Our neighbour is a single mother who works full time and came home to find our cat had come into her kitchen. Her daughter (aged probably 7-10 ) was already home from school and in the house.
A few hours ago she came into our garden through the open gate while we had a friend round to celebrate our baby's first birthday and were having a drink in the garden while he played on the grass. She apologised for disturbing us and explained how she had found the cat in her kitchen, and that her daughter had serious asthma problems which meant it was dangerous for a cat to be in the house like that. She was very polite at first, though she didn't stay that way. We asked her which of our three cats it was, as we thought it was most likely it was our youngest cat as she goes into our friends house down the street sometimes. She just repeated her story - I suppose this meant she wasn't sure. At this point I explained to her that if it was our youngest cat I would catch her and do my best to keep her indoors, however our older 2 cats need to get out as they fight if kept confined. My partner asked whether she could close her kitchen window, pointing out (politely) that it was the only window (just because of how wide it opens) in her house (which has many windows, it's not like it's a one bed flat) where a cat could get in. At this she got angry, saying she shouldn't need to keep her window closed. I basically said that no, that's true but she moved into a neighbourhood full of cats (I mean it's all families in 2/3 bed houses with gardens) so it's sensible to take precautions and after all, I think it's a simpler and more reasonable situation than to ask us to get rid of our cat or keep them indoors where they would fight. I said it more nicely than that obviously. We've lived here two years and she moved in a couple of months ago.She said she wasn't asking us to do anything she was telling us the situation and we could do what we wanted but she would call cat protection (not that they deal with things like that!) if it happened again. She kept repeating everything and was getting rude and sweary and we tried to be reasonable but she wasn't listening to us. She stormed off to take her washing off the line and began loudly b**ing about us to the woman who lives in the next house over. That woman also hates us as I have a hearing problem and apparently 'ignored' her when she was speaking to me.
I just don't know what to do. Keeping cats who fight shut in a house with a one year old is just not an option. We moved to this big house with a garden precisely because we needed more space for the cats and were very happy until this woman kicked off. It's such a simple solution to just not leave her kitchen window wide open - she could still open it as much as 6 inches and our cats couldn't get in, but instead she's kicking up a fuss. Our cats are friendly but before we started letting them out there was a huge feral ginger which would pee everywhere and go into the houses and wreck furniture. Our cats chased him off. So obviously this is a neighbourhood full of cats and it's just our luck that it's our cat who went into this woman's house.
This lady is not a great neighbour either, she has very loud late night parties, at the last one there was one man shouting he was going to 'blow the whole street up' and they were in their garden and in the street as well as partying in the house.she has screaming matches with her ex husband all the time. My partner and I moved here to get away from that kind of thing as we lived in a rougher area before. We're not well off ourselves, before you think we are snobs or anything like that. When we decided to have a baby we moved to this nice area full of families and a good school.
I feel like I'm not being unreasonable, what do you think? We both get anxiety and to be perfectly honest this conflict has me seriously considering moving house as this woman was talking about getting my partner beaten up.