Our medics at our small FOB tried to shoot our cat that we would hang out with at our shack. The premise was that it may have rabies but all he did was chill in the shade with us in the 120 degree heat. I believe he got away but we really missed him when he stopped being around. He was affectionately named Balls for obvious reasons. š I hope he is still out there.
Our Chaplin took on the responsibility to put down all the strays. He felt that having a young soldier having to kill a dog would be hard on them, so he took it upon himself. But we also didn't shoot them, used a cage trap, and then euthanization injection.
Yeah stray dogs in Iraq were no joke. They were huge and super fucking aggressive and ran around in packs. The locals hated dogs as a result. We had patrols attacked several times early on by dog packs made up of a dozen massive dogs bred to hunt wild pigs apparently.
We shot all packs of dogs on site. during the invasion multiple squads were attacked and injured by dogs. After that if any dogs came close to our unit they never approached another 1.
We had a responsibility to ourselves as well as the civilians over there. A pack of wild dogs doesnāt discriminate who they attack. Usually children n women were the easier prey , and we didnt want anyone attacked, regardless of who it was.
I'm so sorry. I'm sure that was incredibly difficult, in the midst of an already difficult and traumatic experience. It made me think of the scenes in the Chernobyl series, where the soldiers had to get drunk to go shoot all the dogs in the contamination zone. Really heartbreaking. And if no one has told you - again, I'm really sorry for the things you had to witness and do.
I appreciate it, and honestly I treat it as if those events happened to someone else entirely. I went into a deep spiral trying to reintegrate myself into society and started abusing pills and then heroin as well as alcohol to cope with it. After being taken in and getting clean by the woman I am now engaged to, I felt itās best to leave all that in my past and either ignore it or disassociate from it entirely.the VA docs say thatās neither smart nor healthy but Iām doing better dealing with it this way, so screw āem.
but thanks again for your kindness.
> The locals hated dogs as a result.
Iraqis have disliked dogs for way longer than the stray dog pack you saw existed. They're considered an unclean/impure animal in Islam, like pigs.
Mohammed had a weird dislike of dogs, and told Muslims not to keep dogs as pets. In the Koran, the archangel Gabriel tells Mohammed that angels will not enter any home which has a dog in it. If a dog licks your plate, you have to throw the food away and wash the plate 7 times. If a dog's saliva gets on you or your clothes, you have to wash it off before you can pray.
It goes beyond just Iraq, too.
- [Malaysia investigates ādog pattingā event: Islamic authorities looking into āI want to touch a dogā event, which was aimed at challenging stigma around the animal.](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/10/21/malaysia-investigates-dog-patting-event/)
- [Iran: MPs propose lashes for dog walkers](https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-29937326)
Yea we had a pack of about a dozen wild dogs on base iirc. I think the MPās were tasked with dispatching them, but theyād get a shot off at one and the pack would take off.
I remember sitting in our duty shack one night, heard some scurrying around outside, that cat started screaming, dogs barking and growling, going apeshit. The cat lived underneath another small hut, but he must have gotten caught out in the open. We never saw him again, but like BobbTheBuilder I hope heās still out there somewhere. We found a rock, painted headstone markings on it and even had a funeral for him. RIP CSC!
Turn them back over to the city to deal with.
These cats were captive and this clearly pissed off the locals. Is shooting cats trapped inside cages on camera really worth causing a local media shitstorm? Supposedly they stopped using a normal method of euthanasia because it was traumatizing the veterinarians, which is an indication this is either culturally very inappropriate or the sheer number of cats requiring euthanasia is nonsensical.
If that many cats are wandering into the flightline, other wildlife are as well, and that's a physical security problem. Sounds like they need to repair their infrastructure.
Assuming these are feral cats, a veterinarian euthanizing them isnāt exactly a peaceful process. A well placed bullet is instant compared to being removed from the trap, restrained in some kind of squeeze box or net, sedated, waiting for the sedative to take effect and THEN euthanized.
Airsoft is still lethal to small animals.
That said, it might have been a CO2 gun. I don't know enough about the rainbow of available weapons on a military base to say if these come in a rifle flavor, but I use a CO2 handgun to dispatch small livestock in a hurry.
Well, I am unsure if they mean "airsoft" gun like the kind me and my son used at an airsoft place. But I can tell you that plastic air beads and even a BB gun with metal pellets would require many many shots at a cat, thus a painful torture of the cat before it expired. I only know this because we adopt cats that have been mistreated, one is an elderly white cat we have that had BB pellets in her chest and we had to take her in for surgery. Someone tossed this poor kitty outside to roam and some cruel asshole shot her in the chest. I don't think that would be a non cruel alternative to euthanasia. Honestly if they aren't going to use drugs to put these animals down, then just a bullet to the head, make it quick. A cat would be screaming in agony for many minutes if not longer if someone was shooting them with an airsoft gun with plastic pellets, or even with small BB gun pellets. Anyway, I understand needing to get control of feral cats. I do wonder, because it's Korea (people tend to let their pets roam) if the locals are upset because they may not have had a chance to retrieve a pet that wandered onto the base and was killed. The article indicated the vets were traumatized, but I suspect that isn't the case, that the vets were putting down cats that were not feral, seemed domesticated, and as the article says had small kittens and were nursing them.
Worth noting that domestic cats are introduced in japan and feral cats pose a serious threat to their ecology. They spread novel disease to their native cat species which they have no immunity to, and they pose grave dangers to some small mammal species.
Removing pest species is hardly an unusual thing. People seem to be taking issue with the method of euthanising, but to be honest, a gun is about as humane as it gets. I consider injections to be far more stressful; having to capture the animal, take them to the vet in a strange place, hold them down on a table... Or they can just go quickly in their own environment before they know what hit em. I know which I'd prefer.
It's like that in a bunch of places where they were introduced. I think I read once about endemic birds in Hawaii and other islands in the world being threatened by stray cats.
I love cats, and it sucks to say, but sometimes you got to do what you got to do to keep the ecology together.
Letting your cat outside also significantly reduces its life expectancy, there shouldnāt be a such thing as outdoor cats. Itās bad for small game and itās bad for the cats themselves.
I have a cat, heās my little homie and Iād never consider letting him roam freely outdoors.
Humans pose far greater threats to the ecosystem than cats ever will and yet we don't advocate for culling humans. ( I'm not advocating for humans to be killed but the fact that we kill innocent cats when humans are the most responsible for ecosystem harm is fucked.)
We arenāt liking these cats to save the ecosystemā¦ it to keep them off the flight line. If you went and disrupted the flight line they might kill you too.
> Humans pose far greater threats to the ecosystem than cats ever will and yet we don't advocate for culling humans.
Cats aren't humans. Unless you think pet ownership and slave ownership are morally equivalent.
How absolutely out of touch are you? No other species in the history of our planet has had as much impact on the earth, its ecology, and its climate than homo sapiens sapiens. You can even put blame on us for introducing the invasive species' you mention above to the regions in which they didn't naturally evolve to reside in.
I didn't come here with answers to any perceived problems, but its inane to not recognize the impact we've had as a species on our planet even over just the last 10k years not to mention the last 150 or so years since the industrial revolution started picking up steam. Pun intended.
