Stop America from Arrests for Feeding Cats and Demand TNRV Legislation in Rural Towns
Stop America from Arrests for Feeding Cats and Demand TNRV Legislation in Rural Towns
The Issue
March 23,2023
IS FEEDING CATS A CRIME IN YOUR TOWN YET?
The Prosecution of the Cat Lady: an American Phenomenon
By Michelle Tynan, Co-Founder of Nebraska Loves Cats
For the past six years I have worked, effectively, as a cat ambulance for community cats living at large in rural communities, in Nebraska. Specifically, for feral cats living with painful dental disease and upper respiratory illness caused by the calici-virus, (among other deadly viruses) manifest in unvaccinated colonies of unowned community cats. Work which was criminalized by the county I live in manifesting over several years, and culminating in the form of malicious prosecution of myself, and abuse of process in 2021.
Like many people who share their stories online, and through social media, I have video journaled with Facebook live videos, and regular posting of events that have shaped Nebraska Loves Cats, a nonprofit I organized to address the issue of suffering animals as a result of rampant dumping in rural communities. The social media page called Nebraska Loves Cats has told our story on Facebook in western rural Nebraska since 2016.
In my town, one day while filming live on social media on a property where we filmed regularly, (feeding and rescuing cats), we came across a cat half frozen in a trap with the name of an animal control officer on it. The cat was in bad shape and looked like it had been in the trap for a long time as the bait in the trap was frozen solid. I let it out of the trap, but I caught the whole event on live video.
Then after the urging of the commenters on the live news feed, I reported it to authorities. Reluctantly. Been there, done that, and I was afraid of punishment.
I was right. I should have been.
Subsequently, I was served no trespass orders: one after another. I lived like a fugitive for a year while the county and the animal control officer in question pursued over 33 charges for which I was prosecuted until charges were finally dropped almost a year later.
On an affidavit to have me arrested the animal control employee wrote things like:
(Please see: Affadavit filed in Deuel County Nebraska on March 19 Case No. CR20-21)
-I contributed to the cat overpopulation by feeding the cats and was the reason the animal control officer was contracted by the city to correct the overpopulation that I caused.
-because of my harassment the animal control officer has nightmares and is terrified that I will start a fire at night at the shelter, which houses cats and dogs.
-the animal control officer is paranoid that I am lurking around corners and filming her.
-the animal control officer went to another state due to harassment and stress I caused her.
Western rural Nebraska, like many rural parts of the United States, is grossly underserved for services for breeding unowned feral cats as the “animal shelter system” as it is referred to in current animal welfare legislative work in US, does not exist outside of densely populated metropolises. For this reason, there are only a handful of resources serving the panhandle region of Nebraska.
Also, veterinary services are too expensive in rural communities in America for low-income residents living in small towns. There are exponentially more animals, specifically, cats, in need of care, than there are veterinarians skilled to provide services and educate the public about feral cat diseases.
Dr. Michael Blackwell, veterinarian and director of the University of Tennessee’s Program for Pet Health Equity says that lack of access to veterinary care is a “national crisis”.
PBS recently reported that Dr Blackwelll is concerned the lack of veterinary care can impact the public health of communities.
According to the American Medical Veterinarian Association there are 150,000,000 dogs and cats in the US and just under 60K veterinarians who care for them.
The rural small towns problems look differently, but they help to locate the impetus.
In my work, I have witnessed and documented cruel and inhumane treatment of feral cats over the last six years in my rural community. I have called it into question, reported it, organized to prevent it, and offered humane alternatives that were met with resistance, and to a greater more extraordinary degree, malicious prosecution of myself by authorities in my community.
*Note to Self- Make file entitled: "what I can say and not say online to avoid local prosecution." In my case, local authorities trolled me online looking for offences.
Cats are a domestic animal. Cats are not wild animals however they have adapted to survive as feral animals in extreme circumstances. A feral animal is no more than a domestic animal that has “adapted” to live wild, or “at-large”.
