Rachel, clearly you are living in the Alabama-zone of Texas.

Sorry to say it, but that devastatingly cute three-year-old is just going to grow up to be another redneck, living in that household. Let the dogs eat! (And I say that as a former owner of cats--but I didn't let mine run wild, either).

Seriously, let Digger and Sunny out and about like the neighbors do with their cats, and you will cease to have a cat problem in short order.

Hell, you might cease to have a neighbor problem, too.

I have the same issue with a female cat that has roamed the parking area near my home for the last 3 yrs. I've seen at least three litters thus far!

They hang out under cars, eat out of the garbage bins, dash around like lunatics. Poor little fuckers. I'm sure they have crappy, short lives.

At one point, Mama Feline-Fuckfest was mean enough to leave one of her baby kittahs on my front porch (he had to be only about 5 wks old). After staring at the little twit for 20 mins, I decided to take her in. *Sigh*. So I now own my first cat.

Luckily for her (aka "Sox"), my Yorkie (ironically named Sunny) didn't want to eat her. He's too ten kinds of sweet. He does occasionally like to beat up on her and climb on her back to hump on her. His way of showing his domination, I guess.

She's a pain in the ass, but I do love the bitch. Most importantly, though, she is 1) spayed, and B) NEVER allowed outdoors. Cats breeds like rabbits, people!! HELLO!

My suggestion is for you to call Animal Control. Just call the police non-emergency number and tell them the whitetrash asshats living next to you are about to get their precious furballs killed. After that, your conscience should be cleared.

Viva La Rachelution!

See if you can't make those window ledges cat-unfriendly. Install glass shards maybe. Or a bark-activated sprinkler system. I'd pay money to watch the first time they discovered a bark-activated sprinkler...

Rachel, you are deranged.

Never, ever, I mean ever, get therapy.

That is just too fuckin funny.

Because my wife's family are all a bunch of batshit-crazy cat people, I married into disease. I live w/ 2 cats. And before I paid the dealt the ultimate revenge and got two boxers to terrorize said cats. I had friends (Yes, plural. They knew the agony that I was dealing with.) offer to come into our old apartment and leave out a nice, healthy bowl of antifreeze. I cannot tell you how hard it was to turn that down, knowing good goddamn well that my wife is just crazy enough to have a fucking autopsy done on the cats and the vet would go "Ma'am, they were poisoned. With antifreeze." End of marriage. That would have been the best $50 I would have ever spent.

As far as the kid is concerned, fuck her. She may be sweet and cute, but she is going to grow up to be a redneck, too, if someone like you doesn't set her straight in the areas of "Don't park 30 shitbox cars in the front of my house hindering my view of our pretty street and keep your fucking cats in your own house" rules of life. I say you make sure the kid is outside when it happens. Make sure she sees what happens when Mother Nature runs her vicious cycle and rids the world of vermin like cats with the precious, powerful jaws of dogs. Make sure it haunts her enough that she never wants another cat. And that it scares her enough to realize the err of her parents' ways so that she doesn't get knocked up at 15 and adds another white trash element to the neighborhood.

Just a few ideas. But then again, I am usually an asshole.

"The only thing keeping me from letting Sunny and Digger break those fucking cats' spines is the curly-haired 3-year-old who loves them. I don't even like children but this kid is catastrophically cute and sweet. I can't crush her soul, it wouldn't be right."

So essentially what you are saying Rachel, is you have started to hear your biological clock ticking louder?

Have fun ;)!

On behalf of rednecks everywhere, I must say that I'm offended.
Why just last night, while I was taking a whiz on the neighbor's rosebush, I noticed how the moonlight shimmers off the oil slick in my driveway.
It brought a tear to my eye.

Why didn't Rupert douse the piles of tube tops, wife-beater t-shirts, cut-offs, baseball caps, and halter tops with charcoal lighter and drop a match on the whole mess?

...I prefer not to live with the rank stench of urine and piles of vomit.

I hear you. My new kitten, Reggie, has a distasteful habit of not covering up his poo in the litterbox. I've been trying to instruct him with mixed success.

But on the other hand, he seems to have developed a taste for martinis. So he's cool after all.

