To think cat owners are unreasonable for insisting that drivers MUST stop if they hit a cat?

[OtterlyMad]

Some of the people on my town’s Facebook page lose their minds when a cat is killed by a car. It’s automatically blamed on speeding (despite there being no evidence of this) and there are always lots of comments along the lines of how “disgusting” it is that the driver didn’t stop and make the owner aware.

None of them seem to appreciate that the driver might not have time to track down the owner. For example, perhaps they are on their way to work, a job interview, wedding, funeral, court, airport, hospital, dentist, client meeting, school pick up, etc. Plus cats can wander quite far and don’t all wear collars so tracking down the owner could be a real challenge - even more so if driver isn’t local to the area!

Obviously it’s devastating for people to lose their pet in this way (I’m an animal lover and have owned pets all my life so I get it) but surely this is a known risk of allowing cats to roam freely? And owners accept that risk because they feel it gives their cat a better quality of life, even if that means their life is shorter as a result?

My locals are now campaigning to make it law that drivers who hit a cat must not only stop and find the owner, but also HAND OVER THEIR CONTACT DETAILS. To do what with?! So the cat’s owner can give the driver grief and/or demand compensation they’re not entitled to???

Am I the only one thinking this is ludicrous?

You are being unreasonable - drivers should be required to stop, track down the owner of the cat and hand over their contact details.

You are not being unreasonable - injury/death by vehicle is a sad but accepted risk of cats having the right to roam so drivers should not be required to stop.

I don’t have a cat as I know they like to roam and would be terrified of something happening to them. I have been beside myself with worry on the very few occasions my dog has escaped.
I think it’s awful that we even have to think about needing a law to make people at least check if any animal they hit with a car is alive and in pain, and if it needs treatment/ despatch in the case of a severely injured wild animal.
I appreciate there are times when it is too dangerous to and common sense must obviously be applied.
I feel less strongly about what should happen if the poor animal is already dead. I know that dogs should be reported. I would move a cat out of the road, but I am not sure that I would put it in my car and take it to the vet. It is not suffering. If it was at a reasonable hour I would probably knock on nearby doors. (This would apply whether I hit the cat or saw an accident happen.)
I would be a bit wary though as I have seen Facebooks posts with people saying they ‘screamed’ at the driver.
As for leaving contact details, why would anyone need those? Unless the driver went onto a path to deliberately hit a cat it would have been on the road, and an unfortunate accident.
I have never hit a cat but had a very near miss. I had not long pulled out of a junction and was going maybe 15 MPH. I saw 3 cats on the path opposite and just as I was getting level one shot across my the road and went under my car. It was one of those situations where braking could have just as easily made the situation worse. I didn’t feel anything and was so relieved to see it running away.

There is something you could have done. You could have posted on your local Facebook, or informed your local vets.

That is what a considerate human would have done.

My vet is 24 hours. My cat is microchipped but doesn’t roam - she is confined to the garden. If she ever escaped and was badly hurt I would really hope someone phoned a vet rather than leave her in pain.

my teenage nephew and his friends came across an injured cat. At 14 they had the compassion and responsibility to phone their parents and then phone the vet.

I do think something is broken or missing in people if they can leave an animal in pain like that. But then why are we surprised - people do awful things every day. Much worse than leaving a pet to die on the road.

Which countries??

I’ve never heard of any with such a rule.

Parts of Australia, for a start. Cats (including pet cats) are one of the biggest causes of native animal loss in Australia.

What makes me uncomfortable on my local Facebook is when someone finds one of these poor creatures and you get the mob calling out the awful driver for not stopping. Actually it’s impossible to say whether the driver stopped or not. If the poor cat wasn’t killed instantly often they can run a fair way, and the driver may not have been able to find them.

It is the automatic assumption that the driver hasn’t tried to do the right thing that bothers me. As for people saying that you could post the news on Facebook yourself- I wouldn’t, some of these people I see commenting are really aggressive and unpleasant. You get quite the mob mentality. So I understand that.