Currently in the United States, campaigning by animal rescue workers for (rural) communities to adapt TVNR, or Trap, Vaccinate, Neuter, Return, is historic, and its success is changing the culture of communities who have also, alternatively, “adapted” to live in harmony with nature, and feral cats, as opposed to relying on outdated research that describes the feral cat phenomenon as a nuisance. (and when it is a nuisance, shouldn’t we ask ourselves the question: how did this happen?)
Vaccinating feral cats is the first step in the success of managing the cultural phenomenon. It is reported that kittens vaccinated within the first three months from birth have the best success in defense against deadly viruses like calici-virus which will cause painful dental diseases for life, left untreated and is extremely contagious and prevalent in feral colonies of cats. The second step is spaying and neutering community cats to control breeding, and the last step is educating communities how they can live in harmony with TVNR’d feral cats.
Once all aspects have been addressed, and the problems of treating diseases are managed, the likelihood of socialization, and adoptions, will increase as well and contribute to the solutions for managing feral cats in rural communities.
Of course, the best part is they are not breeding and overwhelming the size of the colonies and the rescuers who try to manage them.
Then, after the hurdles of managing diseases and breeding in feral cats in rural communities, particularly, with education and influence are tackled, the next obstacle to overcome is the high, and sometimes exorbitant, costs of veterinary and animal health care.
Unfortunately, in rural communities like the one I live in who have begun to criminalize work of rescuers who work effectively to manage feral cats with the solutions, their work is unrecognized and sometimes vigorously opposed since the most accepted view is that feral cats are a nuisance.
In Alabama, two elderly woman were actually sentenced to jail in 2022 for feeding cats!
I believe that since there most commonly are not current laws and ordinances that criminalize protecting feral cats already, some communities are creative in their efforts to find other laws to use to criminalize rescuers ( Rescuers, you know? compassionate people who contribute to saving feral cats).
Why?
One answer is, it is in opposition to indiscriminately (without oversight), or more strongly inhumanely, dispatching them. It can result in (malicious) prosecution of those individuals to stop them from rescuing and feeding cats.
In other cases, small towns are creating ordinances to punish people who feed stray cats, and this is nothing more than punishing compassionate people who want to help animals but do not know how to, or what to do first.
Isn’t this a very contradictory position for a rural community when its accepted animal control practices are in direct opposition to the very popular mainstream TVNR movement that is supported in current United States animal welfare legislation and reform, including the most recent heavily touted warning in national media that “animal abuse is now a federal crime”?
If this is true, then somehow the cowboys, the cattle ranchers, the farmers, the state licensed veterinarians setting up their practices in small towns, and nearly every small-town sheriff’s department in western Nebraska have not been impacted by these developments.
When farmers, like my own farm family in Chappell, pose the question to city authorities and local veterinarians: “What can we do about our breeding cat problem on our farm?”, the most popular answer is: “Pick the ones you like and shoot the rest.”
They cannot, and will not, answer questions like: “How come I see a new pregnant female on the farm that I haven’t seen before nearly every day?” or “Where can I get a litter of kittens vaccinated and neutered that won’t cost me two mortgage payments, an hour’s drive each way to a veterinary clinic, and my weekend off work?”
Instead of answering these questions and doing the work to resolve them by amassing resources to help the farmer’s and small town- usually low-income-residents, they have chosen to shut the door on the topic and look the other way while healthy domestic animals are dispatched the way that a property owner sees fit.
Mind you, the cats did not make themselves feral. Feral cats adapted to a circumstance that they had nothing to do with. A circumstance that is created when people dump cats. In the county where I live, the practice is called “relocating them to a farm somewhere” and is the most popular form of animal control.
A circumstance that is direct correlation to the humanitarian work of people who rescue animals, another cultural phenomenon.
But which animal control practice is being criminalized? Dumping cats, or rescuing/feeding cats?
Well, the answer is feeding cats, and subsequently rescuing them.