You need a paintball gun.
Your neighbor will change her ways once she has experienced the joy of de-painting a cat and whatever furniture it gets on before she catches it.

Then you play innocent and sympathetic when you hear about it.

You need a paintball gun.

Yea...... a paintnall gun........... say, about a 7.62 mm x 39 mm paintball gun. You know, the kind that leaves a red mark. Cats, rats with hairy tails.

Yeah... you know what fixes that? Rat traps. Unless your a little pussed out.. then mouse traps. Cats hate them. The rat traps make a nice big snap.

Off topic alert:

I don't quite know what to make of this, but I recently discovered alexa.xom, which tracks traffic on internet sites.

I plugged rachellucas.com in and got this page.

Here's the interesting part:

Rachellucas.com users come from these countries:
United States 95.6%
Cyprus 2.2%
United Kingdom 2.2%

Rachellucas.com traffic rank in other countries:
Cyprus 58,628
United States 81,093
United Kingdom 673,136

Your site is more popular in Cyprus than in the United States? WTF?

Rachel says, "The only thing keeping me from letting Sunny and Digger break those fucking cats' spines is the curly-haired 3-year-old who loves them."

Clearly, the thing to do is break that curly-haired 3-year-old's spine.

Then you can let Digger and Sunny do the kitties.

Remember: First things first.

Guess whose?

http://jollywalkers.com/mary_jane1?b=1

They have an adult cat and a few kittens that they let run free by means of keeping their garage door raised about 4 inches.

Uh, Rachel? I hate to break it to you, but it sounds like there will shortly be more than "an adult cat and a few kittens."

One thing cats are unfortunately good at are making other cats.

I have an asshole cat neighbor down the block, as well. Sisters, actually. One old bitch lives in one house and the other lives next door. One of the old bitches has a bastard son; he and his girlfriend have a catfarm which adds new members every year by means of procreation.

I've already killed one of their cats with my car (it was chilling out in the road at night and I didn't see it). It died slowly and I felt horrible. Neither of the old bitches cared- both referred me to their sister's house- and I wanted to bust one (or both) of their osteoporotic faces in.

Another one has gone feral this summer and has been harassing the shit out of my (singular, spayed) cat.

I'm certain it will end in more dead cats and the SPCA being called in. Given enough time, any pet cat that isn't actually a pet so much as a mobile outdoor decoration ends in dead cats and summoned animal control officers.

You know, kittens are remarkably resilient. You can throw them a good long ways without hurting them. It pisses them off good, but doesn't hurt them. Just be sure to do it underhand and try not to skip them across concrete. A couple of good skids through the grass and you will have fewer problems.

If you don't get a paintball gun you can always get an airgun. I can categorically state that they scare moggies away. Taxidrivers as well.

I've seen this before, the cats believe that even with the threat of being torn limb from limb by Sunny and Digger your place would be a better home than where they are.

Based on your observations of your neighbors and the way the cats act leads me to believe they're pretty piss poor pet owners.

Probably the only reason the cats go back to the neighbors is they know that's where the food is. And speaking of food one of the reasons cats puke up hairballs is getting fed the cheap crap from walmart makes them shed more.

Most likely the only attention the cats get other than food and water is the little girl dragging them around like a rag doll.

They probably come over to your house saying to themselves "please God let the dogs kill me today"

I am going to make a few comments that will offend cat-lovers. If you like cats, you are forewarned.

First, cats are the most foul creatures on this earth. I would rather have a pet spider or snake. I'd rather have a ferret. Hell, I'd rather have a pet SKUNK than a cat. Skunks smell, sure, but at least their shit and urine does not.

Unfortunately, I grew up on a farm, and cats were kind of a necessity. They keep rattlesnakes and rats to a minimum, you see. So we always had a population of about 7 or 8 feral cats. We fed them just enough to keep them around. Now, I know you're going to ask, how is that different from Rachel's redneck neighbors? Well, our nearest neighbor was about a mile away, and we had a swimming pool. Any annoying behavior by a cat resulted in said cat being thrown into the pool. Cats look funny as hell when they're wet. Oh, and they can swim just fine.