I do think if people are going to let their cats out they should have to fit them with trackers. That way if something happens they can find their pet.

YANBU. I've had a number of pet cats killed on the roads growing up. The first one was because the cat had crossed our tiny rural road with my dad qnd panicked when a car came and shot under her wheels at the last minute to get back to our house. Poor woman was distraught. Three others were on a busy A road at night. Who knows if the drivers even knew? One more was hit and knocked unconscious outside our house. A friend popped her on our doorstep while he hunted for my dad in the garden. Cat came to and legged it (survived but cats often run off to die quietly somewhere - how drivers are meant to hunt thm down I don't know. These online witch hunts are insane and utterly unreasonable. We have a Poirot down our road trying to interrogate all the residents and establish their whereabouts (really!) when a hedgehog was run over. We have so many potholes i genuinely doubt I'd know if I hit something small in the dark. My parents have built a large cat pen in their garden after all the accidents we suffered - maybe people should try that before blaming drivers?

I have to agree with you.

While I would have all the sympathy in the world for the poor cat, I would be afraid of owner's reactions. People can be very aggressive about this, and seem to want to blame the driver.

I'm late to this and I may well be repeating what others have said but here goes

Cat owners who let their cats roam really can not have it both ways and need to stop thinking they can.

Roaming cats are a PITA and do a lot of damage. They are endangering wildlife, killing huge numbers of birds, frogs, hedgehogs and other rodents. Many naturists including David Attenborough have expressed their concerns about the damage they are doing with their massively unfair advantage.
In addition to this, they will shit in everyone's garden but their own, so that I have to clean up after other people's pets before I can let my kids play in their own garden, they dig up my flowers and they leave the entrails of my poor frogs they have murdered strewn across my patio. And yes I do know it is cats because I have seen them on my wildlife cameras and yes I've tried all the suggestions to keep the buggers away.
While cats are out there causing all this death and destruction, their owners sit back and let their pets do as they damn well please. I've had many arguments about this online and what I have found time and time again is that cat owners simply do not care one tiny bit. Cats roam, that's what they do, it's cruel to keep them indoors, it suits them to be outside, I don't want them in here scratching up my furniture blah blah.

And yet when darling little tiddles gets run over these owners who let their cats out and have no idea where they are genuinely beleive that it is a drivers responsibility to find them and report them??

The entitlement and wilfully ignorance is unbelievable. If you want to let it run around like a wild animal then don't be surprised when it gets treated like one.

Well, I can understand that. They are the killers of millions of songbirds annually in the U.K., too. 🙁

You’d not be waking a vet up, they aren’t sleeping in the vet practice.

They either are open for emergencies or when you phone them they’ll direct you to which practice covers overnights.

My cat did actually have a tracker on. It was crushed on the road he was killed on - presumably by the same car that hit him.

I so wish that driver had tried to help in any way. I completely understand that accidents happen, but I would have respected that driver if they had done the decent thing.

Now I just think they are a cunt!

On a residential suburban road, I was once behind a car that ran over a cat. The driver couldn’t possibly have avoided it - it ran right under its wheels. TBH I didn’t blame the driver for not stopping, and nowadays I probably couldn’t have stopped on that road anyway - no space to pull over because of parked cars.
But I did, and almost immediately a man from one of the adjacent houses came out with an ‘oh, no!’ face, and I could hear the children wailing from a front window. 🙁

We’ve had 2 cats run over on a busy road that’s actually quite a distance from our house, but that’s the risk you run if you don’t approve of indoor cats - and I certainly don’t.

Have you tried keeping a cat in that wants to be outside? My poor fella came to us after being semi feral, it was on his terms and there is no way he could be kept inside without trashing us and trashing the house. And then he’d have still been out the moment the door was opened. And he was knocked down in broad daylight, not at night.

