Sarah Hill allegedly has been harboring and feeding a dangerous criminal: her eight-year-old cat Cameron. She has been criminally charged under a Kalamazoo city ordinance after a neighbor reported that Cameron had attacked her cat.
She could face 90 days in jail and a $500 fine for the cat fight.
The neighbor Elizabeth Eisenbach reported to Kalamazoo County Animal Services and Enforcement that Hill’s cat had attacked her cat, William. Her witness account say that she saw Cameron chasing William down the street “attacking William’s rear end.” She eventually chased Cameron away and took William to the vet for scratches.
Hill is an associate professor of anthropology and environmental studies at Western Michigan University and has retained counsel.
It seems another example of the criminalization of America where civil disputes are turned into criminal matters, here.
For the full story, click here.
Bees,
Mission accomplished.
All this time I was thinking that fighting was a natural instinct in cats, dogs, and every warm and cold blooded creature inhabiting this earth. Who would have ever thought cats … fight?
@tootie: I admire that you have come up with a post that is so generalized that it can be used as a comment for nearly any article on mlive. I bet that allows you to streamline posting by removing the terrible burden of reading articles and thinking about what you read.
@buddha: thanks for the good insights about cats. Most of us here in Kalamazoo think cats spend all of their time blogging. Your masterful use of capitalization made your argument especially compelling–I really felt like you were in the room shouting at me.
I do not have the ordinances at hand, but I am pretty sure that what was used against Ms Hill is a reasonable law about dangerous animals, not a bad law about cats. For example, I do not want my neighbors to keep wolves or tootie as pets. (It is a little sad that I can’t handle such situations by shooting out the neighbor’s window, as we did in the days before the liberal lawmakers ruined everything.)
The problem is not the ordinance, or the punishment attached to the ordinance, but the application of a law regarding dangerous animals to a housecat. What I find most disturbing is that the DA has allowed this law to be used in a dispute between two neighbors, both of whom did the very same thing: let their cats out at night.