So anyway, the legal cat limit (according to my mom's decrees) was 7. Which meant that if we had too many cats, the population had to be culled. The humane way, I guess, would be to take them to a shelter, but the easy way on the farm is lead poisoning. Preferably lead that was traveling at about 1200 fps. .22 Long Rifle was the preferred option. That is not to say that shotguns were not used, as well. I know it sounds cruel, but it was the way things were. You shot a cat, picked it up by the tail, and slung it over the fence (our fence bordered the neighboring farm, but they didn't have a house on there, and it was a field that they never went into). I'm sure there's a goodly sized boneyard over there. Plus we always had dogs to keep them cats in line (naturally).

The problem with feral cats is that left to interbreed, cats quickly develop a monkeylike face that is just downright disturbing. My mom had this old man bring us the occasional cat from the city pound (city = San Antonio) to keep the gene pool fresh. Otherwise pretty soon we'd have a chimpanzee farm and not a bunch of cats.

One of these cats that he brought was this yellowish thing, a tomcat, and he released the cat and zoom! The cat ran off into the pecan orchard and we didn't see him for weeks. Then the females went into heat, and he showed up. He wasn't the same scrawny cat he had been. He was HUGE. I guess he found some squirrels or something in that pecan orchard. We called him Sumo, in fact, because if you were to catch him (no one ever did) he'd probably weigh 20 lbs. He did his job with the females and then he'd disappear for a while until they came into heat again.

Sumo had a couple run-ins with speeding bullets thanks to my brother, but none of them killed him. One clipped his tail, so that it went up about an inch and then hung limply. The other hit his foot but that healed. Eventually the cat must have died, but not for several long years. THAT, in my opinion, was a GOOD cat. He kept the gene pool fresh, and he minded his own business. We even took to calling most of our male cats "the Sons of Sumo."

Oh, and here's one other thing. Occasionally, we'd have a tame, friendly cat that we actually considered a pet rather than an asset. My sister had one when we moved out to the farm called "Susie." I had one cat my friend gave me, and when he was a kitten he was pink, so his name was Floyd. Anyway, he was not that bad of a cat, just had a limp from where my brother picked him up by the leg and threw him about 30 yards. He was actually very tame, because I raised him. Floyd was the only cat that I'll admit I actually LIKED.

My best friend years later had a cat, Jack, and one time I stayed at his house for a week as a guest. He had one of those elastic string thingies with a toy mouse on the end. I'd play with the string until the cat got a good grip on it. Then I'd pull back that elastic string and let it go...snap! into Jack's nose.

From that time on, whenever I'd visit, Jack would run away and hide in my friend's mom's room. They never knew why Jack hated me. He liked everyone else.

My other friend has a house cat, Zoe, she's spayed, and all, and she's alright. I don't torture her, but I shoo her away all the same. I don't like cats, on the whole.

Would I do all the same nasty evil things to cats I did as a child or youth? Not today. But I still don't like 'em. And I don't understand the people who do, either. The whole lollerkatz thing bothers me. Cats are not cute, at least IMO. Dogs? Yep. Dogs rule. Except for those little bitty ones that yip and yip and would be better off stuffed and used as a duster or a mop.

otcconnan ... you had a farm named "Susie"? Weird!

Rachel .. without causing them damage, you could easily keep them off the window ledges with the same method I keep my horses in their respective pastures. Electric shock
"therapy". Small fencers are cheap, as is the thinnest wire. After one ... or, at most, two, lessons on what happens when they visit the ledge ... they'll stop teasing the dogs.

Oops. Need to go back to 3rd grade and learn some sentence diagramming.

My sister's cat was "Susie." The farm had a name as well, but in the interest of staying (somewhat) anonymous, I'll leave that aside.

Q: How many cats does it take to paint a house?

A: It depends on how hard you throw them.

Directly across the street, one disabled 4-door shitbomb with a missing front fender, missing front bumper, and flat tire.

Be sure to call that one in to the appropriate authoriteh. Seriously. Code enforcement or enviromental services or the local PD, whoever handles "abandoned and/or inoperable vehicles" in your neck of the woods.

A flat tire or expired tag automatically makes a vehicle "inoperable" in almost all jurisdictions, subject to tow and impound. Nothing says lovin' like the city/county hauling off the junk!

