cat hunting

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dakotasin

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for those of us absolutely inundated w/ feral cats, thought i'd share a smidge of success w/ you... the feral cats here are so thick its unreal. every time i turn around, there seems to be another 2 or 3 running. usually, i've been shooting them during the day, but the hunting's been getting thin lately. so, i decided to try at night to see what happened. put 5 rounds in the ar's magazine, and headed out. in the first 10 minutes of hunting, i had hammered 3 cats and missed a 4th. an hour later, i was at 9 for the evening. probably around 4 total got away (was a bit slow w/ target identification... skunks and cats were the only things i was after - let the badgers, coons, and foxes walk).

so, if you're having feral cat troubles, try doing it at a different time. seemed to work well for me. sure would be nice if we can get a few more pheasants around here, too.
 
Happy shooting!

Sounds like you take your cat control seriously. I kinda wish I had your problem, but :evil: with wild boar.
 
If you follow the same routine in time you will only be getting the stupid cats, nothing more than excelerated Darwinism.

Which leaves the smarter cats to breed with each other, which leads to smarter kittens, which will eventually lead to a breed of super smart cats that will sit just outside your rifle range and taunt you and make little obscene cat gestures at you, while others wait in trees to ambush you and your family
 
thus the popular phrase "shoot shovel and shut up" no one here would leave the bodies to attract worse predators/scavengers. not anyone in this particular :scrutiny: forum I'm sure.
 
trey- yeah, i have to take it seriously. i have 2 small kids that really enjoy playing outside, and these disease-ridden cats aren't something i appreciate. the cats are also really hard on pheasants and dove... used to be a man could go out on pheasant opener and be back in 20 or 30 minutes, limited out for the day. now, those days are over. a man goes out now, hunts hard all weekend, covering miles of ground, and on a good weekend will find 2 birds - for the entire weekend! the difference between then and now? feral cats.

dale- you must understand something... there is no 'backyard', this is not in town, nor is it even within 2 miles of the next populated house. this is the country, farmland, and things are different here than in a city/suburb/whatever... the feral cats are no different than skunks, coyotes, coons, whatever. you simply cannot have too many of them around. feral cats are a pest, aka: vermin. just like mice are. the difference to me is that i would like to see every feral cat eradicated, but i sure don't want every skunk, coon, etc eradicated.

joab- thanks for the heads-up on the super cats... i will be sure to do my best to prevent that scenario from occuring!
 
Dale, as Byron Quick's sig line sez, "Buzzard's gotta eat, same as worms."

And a well-fed coyote doesn't have to hunt as busily. Less predation on pheasants or quail.

Buryin's Bad.

:), Art
 
Dead carcuses are a source of disease whereever theylie. Danger to other game as well as humans. Bury remains. Dale L Taylor, M.D.
 
new gun?

nah! new starlight gen 3 or thermal high tech scope :evil:
 
Doc I don't know if you have ever visited the great state of SD, but I have to tell you they have more then enough room for a few dead cats. I would bet you a dollar that you couldn't go back out and find those cats even 12 hours later. They are surely breakfast for something higher on the food chain. I saw a 40 lb racoon disapear in 24 hours by our house when I lived in IA. First the bugs found it, then the turkey vultures, and in the middle of the night the cayotes drug it off into the river bottom.

The only way I could see the cats being a disease issue would be if they were close to the house, and from what Dakotasin has said he far from in the backyard.


Norm Walker
Midwesterner.
 
Unburied carcass

Dr. Taylor, I'm not going to rant about your position, you're entitled to it. What you don't understand is that physical conditions are very different "out there" than they are "in town". I agree than a dead animal laying on the sidewalk or near parks, etc., can be very bad. With an abundance of other animals, though, a corpse hardly lasts long enough to mean anything. Obviously, animals don't bury their dead, so why isn't the woods full of filth and disease? Because it is self maintaining.
 
the feral cats are no different than skunks, coyotes, coons, whatever.
Click to expand...
I disagree with you on that.
Feral cats not only carry the same diseases that wild predators and carrion eaters do',feral cats are also smarter and meaner than most wild animals, they also lack the natural fear of man that is in the collective intelligence of true wild animals, making human interaction that much more likely.

One day maybe not today maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even when you're awake some cat will be just over the hill flippin you off, when he does, don't forget to look up in the trees
 
Sounds like west river. Take them to a Chinese restaurant, a lot of them
will buy them and coyotes.
 
joab, sorry I didn't make it more clear: Feral cats have no more moral importance than other pest-type critters.

Dale, I gotta second 1911 guy's comment. Over a two-week period (possibly a bit shorter) I watched from driving by as buzzards, coyotes, flies and ants turned an 800-pound dead cow into a scattered pile of dry bones.

Whether land or sea, whatever dies becomes food for other animals in the habitat.

Out of curiosity, what airborne pathogens come from a dead animal which was shot? For that matter, what diseases can be transmitted to people from a dead animal that died from some disease if the animal is not touched by people?

Looking back on farm and ranch life, plus hunting, I've been around dead animals from time to time since I was a kid. Livestock and poultry; fence-killed and hunter-killed deer, as well as "varmints". That's over 65 years of observation...