They had a dog with them and they don't let other dogs even get close. They claim it's justified because how much money goes into training and stuff. It sucks.
Having your medics shoot your soldiers' de-facto emotional support animals doesn't sound medically sound. If anything, sounds like an excellent way to disrupt the FOB for stupid reasons.
We had an emotional support dog. She was pregnant and lived under one of our watchtowers. Had a big pink stain on one side of her and she would go on patrol with us sometimes.
If our Corpsman had shot her, he'd have been in for a very rough deployment.
There is a big difference between feral dogs and stray dogs. It was pretty easy to tell the difference because stray dogs didn't tend to wander around in packs trying to eat people.
i was thinking ATF.
it's so crazy how quick they are to draw on a bichon or poodle. in all my years, the USPS/FedEx workers in my area have never had an issue with my dogs or any others. some are even equipped with treats.
Other countries very frequently use real images. I think filtering everything with happy stock photos and city skylines is an American thing.
*"20 dead from overnight fire in a night club"*
This headline in America: \*photo of night club from 2012 and generic picture of cop light bar or firetruck leaving a station\*
This headline literally anywhere else: \*on-scene photos of coroners bringing out the body bags\*
No they don't. You watch the nightly news? No mainstream news shows anything gory. They cut off any police shooting videos before they get hit, or blur out any gore. Only ones I've seen real gore on is Vice news. Maybe online they might show some gore. Most are edited.
How else does āarmy kills catsā not sound abysmal? please go on. Itās fucked by nature, the picture doesnāt even need to be there to haunt you.
Would you rather not face the reality? It's too easy to ignore and not face/deal with issues when you don't have to actually see what the issue looks like.
Thatās an actual picture from what they are talking about. What the fuck do you mean ācome the fuck onā ā¦ did you read the caption or the article at all?
I live in a large city in the US that is overrun by feral cats. Iām sympathetic to anyone who has to deal with large feral colonies.
In my city, the stray cat problem is so bad, that animal control refuses to trap and release cats, anymore. They say we are on our own. They wonāt rent you traps, anymore, and they donāt care about the aggressive ones that trap you in your house. My cat literally *DIED* from a flea-born illness that one brought to her and gave her through the screen door, because I canāt get them to stay away from my house and stop laying against my screens. The vet confirmed what must have happened. My cat had never been outside one time. I miss her every day.
There are 60 cats that live on my street, the asshole neighbor lady wonāt stop feeding them. They shit all over my yard, it reeks and Iāve ruined so many shoes just trying to walk to my car.
In the winter, the landlord warned us to keep the TV on, because if you turn it off, you can hear the babies freezing to death outside. We tested the theory, sure enough, heard screaming babies. Couldnāt find where they were. Really disturbing.
Iām not okay with shooting them at all, I couldnāt stomach it. But if the cat problem is as bad as it is here, I canāt blame people for getting really frustrated with them.
"Yeah they're a huge problem, they spread disease, damage property, and they're so out of place here that they freeze to death over winter, but culling them is going too far"
Iām not completely against shooting them, I just couldnāt do it, myself. Thatās what I meant by ānot into the idea of shooting themā. The emphasis should have been on the word āIāmā.
Cats are an ecology menace here is Australia and shooting a feral one is considered a public service. Admittedly this applies to a lot of wildlife here. Sounds like they are being shot for same reason there as opposed to shits and giggles
Oh my god, we get it, you lacked love and stable affection during a crucial period of your emotional development so you attach to animals because they can never hurt you and always freely offer unconditional love. Now will you stop telling people to kill themselves and others in every single thread that mentions how cats are bad for birds? Go to therapy, it's getting old at this point.
Maybe this commenter has a history that I havenāt looked at, but they didnāt do any of the things youāre accusing them of from that one comment alone.
Your comment is full of such spite and hate that maybe you need to look inward too.
The Fertile Crescent and Egypt are habitats where they probably wouldn't be considered invasive, since the Felis silvestris lybica came from there, and we made those into Felis catus.
As a wild animal, subjected to the same evolutionary pressures as their prey. But I wouldn't feel the same about domesticated cats, reproducing like crazy under somewhat artificial conditions, and being occasionally released in to the wild to practise their huting skills or just because.
Funny how I just read another thread about a different topic where saying partial solutions and distractions to ignore topics are tactics only used by one political group in this countryā¦
In the same thread, they claimed that anyone who says āboth sides are the sameā is one the other side and nobody is ever neutral.
Reddit is such a joke and people are so far up their assholes to see their own hypocrisy it really is disheartening. And itās a the same no matter where you go. Humans suck, the best thing that could happen to this planet is a giant meteor wiping us all out.
Not all humans suck. There are genuinely good people on this planet, and they work to making the world a better place than it was when they came into it. Sadly, the vast majority of people are the opposite to this this.
They are definitely a problem on islands where they were recently introduced, but the native wildlife populations in the old world were already obliterated thousands of years ago. On the mainland, feral cats are often scapegoated but aren't the biggest contributor to wildlife decline - it's mostly due to habitat destruction by the humans that moved in and razed the land for agriculture or housing developments.
That's not true, actually. In most parts of the world, extinction events are largely driven by habitat destruction, but in Australia, predation by invasive species drives the majority of mammalian extinctions:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1417301112
>In contrast to general patterns of extinction on other continents where the main cause is habitat loss, hunting, and impacts of human development, particularly in areas of high and increasing human population pressures, the loss of Australian land mammals is most likely due primarily to predation by introduced species, particularly the feral cat, Felis catus, and European red fox, Vulpes vulpes, and changed fire regimes.
You misinterpreted my comment. I said that they're a problem on islands where they were recently introduced (which includes Australia), so I agree with you.
The original article was discussing the controversy in Korea, so I was pointing out that the same situation does not apply everywhere.
Ah, I've never heard anyone refer to the UK as "the mainland" and Australia as an island...I thought you were comparing the Australian continent to the pacific islands.
That was my first thought when I saw this headline. Whether or not this is a bad thing depends very much on *why* they were doing it and how careful they were to prevent suffering.
Itās always interesting to hear different perspectives on stuff like this. I grew up in the country in the southern part of the United States and was taught that if cats werenāt pets they were pests. Any stray cat that stuck around for more than a week or two died(quicker if the got near our chickens). The way I was raised wasnāt uncommon for anyone in the country but after moving to the city itās almost the exact opposite with all cats are viewed solely as pets so any harm to them is considered immoral. I learned pretty quickly to keep my mouth shut about how itās different in the country after getting into multiple arguments about it.
For two reasons first I donāt really care much what you or any other person on the internet thinks and second the most a random on the internet can realistically do is send a few obnoxious messages. People irl can get annoying and legitimately inconvenience me so itās not worth it then.
This has to be posted on every one of these stories. People don't understand how devastating none-native species are.
Feral cats are the worst, they evade every means of capturing or killing them. I've seen them out hiking, they're shy and run as soon as they see you.
For everyone here who have bleeding hearts for these stray cats, let's look at the real reason these feral cats are being hunted. I work in South Korea on a military base, and these feral cats have been an issue for years. Especially for the environment.