In my family’s farm case, the community practice of dumping cats, (relocating cats) by our local town, culminated to more than 150 breeding cats on their farm in Chappell from 2010-2017. My mother, moved to Chappell Nebraska from Summerfield Kansas in 2008 with 4 horses, 3 dogs, and 17 spayed and neutered barn cats to a farm property five mile north of Chappell.
In 2018, I organized and hosted the largest spay and neuter clinic in Nebraska state history on her farm property sponsored by the HSUS: Humane Society of the United States.
Subsequently, licensing as a state inspected rescue in 2018 with the Nebraska Department of Agriculture for the purpose of seeking legal adoptions for 150 spayed and neutered healthy adoptable farm cats, and in 2019, I learned and reviewed state statutes to write and file Articles of Incorporation with the Nebraska Secretary of State for Nebraska Loves Cats and finally, organizing as a non-profit in August 2019. #adoptcatschappellnebraska
But the emerging popular thought in small towns is that someone like me should be punished and spend time in jail, right?
WHERE IS THE TRESHHOLD FOR ANIMAL ABUSE IN YOUR SMALL TOWN?
DISPATCHING: This term is used very loosely with respect to unwanted animals, and the practice is indiscriminate in rural communities. What is one farmer’s “federal crime”, is another’s weekly routine, like bowling on Thursdays. Some people say: “humane dispatch”, some people say “dispatch’, and know to leave the “humane” part off. Depends on who you talk to.
So, it begs the questions for small towns: Who monitors the city traps when its freezing cold and when public officials want all of those cats gone from the public locations where they were born?
What are they going to do with them when they trap them? Who decides which cats should be euthanized and why? Why should they be euthanized at all? Because the city wants them gone?
How are they being dispatched when not euthanized? Who decides what is humane?
What happens when the city wants them gone and they have no place to hold them?
What happens when city employees use this answer, “I take them to a farm somewhere”, well, “Where?”
Why is it okay to not have an answer?
If you cannot trust an authority when they give you part of an answer, and then try to make you go away, how can you trust any part of the processes that builds the animal control institution in a small town?
Is it more acceptable setting traps, leaving them in traps without food and water until they starve, or freeze to death because someone forgets about them, dispatching them by shooting them, or dumping them (again, here they call it “relocation”) on some unsuspecting farmer’s property somewhere? Is that better than gassing them in piles at the New York City shelter every Tuesday? Because no kill laws are shutting down those “accepted practices” of animal control.
Or if a resident takes them to a farm who invites them a, what oversight ensures they are vaccinated, spayed, and neutered?
Because living with diseases and breeding with diseases does lead to suffering animals. I know this, especially with my experience working as a cat ambulance.
So why is feeding cats being criminalized and creating suffering for animals by dumping them, is not?
Where is the threshold for animal abuse in your county? In your small town?
And why would it be different than at a federal level? Because what I am told over, and over again, is each town decides what animal abuse is, and what animal abuse is not, and that is on a case -by-case basis.
The media has shown us what the federal government will not tolerate, so why are the same practices everyday life on rural farms, and in small rural towns?
Right or wrong, federal animal abuse crimes, or not, when did ethical get lost on rural communities?
I was informed by Deuel County Attorney, Jonathan Stellar, when I went to him for guidance to work collaboratively with the city, and county, to potentially forge proactive partnerships to adapt TVNR, that my work to protect the cats was contributing to the feral cat problem. That is as far as I got. End of story. I was the problem.
So essentially, I left the meeting I asked for with the county knowing that the breeding cats were not the problem they could not solve.
I was.
-and the way that they wanted to solve it- was the caveat.
I was the problem because I was looking for ethical markers in the treatment of dispatched animals by the city, and animal control. I was looking for assurances that the following that I created in my work to fund proactive solutions through my non-profit could be impactful, and help the community in a positive way, making good use of donor money, and working to provide solutions, instead of adversity,
My work to protect them is what they wanted stopped.
After I left the meeting, I did my work in fear. Not only did I not create a bridge, I realized I was a target. I realized I was the something that was going to be in the way of how that they wanted things done.
