Birder Indicted for Killing Cat

This is pure lunacy. Texas birder Jim Stevenson, founder of the Galveston Ornithological Society, was indicted on a felony charge of cruelty to animals for shooting and killing a feral cat in an area near a toll bridge on the west end of Galveston Island where he had previously seen cats stalking “three snowy and two piping plovers, and several sanderlings.”

Under Texas law, one definition of cruelty to animals is “killing an animal without its owners consent.” But this was a feral cat. It didn’t have an owner, right? Technically, that’s true. But a bridge worker testified that “he and his peers regularly laid out food for the cats and had come to think of them of as pets.” And that is apparently enough to make them “owners” and the cats “pets” under Texas law. Is this type of testimony permissible in a court of law? There were apparently multiple cats in the area, so how were the bridge workers able to prove to the satisfaction of the grand jury that the cat killed by Stevenson was one of the cats that had accepted handouts from them?

It’s truly a sad day when feral and invasive cats receive more protection under our laws than do native birds. It seems to me that if it could be shown that cats being fed by the bridge workers were responsible for killing birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, then they could be charged with the illegal take of migratory birds under that Federal statute. This case is a major travesty.

Disclaimers: (1) I am not overly fond of cats, particularly feral ones, but I once tolerated a domesticated cat in my home for nearly 10 years. (2) I also killed a feral kitten that appeared in our yard. (3) On another occasion I removed a feral cat from our garage, where it had taken up residence and was being fed surreptitiously by a grandson, and transported it (unharmed) to an animal shelter.