I still have one other cat who has a bit more road sense after a near miss, treats the front gate as a kind of mystical invisible boundary. Still couldn’t keep her inside without making both her and my lives a misery.

both cats came to us after we moved here, we had no plans to get cats due to the road but both were the result of desperate pleas from people we knew to home them. I’ve lived in a house on a busier road, and the cat I had then was very old and by then quite content to stay indoors 24 hours. Couldn’t have done it when she was younger though. Most cats need the stimulation from being outside - same as dogs, you wouldn’t put a dog on a treadmill and consider the walkies done.

This.

I would stop if I could but safety comes first. Cat owners can't have it both ways.

But what is the 24 hour vet, when one is eventually found, going to do with the drivers details? Not microchip checking or treatment where applicable, as that doesn't require the details of the person who hit the cat. But the contact and vehicle details specifically. It's not immediately obvious why a vet would need those and what purpose it would serve.

Have you tried keeping a cat in that wants to be outside?

I don't have a cat and have never had a cat - i'm very allergic to them. It's not about keeping them inside if that's not what you/they want. It's about accepting that allowing them to roam outside is inherently risky and that you cannot demand that other people do X, Y or Z to either manager that risk or deal with the consequences.

I’ve hit a cat before - killed it instantly.

Stopped, grabbed the body and took it to the vets. Later that day I get a phone call from the owner demanding that I ‘pay’ them for the cost of the sodding cremation - the vets (my old practice) had shared my contact details (without permission). I ended up having to block multiple numbers from the deranged owner asking that I pay for the cremation.

I’d never stop again - both because I don’t trust the owners not to go mental and I don’t trust the vets not to share my details (despite it being a huge GDPR breach).

I don't mean to be awkward, but how do you know the driver didn't try to help in any way?

What a cheeky twat.

But this is a very good example of why it's so stupid to expect other people to take responsibility for the cat you didn't prevent from running in front of a car. Enough people get weird and entitled that it means there's frequently a safety aspect.

Outdoor cat owners are unreasonable full stop.

You should take care of your own pets - that includes supervising them for their own safety and supervising their actions to ensure they’re not killing wildlife, killing other people’s pets, or causing a nuisance on other peoples property.

There is no other domestic animal that is allowed to roam without supervision. There is no other animal allowed to injure or kill other animals - whether domestic or wild. They’re an invasive predator that cause ecological devastation, there are species across the world that are extinct because of the domestic cat. They have no place being loose outside. In Austria they’re poisoning cats now because of the damage they cause. Sad situation, but one caused by feckless humans as usual!

It is archaic, selfish, lazy and irresponsible to allow any pet animal to roam freely. They should be contained inside a house or catio/pen, or leash trained (which is entirely possible).

If you don’t believe in keeping a cat indoors, and don’t have the space or money for a catio - then don’t have a cat!

I don’t have the space for a horse, nor the money to buy a field. I don’t just keep one in my garden then let it roam around causing accidents, hurting itself (then blaming other people for it), kicking or biting people/animals and shitting all over the place. Because that’s not responsible or fair.

If you let your cat out and it gets killed or injured it is 100% your fault and no one else’s.

I did stop. The cat spent a little time writhing around then went still. It had no collar. I placed it onto the pavement. I don't know where any local vets are. I wasn't late for DD but I also didn't wish to involve her in taking a dead cat to the vets. Just to be clear - the fact that some people think a cat is equivalent to a human in some weird way doesn't make it apply to me. It was actually a very unlleasant and upsetting experience for me - one I didn't ask for and couldn't have avoided except by never driving.

As a PP observed, it's no wonder some peolle just drive off, given the villagers with pitchforks and torches attitudes.

Out of interest…why do you not care about making other people’s lives a misery with your free roaming cat?

Genuine question.

Ages ago now, a relative of dh once hit and killed a small deer on a rural road near where he lived. Loaded it into the LandRover and took it home to cut up for the freezer.

Genuine question, really? It starts from an assumption and then makes an accusation. Difficult to have an honest conversation from such a goady starting point.