Then, I got what I saw coming, frivolous prosecutions, by Deuel County, and the City of Chappell.
I found myself in ordinance violations, I was an illegal rescue, I was contributing to the feral cat problem by leaving bowls of water, and food, on public and private properties where I had asked for permission to manage the cats and work on solutions.
The no trespass orders started, intimidation started, as a county officer would sit in his truck behind the town gas station, backing the vehicle up to the back door and put his cameras on me watering cats on an empty rental property every morning where I had permission to tend to the cats.
When I unwittingly became an enemy of the county, I became an enemy of everyone in the community who wanted favor from the law.
An animal control volunteer would stand in front of my car in the alley and shout at me. He even pounded on my vehicle and told me I need to get out of town, or I would be arrested!
Then that started happening too, deputies showed up regularly to serve me no trespass orders. A county officer arrested me three times, impounded my car, and seized my Nebraska Loves Cats phones, and business computer.
I am not a criminal for feeding, protecting, and saving feral cats. I made it my business, and my business was criminalized.
No one in the United States should be pursued by authorities for feeding, protecting, and saving feral cats, or serve time in jail for it.
People in my community are afraid to feed helpless animals for fear of being punished for it. As are people in Sidney, Nebraska, and other small communities in western Nebraska because communities without resources, education, and solutions, are adapting cultures that criminalize the most admirable qualities in people, namely, compassion, and compassion for animals. It does not have to be that way.
I described in my letter to my state’s attorney general, two cultural phenomena, the adaption of the domestic cat to a feral cat for living in circumstances that people created by dumping animals, and the cultural phenomenon of rescuing, and feeding feral cats.
But there could be one more emerging that is dangerous to public health, and that is the way small towns pursue favor by authorities in the communities through abuse of process to criminalize and prosecute the catlady.
They do this because someone told them feral cats are a nuisance and feeding them is contributing to a problem.
Well, I’m a “catlady”, and I am here to set the record straight. Ladies get ready and sharpen your claws because there is going to be a catfight in America.
136
The Issue
March 23,2023
IS FEEDING CATS A CRIME IN YOUR TOWN YET?
The Prosecution of the Cat Lady: an American Phenomenon
By Michelle Tynan, Co-Founder of Nebraska Loves Cats
For the past six years I have worked, effectively, as a cat ambulance for community cats living at large in rural communities, in Nebraska. Specifically, for feral cats living with painful dental disease and upper respiratory illness caused by the calici-virus, (among other deadly viruses) manifest in unvaccinated colonies of unowned community cats. Work which was criminalized by the county I live in manifesting over several years, and culminating in the form of malicious prosecution of myself, and abuse of process in 2021.
Like many people who share their stories online, and through social media, I have video journaled with Facebook live videos, and regular posting of events that have shaped Nebraska Loves Cats, a nonprofit I organized to address the issue of suffering animals as a result of rampant dumping in rural communities. The social media page called Nebraska Loves Cats has told our story on Facebook in western rural Nebraska since 2016.
In my town, one day while filming live on social media on a property where we filmed regularly, (feeding and rescuing cats), we came across a cat half frozen in a trap with the name of an animal control officer on it. The cat was in bad shape and looked like it had been in the trap for a long time as the bait in the trap was frozen solid. I let it out of the trap, but I caught the whole event on live video.
Then after the urging of the commenters on the live news feed, I reported it to authorities. Reluctantly. Been there, done that, and I was afraid of punishment.
I was right. I should have been.
Subsequently, I was served no trespass orders: one after another. I lived like a fugitive for a year while the county and the animal control officer in question pursued over 33 charges for which I was prosecuted until charges were finally dropped almost a year later.
On an affidavit to have me arrested the animal control employee wrote things like:
(Please see: Affadavit filed in Deuel County Nebraska on March 19 Case No. CR20-21)
-I contributed to the cat overpopulation by feeding the cats and was the reason the animal control officer was contracted by the city to correct the overpopulation that I caused.
