson, in the blogosphere, has been labeled a “murderous fascist” and a “diabolical monster.” Bird-lovers have fired back, asserting in the most vigorous language, that he had a right to “dispense with a terrible menace.”
At the risk of raising your ire further, let me play this out a bit more. I’m OK with protecting from cruelty any animal that “belongs to another” (assuming, of course, that the “another” is a human). On the other hand, in Texas six weeks ago they changed the animal cruelty statutes to protect all cats from “harm” even if they are feral.
Forgive me, though I had cats as beloved pets for more than 20 years, what’s so special about cats to earn them this unique designation? What about deer with big eyes? Shouldn’t we protect Bambi from hunters? And I’m sure that if we tried we could find pheasant and quail lovers who could be mobilized to protect them from the likes of Dick Cheney.
The newspaper of record reported that in south Texas on Tuesday one James M. Stevenson, founder of the Galveston Ornithological Society, was placed on trial for shooting, with the ”intent to kill,” a cat who, he claimed, had been threatening endangered piping plovers. (Article linked below.)
According to court documents, the policeman who was called to the scene and evacuated the cat to the Humane Society (it died on route) testified that the cat “was in terrible pain when he arrived at the crime scene.” Among other things, the defense team will attempt to ask how the policeman could reliably “asses the cat’s state of mind.” It will be interesting to hear what he has to say. If convicted on charges of “animal cruelty,” Mr. Stevenson could face a fine of $10,000 and up to two years in jail.
This all seemed open-and-shut to me until I investigated further.
First, under Texas law animal cruelty only pertains to doing harm to animals “belonging to others”; and in this case Mr. Stevenson, who does not deny he shot the cat, contends that the cat was feral, that it did not belong to anyone. Though the prosecution counter-claims that the toll keeper of the bridge under which the cat lived fed it regularly and even gave it a name—Mama Cat—and in effect it/she belonged to him and was thus not wild.
On the other hand, it is not contested that Mama Cat did in fact chase after birds on the Galveston beach. That, after all, is what cats do. No? But, and this makes things all the more complicated, the piping plovers Mama most loved to hassle are indeed endangered and therefore legally protected. If you, a human, drive on the beach in some four-wheel drive gas-guzzler and run over plover nests, killing any or destroying their eggs, you are subject to prosecution.
But to equate a cat, whose natural instinct it is to chase down and eat birds, with a luded-up SUV jockey may not hold up in this court. Unless you can make the case that the drivers are also doing their natural, instinctual thing.
As you might imagine, birders and cat-lovers who learned about this legal battle are at each others’ throats. Mr. Stevenson, in the blogosphere, has been labeled a “murderous fascist” and a “diabolical monster.” Bird-lovers have fired back, asserting in the most vigorous language, that he had a right to “dispense with a terrible menace.”
At the risk of raising your ire further, let me play this out a bit more. I’m OK with protecting from cruelty any animal that “belongs to another” (assuming, of course, that the “another” is a human). On the other hand, in Texas six weeks ago they changed the animal cruelty statutes to protect all cats from “harm” even if they are feral.
Forgive me, though I had cats as beloved pets for more than 20 years, what’s so special about cats to earn them this unique designation? What about deer with big eyes? Shouldn’t we protect Bambi from hunters? And I’m sure that if we tried we could find pheasant and quail lovers who could be mobilized to protect them from the likes of Dick Cheney.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
11:16 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home