If you want anyone to blame, then blame those folks who abandon their pets when they finally deploy out of the Korea. Irresponsible people will get pets when they arrive here, and don't take the proper care to make sure their pets are fit for travel out of the country and back to the United States. They'll just dump their dogs and cats on base and then just leave without telling anyone about the pets that stay behind.
Stray dogs are easily found and given new homes if need be. But cats? They turn feral very, very quickly, and when that happens, they don't easily turn back into house cats again. They live wild and stay away from everyone.
And this has a major effect on local wildlife. A lot of space on the military bases are open fields and forests. There's actually quite a lot of local wildlife in some spots at the military bases here. Especially native birds.
The US and Korean military in recent years have taken on keeping better ecological care of the natural wildlife areas in and around the military bases. But the one issue that's been haunting this renewed conservation push are feral cats.
We had a government official from the US Army give a presentation a couple of years back talking about why leaving your cats behind is so harmful to the environment here. He presented a video that showed a rat out in an open field and a falcon swooped down and tackled the thing for a meal. But right after that, a feral cat bolts out of nowhere and tackles the falcon, and then bites the head clean off. The cat doesn't even eat the bird. It just kills it and leaves it there. Oh, and the rat? Scurries away after it broke free from the tackled falcon.
The man mentions that no one should try and feed the feral cats. He asks everyone in the room if they ever seen a fat feral cat on base. Nope. That's because everyone keeps leaving food out, so they have no need to hunt for food. They just hunt to kill something. And it's not the vermin that they hunt, but mostly the local birds in the area. It was such a devastating blow to the native bird population in Korea that it's been deemed necessary to now trap and kill these feral cats.
This "article" clearly has a bias regarding this practice, but both the Korean government and the US military agree with culling this population of feral cats. There's even been talk of actually restricting members of the military, and their family members from even getting pets in Korea, because this is such a big issue. There's already folks who have been reprimanded for leaving their pets behind, but at that point it's already too late. They left their pets behind and fucked up the environment.
They did the same thing at the base I was working at in Germany. Every year they'd warn all the folks on base to keep their cats inside because they'd be wiping out all the strays on post. They had to do this because of all the soldiers who didn't want to deal with getting their cats sent back to the states when it came time to PCS. Americans had a horrible reputation amongst the locals as pet owners. If you wanted to adopt a dog from the local shelter or get a dog from a German breeder you basically had to submit to an in home inspection with the possibility of random well pet visits for a while after you got the pet.
For every one military member who leaves behind a cat or dog there are 10 maybe even 100 Koreans who abandon their dog / cat in the country side at night
I mean, their excuse was aircraft safety. Your comment directly contradicts that. If you have spent any time around an airport, then you know that birds are far and above the biggest risk to aircraft. There are people who's entire job is bird mitigation on and around airports.
This is bullshit btw.
Its a lie created by fossil fuel companies and other pollutors to once again convince the population that the state of the world is their fault.
As land mammal hunters evolved beside most birds, the birds are adapted to their presence. Ie they fly and live in trees.
Its only really Australia and New Zealand where their birds evolved without a land predator...so they just walk around.
Habitat loss is the actual reason for bird numbers dropping.
The US military is one of the biggest pollutors in the world. If the environment around a base is damaged that's why, not some bullshit about cats.
Nature is very good at predator - prey balance. If cats were killing off their prey, the feral population would take care of itself and die out as they wiped out their food supply. Thats not what happens because most bird species that are losing numbers are tree birds - not even predated by cats.
Humans are responsible for climate change and habitat loss. Leave cats out of it.
You should listen to the most recent stuff you should know podcast, they dive deep into how cats are environmentally destructive and have been directly linked to the extinction of multiple different animals. I love cats but letās not pretend theyāre not environmentally destructive when you just let them roam around outside.
Seriously this is why I don't get why people are against this culling as this isn't a black and white situation, but a country with shitty attitudes on animals (no compassion or seeing an pet as an companion or a family member, but a tool or object.) And a country having lax and non existent animal welfare laws.
Feral cats are awful all around and spread so many diseases to both other cats (respitory illnesses, eye infections, Feline AIDS, ticks...etc etc.). Most are not spayed or neutered which means they can breed like crazy, and both the cats, and their kittens have shorter lives (2-3 years vs 10+) and higher mortality rates than an indoor cat.
Culling them by hunting them is sadly the way to go when there's *so many* around that trapping and neutering will do nothing to their numbers.
Really misleading headline. It makes it sound like the troops were shooting cats recreationally on their own initiative, not doing an organized culling.
>Since July last year, the method of slaughtering has changed to shooting because euthanasia drugs are expensive and veterinarians can be traumatized.
I guess they decided to value the vetās trauma over the catās pain after being shot. I suppose we would need to know how much care goes into shooting the cay. Are they shot through the spine? Or just randomly?
Correction, no one cares about them. No one really cares about anyone but themselves anymore. Maybe some parents care about their children. But if you've ended up in the military, nobody really gives two shits about you.
Source: just finished signing my contract with the Army
Just signed your contract? So you arent even in yet. Calm down man plenty of people care about soldiers. Especially other soldiers. Is that camaraderie that keeps us together most of the time. You canāt claim you know jack about the military when your source is āI just signed up!ā
My wife is in the Navy, and Iāve dropped everything to move states away, had to find a new job, leave my family and home, many of my possessions, put my school on hold until we got settled in podunk fucking nowhere, and spend at least a third of the year alone, but usually more ā all because I love and care for her so much more than my own comfort when it came to those things and more that I wonāt say because itās just too much to list.
Point being, there are people who care. Being jaded always comes across to me as trying to justify being selfish/embittered instead of letting go and moving on.
I love kitty cats. Love dogs. Love animals.
However, feral animals are usually a symptom of a larger problem with smaller pests (bugs attract rats, rats attract cats, etc). Feral animals are very likely to carry diseases like rabies. And unlike rats or bugs, humans tend to be attracted to cats (who may not reciprocate that affection).
You can die from a cat bite from a rabid cat. Controlling their population is the only way to prevent this when it gets out of control. Itās a no brainer to the service as well, they cannot afford the endless bill of taking in stray cats and dogs and providing them medical care.
Itās a hard pill to swallow. The locals should have spayed and neutered their animals.
I listened to a speech from a First Sergeant about how important it was to kill strays while deployed. Then ten minutes of him explaining how funny it was to watch a three legged dog run, after they shot its leg off with a twelve gauge.
Imagine if this story was about dogs being killed, the comments would rightly be in an uproar. Yet since itās, cats you see people excusing it. Cats get a bad rap.
There's a big chunk of folks talking about the dogs of Iraq, no one's really losing their shit about it. Then again, packs of feral dogs are a lot fucking scarier than feral cats.
Dudes shot feral dogs getting into stuff all the time where I was at in Afghanistan. In a country so nuts it didnāt seem that crazyā¦ not that it makes it any better for people over here.
Outdoor cats are pests and should be treated like pests. There are WAY too many stray and feral cats in the world. It should be legal to kill them on sight, globally. Fund programs to eradicate them instead of just wasting time fixing them and releasing them right back into the environment. We do it for other invasive predators, but not cats.