-because of my harassment the animal control officer has nightmares and is terrified that I will start a fire at night at the shelter, which houses cats and dogs.
-the animal control officer is paranoid that I am lurking around corners and filming her.
-the animal control officer went to another state due to harassment and stress I caused her.
Western rural Nebraska, like many rural parts of the United States, is grossly underserved for services for breeding unowned feral cats as the “animal shelter system” as it is referred to in current animal welfare legislative work in US, does not exist outside of densely populated metropolises. For this reason, there are only a handful of resources serving the panhandle region of Nebraska.
Also, veterinary services are too expensive in rural communities in America for low-income residents living in small towns. There are exponentially more animals, specifically, cats, in need of care, than there are veterinarians skilled to provide services and educate the public about feral cat diseases.
Dr. Michael Blackwell, veterinarian and director of the University of Tennessee’s Program for Pet Health Equity says that lack of access to veterinary care is a “national crisis”.
PBS recently reported that Dr Blackwelll is concerned the lack of veterinary care can impact the public health of communities.
According to the American Medical Veterinarian Association there are 150,000,000 dogs and cats in the US and just under 60K veterinarians who care for them.
The rural small towns problems look differently, but they help to locate the impetus.
In my work, I have witnessed and documented cruel and inhumane treatment of feral cats over the last six years in my rural community. I have called it into question, reported it, organized to prevent it, and offered humane alternatives that were met with resistance, and to a greater more extraordinary degree, malicious prosecution of myself by authorities in my community.
*Note to Self- Make file entitled: "what I can say and not say online to avoid local prosecution." In my case, local authorities trolled me online looking for offences.
Cats are a domestic animal. Cats are not wild animals however they have adapted to survive as feral animals in extreme circumstances. A feral animal is no more than a domestic animal that has “adapted” to live wild, or “at-large”.
Currently in the United States, campaigning by animal rescue workers for (rural) communities to adapt TVNR, or Trap, Vaccinate, Neuter, Return, is historic, and its success is changing the culture of communities who have also, alternatively, “adapted” to live in harmony with nature, and feral cats, as opposed to relying on outdated research that describes the feral cat phenomenon as a nuisance. (and when it is a nuisance, shouldn’t we ask ourselves the question: how did this happen?)
Vaccinating feral cats is the first step in the success of managing the cultural phenomenon. It is reported that kittens vaccinated within the first three months from birth have the best success in defense against deadly viruses like calici-virus which will cause painful dental diseases for life, left untreated and is extremely contagious and prevalent in feral colonies of cats. The second step is spaying and neutering community cats to control breeding, and the last step is educating communities how they can live in harmony with TVNR’d feral cats.
Once all aspects have been addressed, and the problems of treating diseases are managed, the likelihood of socialization, and adoptions, will increase as well and contribute to the solutions for managing feral cats in rural communities.
Of course, the best part is they are not breeding and overwhelming the size of the colonies and the rescuers who try to manage them.
Then, after the hurdles of managing diseases and breeding in feral cats in rural communities, particularly, with education and influence are tackled, the next obstacle to overcome is the high, and sometimes exorbitant, costs of veterinary and animal health care.
Unfortunately, in rural communities like the one I live in who have begun to criminalize work of rescuers who work effectively to manage feral cats with the solutions, their work is unrecognized and sometimes vigorously opposed since the most accepted view is that feral cats are a nuisance.
In Alabama, two elderly woman were actually sentenced to jail in 2022 for feeding cats!
I believe that since there most commonly are not current laws and ordinances that criminalize protecting feral cats already, some communities are creative in their efforts to find other laws to use to criminalize rescuers ( Rescuers, you know? compassionate people who contribute to saving feral cats).
Why?
One answer is, it is in opposition to indiscriminately (without oversight), or more strongly inhumanely, dispatching them. It can result in (malicious) prosecution of those individuals to stop them from rescuing and feeding cats.