Google for "screw-worms". My grandfather and I fought those (&%$&*#) through the WW II and post WW II era. Nothing bad ever happened to either of us--or any other rancher that I ever heard of.

Art
 
joab, sorry I didn't make it more clear: Feral cats have no more moral importance than other pest-type critters.
Click to expand...
I pretty much got that I just want to spead my hatred of feral cats.
But only feral cats
( just in case moms listening)
 
Mr. Eatman--Let try psitacosis, tbc, histo,coccidiomycoses if I remember my infect disease. Leprosey is not usually passed.Tularemia only from blood spatter. Thats all that comes to mind quickly. However I'm told moderators usually correct so do a PubMed search and I'll stand corrected. [email protected].
 
Psittacosis is caused by Chlamydia psittaci, a bacterium found in the droppings of birds. It is a rare disease-- fewer than 50 cases have been reported in the U.S. in the past 5 years.

Infection is caused by inhalation of the spores of the fungus, Coccidioides immitis, which is often found in desert regions. About 60% of infections cause no symptoms and are only recognized later by a positive coccidioidin skin test.
Click to expand...

The lungs are the portal of entry for this infection. Histoplasma grows as a mold in soil and infection results from inhalation of airborne fungal particles. Soil contaminated with bird or bat droppings may have a higher concentration of mold.
Click to expand...

Humans can contract tularemia in the following ways:

* direct contact with an infected animal or carcass via broken skin
* the bite of an infected flea or tick
* ingesting infected meat (rare)
Click to expand...

So far none of these are contracted from dead cats. But there are quite a few diseases caused by live feral cats
 
Thanks, Dave. But "tbc" is a new one to me.

Thanks, joab. All possible, but so rare as to not be worth the worry, generally. Tularemia, or rabbit fever, isn't known to be a hazard other than when gutting a rabbit; the knowledge of avoidance is widespread.

Leprosy was a rare event from armadillos in Louisiana, way back when I was a kid. Dunno about nowadays. (Armadillos are the world's most vicious animal: Ever notice how they lie on their backs on highways, waiting to trap a car?) Armadillos bodaciously love earthworms, if you ever wondered. :)

I moved back to the old family place in 1967. For the next dozen or so years, we had chickens in the same coop my grandparents used. Mostly what we had was eggs and amusement. (My wife liked scotch and water. So did one of the Polish game cocks, whose capacity and tolerance was extremely limited.)

Seems to me that the mainest part of the deal is distance and time. Some dead animal in a far corner of a large pasture isn't the same as in one's yard in the city. I'd be as careful as anybody, I guess, if I were still living in town and found a dead animal in my yard. Gloves, animal double-bagged in plastic, etc...

Art
 
Hm. We're in a hunting forum, here. I'm a hunter that's taken tularemia into account for years while cleaning rabbits and swine. With swine, I'm more concerned about brucelosis. But it's pretty uncommon in wild animals that aren't confined together. Heck, I'm a lot more concerned about the diseases I might catch from the people I deal with than any animal I might kill.

On the animal carcass issue: Dr. Dale is correct that more rotting corpses means more temporary host matter for pathogens, and a decent place for parasites to pass pathogens to each others. There's no denying that a certain number of rotting corpses in a certain environment will create a health hazard. I read somewhere that at about the turn of the last century, the NYC Sanitation Dept was having to pick up and dispose of ~100 horse carcasses a day from the streets. Talk about some health problems! :)

The issue is really one of scale. Is it unhealthy to have a dead cat feeding the ants and coyotes and buzzards beyond the fence in the pasture next to my suburban home? Not really. Is it unhealthy to have a dead cat or two rotting in every yard of every house for a block? Well, yeah, it probably is. (Especially in the summertime.) Flies will feed, and disease will begin to be spread among the vermin. This increases the likelyhood of disease passing to you and me.

So where's the line? I'd say that if you've got more than one dead cat-sized carcass per quarter-acre lot, that's too many, and you need to get out the shovel. But then, I don't care for rotting meat much. :) I think that, if you're living in a suburban or only semi-rural area that this is just being a good neighbor.

If you're heavily rural, you're not going to be killing enough feral housecats to overly-taint your area with dead corpses.

How many here bury your gut piles after field-dressing a deer? A hog? A bear? A moose? Yep. That's what I thought. [Zero.]
 
We had a deer get hit right in front of our house a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday morning. We called the nice folks at the animal disposal center to come pick it up, and they don't work weekends.

No biggie though, 14 vultures turned it into a scrap heap of bones by monday morning. I'm sure they could have gone through a cat in about an hour.
 
Thanks, joab. All possible, but so rare as to not be worth the worry,
Click to expand...
Actually Art I was in agreement with you. The post was in response to the doctor's correct me challenge.

If you notice the only danger of animal transmissions of these diseases comes from direct contact with carcasses or were airborne and associated with bird feces

So unless your kids like to play with dead cats or you have the flying variety taking dumps over your homestead, leaving cats lay in a rural environment poses no more risk than any of the other dozens of dead animals out there
 
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