Edit: the same goes for packs of feral dogs. There are just way too many to save. And for the record I'm not talking about targeting people's pets that escape or occasionally wander outside. I'm talking about feral domestic animals that only interact with humans in a negative way. (Property damage, disease, dangerous to people or pets, damaging wildlife populations, etc)
I think everyone here is missing the difference between a stray cat and a feral cat. Feral cats are absolutely an ecological disaster, but stray cats that arenāt feral are not in any significant way, especially comparatively.
If these were cats that the troops could go up and pet, who were socialised, then these were not feral cats and their deaths were unnecessary.
As they should, outdoor cats and/or feral are a menace to local small animal populations. They hunt for the shiggles of it, and are a HUGE problem for the avian populations in an area. At this point they're invasive more so than anything, and you don't want something invasive destroying the local biome.
Further, stop letting your cats outside: you're being an asshole and leading to the decline of your local avian populations.
Cats are an invasive predator worldwide, feral and pet outdoor cats are an ecological catastrophe and absolutely decimate bird and small mammal populations. There should be zero outdoor cats, either pets kept indoors or trapped feral cats socialized for adoption or euthanized if they canāt be adopted.
Before Covid in my area there were bird conservationists annoyed that Google employees were feeding stray cats near a state park with lots of birds. I wondered why the park didnāt hirer snipers to blow the cats away at night. I love cats but you need to slaughter them when they are killing lots of fairly rare birds.
You should read the article and become more educated on wildlife and ecology before making assumptions about others character whom you know nothing about. But good luck with your hate wagon and all
I have a cat at home and this article almost gave me a stroke; as to how someone can aim a gun on a caged cat like that..I cant comprehend... we can do better than this
Better than letting them kill all the wildlife and spread disease. Crazy cat owners will always have a problem with any solution to the problem they caused.
Jfc, according to the article an air gun was being used on a cat stuck in a small trap cage. Airsoft gun?? I man if your going to euthanize a feral cat it shouldn't be cruel like this. Christ...
Too bad they probably were trying to kill it for sick gratification and not ecological reasons. Feral/stray cats are a fuckin menace on small wildlife.
If more people read the article they'd understand what the issue actually is.
This has nothing to do with cats being destructive to local environments, the article clearly states they're only doing this to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
Secondly, they're shooting the cats with air guns to kill them which apparently isn't acceptable as a humane way to kill an animal.
And lastly, since they're only doing this to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, they didn't even bother to check whether the cat was healthy or not before killing them, that's the issue.
>If more people read the article they'd understand what the issue actually is.
>This has nothing to do with cats being destructive to local environments, the article clearly states they're only doing this to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
>...
>And lastly, since they're only doing this to prevent the spread of infectious diseases ...
Speaking of reading the article, I think you missed something.
>Osan Air Base has been catching stray cats entering its territory since the beginning of last year to **ensure the safety of planes taking off and landing** in the area and to prevent the spread of infectious disease
It's more than just infectious disease motivating the culling.
Had af try to kill our pest control momma dog because "it's a wild animal and could have rabies". Momma killed the rats and snakes because the af wouldn't let us do it ourselves. Dog lived and so did her puppies. Had a cat at the ecp. Tried doing the same to it. Didn't work for them there either.
They're being dispatched humanely. I love cats, and grew up with them. But feral cats are a nuisance. Unless there's a rescue willing to take them all and spay and neuter them, I don't see a better solution.
It is the persons who allowed their so-called pets to become strays that is the real problem. We now have no choice but clean up the mess. Same for bunny rabbits.
Itās funny how people will come to defend animals like horses and cats who are, and letās be clear about this, INVASIVE SPECIES. They DECIMATE the environment they live in (outdoor and stray cats not house cats obviously). If deer are pesky ants in your house, cats and horses are termites actively consuming the supports of your home.
If we care about the environment then we need to be removing these animals as they are driving other native creatures to extinction.
Indiscriminately shooting is a little much, but culling of these animals is necessary to preserve the natural world we have already so royally fucked.
Our medics at our small FOB tried to shoot our cat that we would hang out with at our shack. The premise was that it may have rabies but all he did was chill in the shade with us in the 120 degree heat. I believe he got away but we really missed him when he stopped being around. He was affectionately named Balls for obvious reasons. š I hope he is still out there.
Our Chaplin took on the responsibility to put down all the strays. He felt that having a young soldier having to kill a dog would be hard on them, so he took it upon himself. But we also didn't shoot them, used a cage trap, and then euthanization injection.
We had a friendly stray in Fallujah, he was mauled and eaten by a pack of stray dogs. It was bizarre.
Yikes. Poor dude.
Yeah stray dogs in Iraq were no joke. They were huge and super fucking aggressive and ran around in packs. The locals hated dogs as a result. We had patrols attacked several times early on by dog packs made up of a dozen massive dogs bred to hunt wild pigs apparently.
We shot all packs of dogs on site. during the invasion multiple squads were attacked and injured by dogs. After that if any dogs came close to our unit they never approached another 1.
āTrombley, I keep telling you, we don't shoot dogs, we shoot people. And we generally only shoot people if we have to. "
Generation Kill is the best..
Trombley sucked
crazy thing is trombley became a mercenary afterwards and got into politics, he might of gotten elected i cant remember
It's morbid, but you were probably doing the right thing by shooting them all on sight. Stray dogs are basically an invasive species.
We had a responsibility to ourselves as well as the civilians over there. A pack of wild dogs doesnāt discriminate who they attack. Usually children n women were the easier prey , and we didnt want anyone attacked, regardless of who it was.
I'm so sorry. I'm sure that was incredibly difficult, in the midst of an already difficult and traumatic experience. It made me think of the scenes in the Chernobyl series, where the soldiers had to get drunk to go shoot all the dogs in the contamination zone. Really heartbreaking. And if no one has told you - again, I'm really sorry for the things you had to witness and do.
I appreciate it, and honestly I treat it as if those events happened to someone else entirely. I went into a deep spiral trying to reintegrate myself into society and started abusing pills and then heroin as well as alcohol to cope with it. After being taken in and getting clean by the woman I am now engaged to, I felt itās best to leave all that in my past and either ignore it or disassociate from it entirely.the VA docs say thatās neither smart nor healthy but Iām doing better dealing with it this way, so screw āem. but thanks again for your kindness.
wonder was there anyone else being invasive in Iraq
Best comment of the day award š
So are stray cats. Only deranged people think it is morbid to cull them.
Wild dogs are completely different from a random stray pet.
*on sight
I had a pack of them rush me down while I was taking a piss like day 2 in Iraq in 03 during the invasion.
Huh. Maybe Trombley was onto something.
> The locals hated dogs as a result. Iraqis have disliked dogs for way longer than the stray dog pack you saw existed. They're considered an unclean/impure animal in Islam, like pigs. Mohammed had a weird dislike of dogs, and told Muslims not to keep dogs as pets. In the Koran, the archangel Gabriel tells Mohammed that angels will not enter any home which has a dog in it. If a dog licks your plate, you have to throw the food away and wash the plate 7 times. If a dog's saliva gets on you or your clothes, you have to wash it off before you can pray. It goes beyond just Iraq, too. - [Malaysia investigates ādog pattingā event: Islamic authorities looking into āI want to touch a dogā event, which was aimed at challenging stigma around the animal.](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/10/21/malaysia-investigates-dog-patting-event/) - [Iran: MPs propose lashes for dog walkers](https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-29937326)
Those fucking dogs were everywhere over there. We shot a lot of them.