In other cases, small towns are creating ordinances to punish people who feed stray cats, and this is nothing more than punishing compassionate people who want to help animals but do not know how to, or what to do first.
Isn’t this a very contradictory position for a rural community when its accepted animal control practices are in direct opposition to the very popular mainstream TVNR movement that is supported in current United States animal welfare legislation and reform, including the most recent heavily touted warning in national media that “animal abuse is now a federal crime”?
If this is true, then somehow the cowboys, the cattle ranchers, the farmers, the state licensed veterinarians setting up their practices in small towns, and nearly every small-town sheriff’s department in western Nebraska have not been impacted by these developments.
When farmers, like my own farm family in Chappell, pose the question to city authorities and local veterinarians: “What can we do about our breeding cat problem on our farm?”, the most popular answer is: “Pick the ones you like and shoot the rest.”
They cannot, and will not, answer questions like: “How come I see a new pregnant female on the farm that I haven’t seen before nearly every day?” or “Where can I get a litter of kittens vaccinated and neutered that won’t cost me two mortgage payments, an hour’s drive each way to a veterinary clinic, and my weekend off work?”
Instead of answering these questions and doing the work to resolve them by amassing resources to help the farmer’s and small town- usually low-income-residents, they have chosen to shut the door on the topic and look the other way while healthy domestic animals are dispatched the way that a property owner sees fit.
Mind you, the cats did not make themselves feral. Feral cats adapted to a circumstance that they had nothing to do with. A circumstance that is created when people dump cats. In the county where I live, the practice is called “relocating them to a farm somewhere” and is the most popular form of animal control.
A circumstance that is direct correlation to the humanitarian work of people who rescue animals, another cultural phenomenon.
But which animal control practice is being criminalized? Dumping cats, or rescuing/feeding cats?
Well, the answer is feeding cats, and subsequently rescuing them.
In my family’s farm case, the community practice of dumping cats, (relocating cats) by our local town, culminated to more than 150 breeding cats on their farm in Chappell from 2010-2017. My mother, moved to Chappell Nebraska from Summerfield Kansas in 2008 with 4 horses, 3 dogs, and 17 spayed and neutered barn cats to a farm property five mile north of Chappell.
In 2018, I organized and hosted the largest spay and neuter clinic in Nebraska state history on her farm property sponsored by the HSUS: Humane Society of the United States.
Subsequently, licensing as a state inspected rescue in 2018 with the Nebraska Department of Agriculture for the purpose of seeking legal adoptions for 150 spayed and neutered healthy adoptable farm cats, and in 2019, I learned and reviewed state statutes to write and file Articles of Incorporation with the Nebraska Secretary of State for Nebraska Loves Cats and finally, organizing as a non-profit in August 2019. #adoptcatschappellnebraska
But the emerging popular thought in small towns is that someone like me should be punished and spend time in jail, right?
WHERE IS THE TRESHHOLD FOR ANIMAL ABUSE IN YOUR SMALL TOWN?
DISPATCHING: This term is used very loosely with respect to unwanted animals, and the practice is indiscriminate in rural communities. What is one farmer’s “federal crime”, is another’s weekly routine, like bowling on Thursdays. Some people say: “humane dispatch”, some people say “dispatch’, and know to leave the “humane” part off. Depends on who you talk to.
So, it begs the questions for small towns: Who monitors the city traps when its freezing cold and when public officials want all of those cats gone from the public locations where they were born?
What are they going to do with them when they trap them? Who decides which cats should be euthanized and why? Why should they be euthanized at all? Because the city wants them gone?
How are they being dispatched when not euthanized? Who decides what is humane?
What happens when the city wants them gone and they have no place to hold them?
What happens when city employees use this answer, “I take them to a farm somewhere”, well, “Where?”
Why is it okay to not have an answer?
If you cannot trust an authority when they give you part of an answer, and then try to make you go away, how can you trust any part of the processes that builds the animal control institution in a small town?