Also, sprinkle some nice fresh powdered cayenne on those window ledges, sit back, and enjoy. :-)

pete - I don't know, when it comes to roaming around, cats are stubborn and stupid. After a few shocks, they would just stay away from the window ledges, but still come in the yard.

The best solution would be a sprinkler system with a switch by the door, so any time the cats came in the yard, they could be showered. Since that's a little impractical, my second solution would be the paintball gun someone else mentioned. You would just need to make sure to shoot every time one is in the yard.

And oh yeah, leash law? You might consider giving animal control a jingle about feral cats roaming the 'hood. They might even come out and put out live-traps, and take away some of the free-rangers. Even if the neighbors go buy them back, it gets expensive. Pound won't release 'em without proof of shots, and sometimes not without neutering them first. Depends on your locale. And they certainly won't adopt them out without the snip-snip.

There is a product called "catscat" which is a set of plastic strips with spikes.

The spikes won't harm the cats or your dog's paws but it has the same effect as you stepping on your kid's legos.

Living in a rural area of Southern California as we do, outdoor cats are not a problem. The solution is a large coyote population. The same solution also discourages irresponsible dog owners from letting their dogs run.

I notice that in one of the side bars there is an ad for a degree in diplomacy. You don't happen to have one, do you?

You want them to stay away from the house? Mothballs... apparently they can't stand the stench. If you don't like the idea of putting something toxic around the house - here are some other alternatives:
http://www.care2.com/greenliving/keeping-cats-out-of-the-garden.html

Wow...some of you have serious issues that require therapy. I've never had a cat that didn't act like a dog so I've never really had to deal with "cat" behavior. My cats come when they're called and they're very well behaved. They have never ever crapped or peed on anything except their litter box (even when I abuse them by not changing their litter often enough). I do admit that they have hair ball cough ups once in awhile - but not because I feed them cheap food. I don't ... it's crazy expensive food.

My grandfather horrified me with a story about how he'd take newborn kittens, put them in a bag, and throw them in the river. :( I was sick. But he said it was either that or they'd starve or be killed by dogs/animals. I still think it was sick but he's of a different generation.

And having said all that...let Sunny and Digger have fun!!! The owners are obviously not responsible and the little kid deserves to learn about real life.

Maybe if you let the dogs kill the kid, she wouldn't be sad about losing the cat?

Just, you know, kickin ideas around.

You know, this will alarm you, but in my neck of the woods, the "burlap bag" method is also employed for dogs.

My best friend's dad once took a whole litter of puppies that his poodle had and put them in a burlap sack. My friend was all of 7 or so and he said "Dad, what are you doing with the puppies?"

His dad took him and made HIM throw the bag into the river. To this day my friend would not harm a dog even if it meant it would save his own life.

I don't know where all this anti-kitteh sentiment is coming from.

I have a cat name of Delilah.
She's a Norwegian Forest cat.

Bred by vikings to kill rats.

http://www.nfcc.co.uk/snow1.jpg

Weighs about 20 pounds.

Solid.

Couldn't be less trouble.

Never pukes or does anything out of place.

Sits on your lap and purrs real cute like.

Then, when you start playing with her butt, she shoots out one of her big mitts and rips gashes on your arm that require prompt medical attention.

Same thing happens when I try to play with with Mrs. de Boyle's backside.

"Whose got a cute bubble butt. I think YOUUUU doooo..."

..................

"He's not right."

"Yes. Playing with his wife's backside?! What's THAT about?"

"He's going to hell."

The fact is that othere people's pets suck no matter what the species. We have cats but they are indoors 100% of the time except for when they are on leashes with us outside.

But I have neighbors who decided it made sense to have three St. Bernards. They utterly destroy my quality of life. The problem is that this is not rare. The vast majority of dog owners think nothing about letting them stand outside and bark their heads of for hours on end.

As a matter of preference I prefer to deal with roaming cats. They are typically quieter.

otcconan OMG - *look of horror on my face*

I don't understand that! WHY?!?! Why in the world would someone do that?!?!? Am I just too soft? I don't think my grandpa would've done that to dogs ... for some reason he has a softer spot for dogs (although they are never allowed in the house) than for cats. And I doubt he'd do the same with cats now a days.

Feeling a little ill now.

"The fact is that othere people's pets suck no matter what the species."