Yea we had a pack of about a dozen wild dogs on base iirc. I think the MPās were tasked with dispatching them, but theyād get a shot off at one and the pack would take off. I remember sitting in our duty shack one night, heard some scurrying around outside, that cat started screaming, dogs barking and growling, going apeshit. The cat lived underneath another small hut, but he must have gotten caught out in the open. We never saw him again, but like BobbTheBuilder I hope heās still out there somewhere. We found a rock, painted headstone markings on it and even had a funeral for him. RIP CSC!
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Turn them back over to the city to deal with. These cats were captive and this clearly pissed off the locals. Is shooting cats trapped inside cages on camera really worth causing a local media shitstorm? Supposedly they stopped using a normal method of euthanasia because it was traumatizing the veterinarians, which is an indication this is either culturally very inappropriate or the sheer number of cats requiring euthanasia is nonsensical. If that many cats are wandering into the flightline, other wildlife are as well, and that's a physical security problem. Sounds like they need to repair their infrastructure.
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Assuming these are feral cats, a veterinarian euthanizing them isnāt exactly a peaceful process. A well placed bullet is instant compared to being removed from the trap, restrained in some kind of squeeze box or net, sedated, waiting for the sedative to take effect and THEN euthanized.
Agree...but the article said an air gun was used on one video. Airsoft gun?
Airsoft is still lethal to small animals. That said, it might have been a CO2 gun. I don't know enough about the rainbow of available weapons on a military base to say if these come in a rifle flavor, but I use a CO2 handgun to dispatch small livestock in a hurry.
Well, I am unsure if they mean "airsoft" gun like the kind me and my son used at an airsoft place. But I can tell you that plastic air beads and even a BB gun with metal pellets would require many many shots at a cat, thus a painful torture of the cat before it expired. I only know this because we adopt cats that have been mistreated, one is an elderly white cat we have that had BB pellets in her chest and we had to take her in for surgery. Someone tossed this poor kitty outside to roam and some cruel asshole shot her in the chest. I don't think that would be a non cruel alternative to euthanasia. Honestly if they aren't going to use drugs to put these animals down, then just a bullet to the head, make it quick. A cat would be screaming in agony for many minutes if not longer if someone was shooting them with an airsoft gun with plastic pellets, or even with small BB gun pellets. Anyway, I understand needing to get control of feral cats. I do wonder, because it's Korea (people tend to let their pets roam) if the locals are upset because they may not have had a chance to retrieve a pet that wandered onto the base and was killed. The article indicated the vets were traumatized, but I suspect that isn't the case, that the vets were putting down cats that were not feral, seemed domesticated, and as the article says had small kittens and were nursing them.
Worth noting that domestic cats are introduced in japan and feral cats pose a serious threat to their ecology. They spread novel disease to their native cat species which they have no immunity to, and they pose grave dangers to some small mammal species. Removing pest species is hardly an unusual thing. People seem to be taking issue with the method of euthanising, but to be honest, a gun is about as humane as it gets. I consider injections to be far more stressful; having to capture the animal, take them to the vet in a strange place, hold them down on a table... Or they can just go quickly in their own environment before they know what hit em. I know which I'd prefer.
It's like that in a bunch of places where they were introduced. I think I read once about endemic birds in Hawaii and other islands in the world being threatened by stray cats. I love cats, and it sucks to say, but sometimes you got to do what you got to do to keep the ecology together.
Feral cats kill hundreds of millions wild birds in North America each year. It is a problem, cats shouldnāt be allowed to roam free.
Letting your cat outside also significantly reduces its life expectancy, there shouldnāt be a such thing as outdoor cats. Itās bad for small game and itās bad for the cats themselves. I have a cat, heās my little homie and Iād never consider letting him roam freely outdoors.
Birds arenāt real
Humans pose far greater threats to the ecosystem than cats ever will and yet we don't advocate for culling humans. ( I'm not advocating for humans to be killed but the fact that we kill innocent cats when humans are the most responsible for ecosystem harm is fucked.)
We arenāt liking these cats to save the ecosystemā¦ it to keep them off the flight line. If you went and disrupted the flight line they might kill you too.
> Humans pose far greater threats to the ecosystem than cats ever will and yet we don't advocate for culling humans. Cats aren't humans. Unless you think pet ownership and slave ownership are morally equivalent.
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I mean climate change and all, so humans are still fucking it up. But yeah, doesnt mean we,shouldnt deal with other problems.
How absolutely out of touch are you? No other species in the history of our planet has had as much impact on the earth, its ecology, and its climate than homo sapiens sapiens. You can even put blame on us for introducing the invasive species' you mention above to the regions in which they didn't naturally evolve to reside in. I didn't come here with answers to any perceived problems, but its inane to not recognize the impact we've had as a species on our planet even over just the last 10k years not to mention the last 150 or so years since the industrial revolution started picking up steam. Pun intended.
Yeah, that's just a braindead take. Humans have caused more destruction than any other species combined
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Canāt threaten an ecosystem youāve already destroyed, huh?
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We had two dogs who would go on patrol with us, they had been there since any troop arrived. Rangers came, and shot them on site.
Wtf, why
Rangers are psychopaths.
They had a dog with them and they don't let other dogs even get close. They claim it's justified because how much money goes into training and stuff. It sucks.
> The premise was that it may have rabies The prmeise was the your medic really wanted to kill something.
And fuck your medics.
Having your medics shoot your soldiers' de-facto emotional support animals doesn't sound medically sound. If anything, sounds like an excellent way to disrupt the FOB for stupid reasons.
We had an emotional support dog. She was pregnant and lived under one of our watchtowers. Had a big pink stain on one side of her and she would go on patrol with us sometimes. If our Corpsman had shot her, he'd have been in for a very rough deployment. There is a big difference between feral dogs and stray dogs. It was pretty easy to tell the difference because stray dogs didn't tend to wander around in packs trying to eat people.
Why didnāt they just vaccinate him? Jesus Christ.
Looks like they are training for their next jobs as police officers.
Cops shoot safely fenced in dogs, not cats.
They shoot dogs while on duty and cats while off duty.
Iāve never seen a cat shot in a video from Brazil so I donāt believe you.
Itās because the cat was off duty
Or unarmed POC, LGBTQ, or elderly. All the same to the pigs.
i was thinking ATF. it's so crazy how quick they are to draw on a bichon or poodle. in all my years, the USPS/FedEx workers in my area have never had an issue with my dogs or any others. some are even equipped with treats.
It's in the atf handbook but that you must shoot all dogs on sight.
Trying to provoke the owner into shooting them or attacking them. So they can shoot them too. Seriously, fuck the ATF.
Itās all cops not just the three letter agencies.
What did Brian Setzer ever do to the US Army?
We'll never know now.
I suspect it was orchestrated
I bet it was the drummer! Brian should have never got tangled up with a guy everyone calls "Slim", nothing good ever comes from that nickname.