Is it more acceptable setting traps, leaving them in traps without food and water until they starve, or freeze to death because someone forgets about them, dispatching them by shooting them, or dumping them (again, here they call it “relocation”) on some unsuspecting farmer’s property somewhere? Is that better than gassing them in piles at the New York City shelter every Tuesday? Because no kill laws are shutting down those “accepted practices” of animal control.
Or if a resident takes them to a farm who invites them a, what oversight ensures they are vaccinated, spayed, and neutered?
Because living with diseases and breeding with diseases does lead to suffering animals. I know this, especially with my experience working as a cat ambulance.
So why is feeding cats being criminalized and creating suffering for animals by dumping them, is not?
Where is the threshold for animal abuse in your county? In your small town?
And why would it be different than at a federal level? Because what I am told over, and over again, is each town decides what animal abuse is, and what animal abuse is not, and that is on a case -by-case basis.
The media has shown us what the federal government will not tolerate, so why are the same practices everyday life on rural farms, and in small rural towns?
Right or wrong, federal animal abuse crimes, or not, when did ethical get lost on rural communities?
I was informed by Deuel County Attorney, Jonathan Stellar, when I went to him for guidance to work collaboratively with the city, and county, to potentially forge proactive partnerships to adapt TVNR, that my work to protect the cats was contributing to the feral cat problem. That is as far as I got. End of story. I was the problem.
So essentially, I left the meeting I asked for with the county knowing that the breeding cats were not the problem they could not solve.
I was.
-and the way that they wanted to solve it- was the caveat.
I was the problem because I was looking for ethical markers in the treatment of dispatched animals by the city, and animal control. I was looking for assurances that the following that I created in my work to fund proactive solutions through my non-profit could be impactful, and help the community in a positive way, making good use of donor money, and working to provide solutions, instead of adversity,
My work to protect them is what they wanted stopped.
After I left the meeting, I did my work in fear. Not only did I not create a bridge, I realized I was a target. I realized I was the something that was going to be in the way of how that they wanted things done.
Then, I got what I saw coming, frivolous prosecutions, by Deuel County, and the City of Chappell.
I found myself in ordinance violations, I was an illegal rescue, I was contributing to the feral cat problem by leaving bowls of water, and food, on public and private properties where I had asked for permission to manage the cats and work on solutions.
The no trespass orders started, intimidation started, as a county officer would sit in his truck behind the town gas station, backing the vehicle up to the back door and put his cameras on me watering cats on an empty rental property every morning where I had permission to tend to the cats.
When I unwittingly became an enemy of the county, I became an enemy of everyone in the community who wanted favor from the law.
An animal control volunteer would stand in front of my car in the alley and shout at me. He even pounded on my vehicle and told me I need to get out of town, or I would be arrested!
Then that started happening too, deputies showed up regularly to serve me no trespass orders. A county officer arrested me three times, impounded my car, and seized my Nebraska Loves Cats phones, and business computer.
I am not a criminal for feeding, protecting, and saving feral cats. I made it my business, and my business was criminalized.
No one in the United States should be pursued by authorities for feeding, protecting, and saving feral cats, or serve time in jail for it.
People in my community are afraid to feed helpless animals for fear of being punished for it. As are people in Sidney, Nebraska, and other small communities in western Nebraska because communities without resources, education, and solutions, are adapting cultures that criminalize the most admirable qualities in people, namely, compassion, and compassion for animals. It does not have to be that way.
I described in my letter to my state’s attorney general, two cultural phenomena, the adaption of the domestic cat to a feral cat for living in circumstances that people created by dumping animals, and the cultural phenomenon of rescuing, and feeding feral cats.
But there could be one more emerging that is dangerous to public health, and that is the way small towns pursue favor by authorities in the communities through abuse of process to criminalize and prosecute the catlady.
They do this because someone told them feral cats are a nuisance and feeding them is contributing to a problem.
Well, I’m a “catlady”, and I am here to set the record straight. Ladies get ready and sharpen your claws because there is going to be a catfight in America.
136
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Petition created on March 24, 2023