Amen to that! (Same with their kids.)

Lance de Boyle - Delilah is absolutely beautiful.

I love cats, I have three. However I do have an overwhelming urge to throttle them from time to time due to excessive hair ball hurling (especially when it's in the middle of the night and I awake to a plunging cat noise).

I also love dogs, but there are times I want to drop kick all the dogs in the neighborhood into lake Ontario - like last night - can't keep my windows open due to three freaking dogs holding long and loud conversations.

People need ot be more responsible for their pets. Don't let your cats out and freaking bring your dogs in when they start barking.

But basically - dag has it covered. The fact is that othere people's pets suck no matter what the species.

Amen to the neighbor's barking dog. You'd think, us having been here before said dog arrived, that it would recognize us by now - 3 years going on 30...

No. The dumb mutt just barks every time any of us leaves the house. The dog is outdoors from April to November.

Some people shouldn't have pets.

CastoC - I hate to break it to you, but in the country areas around where I live, it's not really that rare for "extra" kittens or pups to be taken care of that way.

That said, most people I know wouldn't mistreat their adult animals, but it's like your grandfather said - either that, or getting maimed/killed/starved later.

No Kittah! There My cheezy poofs, Kittah!

Of course, other people's kids are a horror show as well. Children seem completely unable to communicate in anything other than a full-throated yell. And the little girl who lives next to us cannot seem to spend more than three minutes consecutively without crying louldly about something or other.

Of course I also routinely get to listen to the white trash mom count to three. ...not convinced she can go higher, and it doesn't seem to impress the spawn.

When she wants them to come, she will say Naaaaaooooow! Which I think parses as, "now", but I am not sure as the vermin seem to interpret it to mean, "pretty much whenever you feel like as long as it isn't right now."

Don't get me started. The one thing I love about winter is that it drives us all inside and I can pretend they all don't exist...

doug

I always find it fun to pull out my SoftAir Desert Eagle and shoot misbehaved pets doing their business in my yard...and misbehaved neighbor children for that matter too...

We are living in parallel universes, I swear.

Other people's kids...don't even get me started on them. I love my siblings' kids, but they're immensely annoying and I can't spend more than one day with them before wanting to stick an icepick in my ear. Yelling, screaming, pooping, peeing in the swimming pool, breaking every damn thing in tarnation, running around with dirt all over their faces, scratching scabs, crying, fighting...basically everything a Liberal does when confronted with Karl Rove. But I digress. I can't stand kids. Leave it at that.

In fact, I'm fairly certain I can't stand anyone but myself. I mean, you guys are alright, but that's because I don't really know you...

(/goes back to his collection of Erector Sets, Legos, and Nitroglycerine...you'll all pay...I swear....muahahaha)

Rachel,
You're scaring me. A week ago we were ready to convict Michael Vicks for dog fighting and now we want to feed cats to dogs? Look, I agree we need to relocate redneck white trash, and I agree with W.C. Fields when he responded to the question of how he liked children, (boiled) but a cat turd is not a reason to commit violence to pets. There are birds shit(one t or two?)ing on your house right now! We need to get a grip. A hair ball is not the end of the world. If I counted all the times I ended up standing in some smelly bathroom with a toothbrush so I could scrape the dog poo out of the treads of my Nikes, I could make the same argument about dogs. Get a grip.

Rachel's neighbors are the sort of assclowns who give pet ownership a very bad name---like some of the dungbrains I used to have to deliver papers to, who thought that their damn dog had to be tied up in the FRONT YARD, right where I had to go to deliver their damn papers. (Looking back on it, I should have just braved the damn dog, and if it bit me---my dad was a lawyer, and County (District) Attorney, to boot! Can you say "world of payback?")

I'd prefer non-lethal solutions---the paintball idea is wonderful---but at seventh and last, I'd probably let the dogs do their doggy thing.

OMG, Alexander!

Thanks for the flashback.

Another officer and I had to shoot two Dobermans off the 3 year old next door neighbor kid they had just killed about 18 years ago. killed one and wounded the other. The owner came home and was pissed we had shot his dogs. I had to be restrained from assaulting him.

Just you know, remembering good times.

Actually, I might have appreciated the somewhat sick humor if not for the above lurking in my psyche.