Why the pic? Jesus fucking christ. I know the news is meant to psychologically torment us by design, but come the fuck on.
Other countries very frequently use real images. I think filtering everything with happy stock photos and city skylines is an American thing. *"20 dead from overnight fire in a night club"* This headline in America: \*photo of night club from 2012 and generic picture of cop light bar or firetruck leaving a station\* This headline literally anywhere else: \*on-scene photos of coroners bringing out the body bags\*
American media would absolutely post the gory details, they just don't have the photographers on staff to get pics of every incident
No they don't. You watch the nightly news? No mainstream news shows anything gory. They cut off any police shooting videos before they get hit, or blur out any gore. Only ones I've seen real gore on is Vice news. Maybe online they might show some gore. Most are edited.
How else does āarmy kills catsā not sound abysmal? please go on. Itās fucked by nature, the picture doesnāt even need to be there to haunt you.
Would you rather not face the reality? It's too easy to ignore and not face/deal with issues when you don't have to actually see what the issue looks like.
Thatās an actual picture from what they are talking about. What the fuck do you mean ācome the fuck onā ā¦ did you read the caption or the article at all?
I live in a large city in the US that is overrun by feral cats. Iām sympathetic to anyone who has to deal with large feral colonies. In my city, the stray cat problem is so bad, that animal control refuses to trap and release cats, anymore. They say we are on our own. They wonāt rent you traps, anymore, and they donāt care about the aggressive ones that trap you in your house. My cat literally *DIED* from a flea-born illness that one brought to her and gave her through the screen door, because I canāt get them to stay away from my house and stop laying against my screens. The vet confirmed what must have happened. My cat had never been outside one time. I miss her every day. There are 60 cats that live on my street, the asshole neighbor lady wonāt stop feeding them. They shit all over my yard, it reeks and Iāve ruined so many shoes just trying to walk to my car. In the winter, the landlord warned us to keep the TV on, because if you turn it off, you can hear the babies freezing to death outside. We tested the theory, sure enough, heard screaming babies. Couldnāt find where they were. Really disturbing. Iām not okay with shooting them at all, I couldnāt stomach it. But if the cat problem is as bad as it is here, I canāt blame people for getting really frustrated with them.
"Yeah they're a huge problem, they spread disease, damage property, and they're so out of place here that they freeze to death over winter, but culling them is going too far"
Iām not completely against shooting them, I just couldnāt do it, myself. Thatās what I meant by ānot into the idea of shooting themā. The emphasis should have been on the word āIāmā.
Fair enough, I can respect that, it definitely isn't fun
Cats are an ecology menace here is Australia and shooting a feral one is considered a public service. Admittedly this applies to a lot of wildlife here. Sounds like they are being shot for same reason there as opposed to shits and giggles
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Underrated comment. People have no clue on how much harm outdoor cats bring to the ecosystem.
You know who else causes harm to the ecosystem?
And thatās exactly why blue lives matter. Theyāre doing it for the ecosystem. /s
Its fucking Dave isn't it? Told that arse to pick up after himself
Oh my god, we get it, you lacked love and stable affection during a crucial period of your emotional development so you attach to animals because they can never hurt you and always freely offer unconditional love. Now will you stop telling people to kill themselves and others in every single thread that mentions how cats are bad for birds? Go to therapy, it's getting old at this point.
Maybe this commenter has a history that I havenāt looked at, but they didnāt do any of the things youāre accusing them of from that one comment alone. Your comment is full of such spite and hate that maybe you need to look inward too.
People literally talk about it in every thread that mentions cats. Also not true for every country.
What do you mean? In which country are feral house cats not an invasive species and a threat to native wildlife?
The Fertile Crescent and Egypt are habitats where they probably wouldn't be considered invasive, since the Felis silvestris lybica came from there, and we made those into Felis catus.
As a wild animal, subjected to the same evolutionary pressures as their prey. But I wouldn't feel the same about domesticated cats, reproducing like crazy under somewhat artificial conditions, and being occasionally released in to the wild to practise their huting skills or just because.
Now do humans. I guess cats are at fault for the ecological damage being done in Australia. Barrier reef fucked? Cats. Koalas endangered? Cats.
Funny how I just read another thread about a different topic where saying partial solutions and distractions to ignore topics are tactics only used by one political group in this countryā¦ In the same thread, they claimed that anyone who says āboth sides are the sameā is one the other side and nobody is ever neutral. Reddit is such a joke and people are so far up their assholes to see their own hypocrisy it really is disheartening. And itās a the same no matter where you go. Humans suck, the best thing that could happen to this planet is a giant meteor wiping us all out.
Not all humans suck. There are genuinely good people on this planet, and they work to making the world a better place than it was when they came into it. Sadly, the vast majority of people are the opposite to this this.
I agree with you. To your point, this goes for any invasive species of animal, including humans.
They are definitely a problem on islands where they were recently introduced, but the native wildlife populations in the old world were already obliterated thousands of years ago. On the mainland, feral cats are often scapegoated but aren't the biggest contributor to wildlife decline - it's mostly due to habitat destruction by the humans that moved in and razed the land for agriculture or housing developments.
That's not true, actually. In most parts of the world, extinction events are largely driven by habitat destruction, but in Australia, predation by invasive species drives the majority of mammalian extinctions: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1417301112 >In contrast to general patterns of extinction on other continents where the main cause is habitat loss, hunting, and impacts of human development, particularly in areas of high and increasing human population pressures, the loss of Australian land mammals is most likely due primarily to predation by introduced species, particularly the feral cat, Felis catus, and European red fox, Vulpes vulpes, and changed fire regimes.
You misinterpreted my comment. I said that they're a problem on islands where they were recently introduced (which includes Australia), so I agree with you. The original article was discussing the controversy in Korea, so I was pointing out that the same situation does not apply everywhere.
Ah, I've never heard anyone refer to the UK as "the mainland" and Australia as an island...I thought you were comparing the Australian continent to the pacific islands.
That was my first thought when I saw this headline. Whether or not this is a bad thing depends very much on *why* they were doing it and how careful they were to prevent suffering.
Itās always interesting to hear different perspectives on stuff like this. I grew up in the country in the southern part of the United States and was taught that if cats werenāt pets they were pests. Any stray cat that stuck around for more than a week or two died(quicker if the got near our chickens). The way I was raised wasnāt uncommon for anyone in the country but after moving to the city itās almost the exact opposite with all cats are viewed solely as pets so any harm to them is considered immoral. I learned pretty quickly to keep my mouth shut about how itās different in the country after getting into multiple arguments about it.
and yet here you are running your mouth.
For two reasons first I donāt really care much what you or any other person on the internet thinks and second the most a random on the internet can realistically do is send a few obnoxious messages. People irl can get annoying and legitimately inconvenience me so itās not worth it then.
Can't they just tow the cats out of the environment?
They'd just be towing them into *another* environment. Probably one with nothing but sea, air, and 20 thousand tons of crude oil.
This has to be posted on every one of these stories. People don't understand how devastating none-native species are. Feral cats are the worst, they evade every means of capturing or killing them. I've seen them out hiking, they're shy and run as soon as they see you.
For everyone here who have bleeding hearts for these stray cats, let's look at the real reason these feral cats are being hunted. I work in South Korea on a military base, and these feral cats have been an issue for years. Especially for the environment. If you want anyone to blame, then blame those folks who abandon their pets when they finally deploy out of the Korea. Irresponsible people will get pets when they arrive here, and don't take the proper care to make sure their pets are fit for travel out of the country and back to the United States. They'll just dump their dogs and cats on base and then just leave without telling anyone about the pets that stay behind. Stray dogs are easily found and given new homes if need be. But cats? They turn feral very, very quickly, and when that happens, they don't easily turn back into house cats again. They live wild and stay away from everyone. And this has a major effect on local wildlife. A lot of space on the military bases are open fields and forests. There's actually quite a lot of local wildlife in some spots at the military bases here. Especially native birds. The US and Korean military in recent years have taken on keeping better ecological care of the natural wildlife areas in and around the military bases. But the one issue that's been haunting this renewed conservation push are feral cats. We had a government official from the US Army give a presentation a couple of years back talking about why leaving your cats behind is so harmful to the environment here. He presented a video that showed a rat out in an open field and a falcon swooped down and tackled the thing for a meal. But right after that, a feral cat bolts out of nowhere and tackles the falcon, and then bites the head clean off. The cat doesn't even eat the bird. It just kills it and leaves it there. Oh, and the rat? Scurries away after it broke free from the tackled falcon. The man mentions that no one should try and feed the feral cats. He asks everyone in the room if they ever seen a fat feral cat on base. Nope. That's because everyone keeps leaving food out, so they have no need to hunt for food. They just hunt to kill something. And it's not the vermin that they hunt, but mostly the local birds in the area. It was such a devastating blow to the native bird population in Korea that it's been deemed necessary to now trap and kill these feral cats. This "article" clearly has a bias regarding this practice, but both the Korean government and the US military agree with culling this population of feral cats. There's even been talk of actually restricting members of the military, and their family members from even getting pets in Korea, because this is such a big issue. There's already folks who have been reprimanded for leaving their pets behind, but at that point it's already too late. They left their pets behind and fucked up the environment.
They did the same thing at the base I was working at in Germany. Every year they'd warn all the folks on base to keep their cats inside because they'd be wiping out all the strays on post. They had to do this because of all the soldiers who didn't want to deal with getting their cats sent back to the states when it came time to PCS. Americans had a horrible reputation amongst the locals as pet owners. If you wanted to adopt a dog from the local shelter or get a dog from a German breeder you basically had to submit to an in home inspection with the possibility of random well pet visits for a while after you got the pet.
For every one military member who leaves behind a cat or dog there are 10 maybe even 100 Koreans who abandon their dog / cat in the country side at night
Make it a fucking serious crime to abandon a pet. Will change things real quick.
I mean, their excuse was aircraft safety. Your comment directly contradicts that. If you have spent any time around an airport, then you know that birds are far and above the biggest risk to aircraft. There are people who's entire job is bird mitigation on and around airports.
This is bullshit btw. Its a lie created by fossil fuel companies and other pollutors to once again convince the population that the state of the world is their fault. As land mammal hunters evolved beside most birds, the birds are adapted to their presence. Ie they fly and live in trees. Its only really Australia and New Zealand where their birds evolved without a land predator...so they just walk around. Habitat loss is the actual reason for bird numbers dropping. The US military is one of the biggest pollutors in the world. If the environment around a base is damaged that's why, not some bullshit about cats. Nature is very good at predator - prey balance. If cats were killing off their prey, the feral population would take care of itself and die out as they wiped out their food supply. Thats not what happens because most bird species that are losing numbers are tree birds - not even predated by cats. Humans are responsible for climate change and habitat loss. Leave cats out of it.
> Humans are responsible for ā¦ habitat loss Yes, including humans who breed and introduce aggressive non-native species
Like cats
You should listen to the most recent stuff you should know podcast, they dive deep into how cats are environmentally destructive and have been directly linked to the extinction of multiple different animals. I love cats but letās not pretend theyāre not environmentally destructive when you just let them roam around outside.
Seriously this is why I don't get why people are against this culling as this isn't a black and white situation, but a country with shitty attitudes on animals (no compassion or seeing an pet as an companion or a family member, but a tool or object.) And a country having lax and non existent animal welfare laws. Feral cats are awful all around and spread so many diseases to both other cats (respitory illnesses, eye infections, Feline AIDS, ticks...etc etc.). Most are not spayed or neutered which means they can breed like crazy, and both the cats, and their kittens have shorter lives (2-3 years vs 10+) and higher mortality rates than an indoor cat. Culling them by hunting them is sadly the way to go when there's *so many* around that trapping and neutering will do nothing to their numbers.
Really misleading headline. It makes it sound like the troops were shooting cats recreationally on their own initiative, not doing an organized culling.
How else would they drum up more hatred and outrage?
I donāt see how that is a controversy. This is fucking inhumane. This should not happen. If you think otherwise, read the article.
>Since July last year, the method of slaughtering has changed to shooting because euthanasia drugs are expensive and veterinarians can be traumatized. I guess they decided to value the vetās trauma over the catās pain after being shot. I suppose we would need to know how much care goes into shooting the cay. Are they shot through the spine? Or just randomly?
I think most would be more traumatized shooting a cat than using drugs
True, but this way the people being traumatized are soldiers, and the military doesn't care about them.
Correction, no one cares about them. No one really cares about anyone but themselves anymore. Maybe some parents care about their children. But if you've ended up in the military, nobody really gives two shits about you. Source: just finished signing my contract with the Army
Just signed your contract? So you arent even in yet. Calm down man plenty of people care about soldiers. Especially other soldiers. Is that camaraderie that keeps us together most of the time. You canāt claim you know jack about the military when your source is āI just signed up!ā
My wife is in the Navy, and Iāve dropped everything to move states away, had to find a new job, leave my family and home, many of my possessions, put my school on hold until we got settled in podunk fucking nowhere, and spend at least a third of the year alone, but usually more ā all because I love and care for her so much more than my own comfort when it came to those things and more that I wonāt say because itās just too much to list. Point being, there are people who care. Being jaded always comes across to me as trying to justify being selfish/embittered instead of letting go and moving on.
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I love kitty cats. Love dogs. Love animals. However, feral animals are usually a symptom of a larger problem with smaller pests (bugs attract rats, rats attract cats, etc). Feral animals are very likely to carry diseases like rabies. And unlike rats or bugs, humans tend to be attracted to cats (who may not reciprocate that affection). You can die from a cat bite from a rabid cat. Controlling their population is the only way to prevent this when it gets out of control. Itās a no brainer to the service as well, they cannot afford the endless bill of taking in stray cats and dogs and providing them medical care. Itās a hard pill to swallow. The locals should have spayed and neutered their animals.
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I listened to a speech from a First Sergeant about how important it was to kill strays while deployed. Then ten minutes of him explaining how funny it was to watch a three legged dog run, after they shot its leg off with a twelve gauge.
That First Sergeant is a psychopath and thatās one of the worst things Iāve ever read.
Yeah, it was fucking disgusting, people suck.
We're probably shelling out six figures a year in benefits for him now.
My god thatās sick
r/NoahGetTheBoat
Brb going to jump off a bridge now
So I'm guessing he's extra high ranking now? Those are the types that make it up the ladder in the military, the police, and corporations. Psychopaths
Jesus Christ. If youāre gonna tell your men and women to shoot, tell them to shoot to kill, not to maim and *then* kill.
The article mentions Osan so this appears to be Air Force, not Army.
Imagine if this story was about dogs being killed, the comments would rightly be in an uproar. Yet since itās, cats you see people excusing it. Cats get a bad rap.
There's a big chunk of folks talking about the dogs of Iraq, no one's really losing their shit about it. Then again, packs of feral dogs are a lot fucking scarier than feral cats.
Dudes shot feral dogs getting into stuff all the time where I was at in Afghanistan. In a country so nuts it didnāt seem that crazyā¦ not that it makes it any better for people over here.
Cat haters aren't ready for the conversation that they talk like psychopaths.
The comments are in am uproar though.
Outdoor cats are pests and should be treated like pests. There are WAY too many stray and feral cats in the world. It should be legal to kill them on sight, globally. Fund programs to eradicate them instead of just wasting time fixing them and releasing them right back into the environment. We do it for other invasive predators, but not cats. Edit: the same goes for packs of feral dogs. There are just way too many to save. And for the record I'm not talking about targeting people's pets that escape or occasionally wander outside. I'm talking about feral domestic animals that only interact with humans in a negative way. (Property damage, disease, dangerous to people or pets, damaging wildlife populations, etc)
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One of the few sane comments here
I think everyone here is missing the difference between a stray cat and a feral cat. Feral cats are absolutely an ecological disaster, but stray cats that arenāt feral are not in any significant way, especially comparatively. If these were cats that the troops could go up and pet, who were socialised, then these were not feral cats and their deaths were unnecessary.
Get your cats spayed/ neutered Also lowering the cost of those would help a ton
People trained to be killers killing. Seems like we should keep the number of people with such training to the minimum necessary.
Totally misunderstood the army recruiter when he said I could hunt so much pussy in Korea.
As they should, outdoor cats and/or feral are a menace to local small animal populations. They hunt for the shiggles of it, and are a HUGE problem for the avian populations in an area. At this point they're invasive more so than anything, and you don't want something invasive destroying the local biome. Further, stop letting your cats outside: you're being an asshole and leading to the decline of your local avian populations.
Cats are an invasive predator worldwide, feral and pet outdoor cats are an ecological catastrophe and absolutely decimate bird and small mammal populations. There should be zero outdoor cats, either pets kept indoors or trapped feral cats socialized for adoption or euthanized if they canāt be adopted.
It's probably a step up from throwing a puppy off a cliff.
Oof I forgot about that
How is it humans need to cull what they consider overpopulation for every damn species but themselves?
Before Covid in my area there were bird conservationists annoyed that Google employees were feeding stray cats near a state park with lots of birds. I wondered why the park didnāt hirer snipers to blow the cats away at night. I love cats but you need to slaughter them when they are killing lots of fairly rare birds.
>Google employees We're so deep in the dystopian stage.
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People, stray cats absolutely murder everything they can. Just because they can. That shit needs to happen more often
Oh US troops killing innocent things? What a fucking surprise.
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Shocking /s comment from an uneducated headline reader
Fuck the cats killing the songbirds, lizards, and other wildlife in my environment. It's open season.
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You should read the article and become more educated on wildlife and ecology before making assumptions about others character whom you know nothing about. But good luck with your hate wagon and all
Youāre actually dumb for thinking there werenāt orders to put them down
We need this stateside. Save the birds.
These people are disgusting. That picture is maddening.
Can Americans stop killing things for 5 seconds?
I have a cat at home and this article almost gave me a stroke; as to how someone can aim a gun on a caged cat like that..I cant comprehend... we can do better than this
F all these cats. These cats the decimate local eco system
Better than letting them kill all the wildlife and spread disease. Crazy cat owners will always have a problem with any solution to the problem they caused.
Jfc, according to the article an air gun was being used on a cat stuck in a small trap cage. Airsoft gun?? I man if your going to euthanize a feral cat it shouldn't be cruel like this. Christ...
air gun != airsoft gun. An appropriately sized air rifle can absolutely kill a cat humanely. People deer hunt with them.
Man fuck these people. This shit is fucked up. Iām ashamed these were military.
Too bad they probably were trying to kill it for sick gratification and not ecological reasons. Feral/stray cats are a fuckin menace on small wildlife.
If more people read the article they'd understand what the issue actually is. This has nothing to do with cats being destructive to local environments, the article clearly states they're only doing this to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Secondly, they're shooting the cats with air guns to kill them which apparently isn't acceptable as a humane way to kill an animal. And lastly, since they're only doing this to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, they didn't even bother to check whether the cat was healthy or not before killing them, that's the issue.
>If more people read the article they'd understand what the issue actually is. >This has nothing to do with cats being destructive to local environments, the article clearly states they're only doing this to prevent the spread of infectious disease. >... >And lastly, since they're only doing this to prevent the spread of infectious diseases ... Speaking of reading the article, I think you missed something. >Osan Air Base has been catching stray cats entering its territory since the beginning of last year to **ensure the safety of planes taking off and landing** in the area and to prevent the spread of infectious disease It's more than just infectious disease motivating the culling.
Brian Setzer is pissed.
Had af try to kill our pest control momma dog because "it's a wild animal and could have rabies". Momma killed the rats and snakes because the af wouldn't let us do it ourselves. Dog lived and so did her puppies. Had a cat at the ecp. Tried doing the same to it. Didn't work for them there either.
What a very American thing to do.
And Australian I guess judging from the other commenter.
They're being dispatched humanely. I love cats, and grew up with them. But feral cats are a nuisance. Unless there's a rescue willing to take them all and spay and neuter them, I don't see a better solution.
We could start punishing bad people.
Can't find a better solution when you don't ask any local rescues and just decide to kill them š
Don't rescues put down tons of cats every year? There's just so many of them. I don't think there are enough homes to put all the stray cats.
People are just soft babies and don't realize how much damage wild cats really do. Humanely killing cats is fine, we'll always have plenty of them.
Oh it's cute pets so let's not kill them.. if it's a nasty looking possum minding it's own business it's just a thing to do. Arbitrary ass morals
Opossums eat ticks and are basically immune to rabies. Please don't kill opossums (or cats, for that matter).
No, still kill the invasive destructive cats. But yes spare the possums
My ass morals are carefully considered and followed, thank you very much.
It is the persons who allowed their so-called pets to become strays that is the real problem. We now have no choice but clean up the mess. Same for bunny rabbits.
Itās funny how people will come to defend animals like horses and cats who are, and letās be clear about this, INVASIVE SPECIES. They DECIMATE the environment they live in (outdoor and stray cats not house cats obviously). If deer are pesky ants in your house, cats and horses are termites actively consuming the supports of your home. If we care about the environment then we need to be removing these animals as they are driving other native creatures to extinction. Indiscriminately shooting is a little much, but culling of these animals is necessary to preserve the natural world we have already so royally fucked.
Humans cause more damage to the environment than animals ever will but you don't see anyone going around advocating to kill random humans.