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Whether it is local ‘cat-seducers’, out-and-out thievery or marauding toms, our feline friends are prompting furious rows and rivalries between neighbours.
Forget teenagers with asbos or improperly demarcated boundary fences. Cats are the great neighbourhood menace of our age, as likely to rip apart once-harmonious communities as Japanese knotweed. They pad between homes, destroying civic feeling, pitting us against each other in our search for their devotion. Think politics creates division? Cats are worse.
Last week, it was reported that a Hammersmith couple, John and Jackie Hall, had waged a legal battle to prevent a nearby resident, Nicola Lesbirel, from stealing their maine coon, Ozzy. The Halls accused Lesbirel of repeatedly feeding Ozzy, taking him into her house and replacing Ozzy’s collar with one that had Lesbirel’s phone number and the words “My home” on it.
As the situation escalated, emails were exchanged. “He is very loved and well cared for and he is very attached to his territory, and to me,” Lesbirel wrote. “Surely leaving him where he is determined to be and where you can be reassured he is settled and happy and healthy is the best thing for everyone involved, both feline and human.” Jackie responded: “He is not your cat and we are not just giving him over to you.” In a subsequent email to Lesbirel, she wrote: “‘The question we all have asked ourselves year after year: why doesn’t Nicola just get her own cat? Why can’t she just leave ours alone?’”
“It’s a sad case,” says the Halls’ barrister, Tom Weisselberg QC. “If she’d seen sense, everyone’s time and money would have been saved.” He worked pro bono on the case, because the Halls are friends. There are few legal options for someone wanting to stop their neighbour stealing their cat. Technically, it’s theft, but generally the police won’t get involved. “You have to show that they intend to deprive you permanently of possession,” Weisselberg says. “That’s a high threshold to satisfy.”
When he was a junior barrister, Weisselberg worked on a legal dispute between Kuwait Airways and Iraqi Airways. The Kuwaitis argued, successfully, that the Iraqis had in effect stolen some Kuwaiti planes, because they had painted their own colours on them, thereby converting them. “I said: ‘Look, if the Kuwaitis can say the Iraqis converted their aircraft by putting different colours on the planes, why can’t you say the defendant has converted your cat by changing its collar?’” Weisselberg planned to use this precedent in court but, at the courthouse door, Lesbirel agreed to a number of restrictions on contact with Ozzy.
Ozzy isn’t the only cat tearing communities asunder. “We thought it would be our forever home,” sighs Lana, 49, a company director from London. In 2017, Lana, her husband, their children and their three cats moved to rural Scotland. It was a stretch to take on the mortgage, but it was the home they had always dreamed of and the neighbours were welcoming – at first.
In October, however, the shooting season started. “A neighbour said: ‘I’d keep your cats in. We know the groundskeeper has shot 12 cats to stop them taking the game birds.” Lana and her husband were appalled, but thought that, if they reasoned with the local landowner, he would have his gamekeeper leave the cats alone. They were wrong. “He said: ‘It’s my land, I’ll do what the hell I like. Who do you think you are? You’re not even from round here!’” Once-friendly neighbours took his side. “We were shunned. He had a lot of influence in the community.”
t is easy to pin neighbourhood strife on cats. Cunning little things; the tyrants of our homes. But what if cats aren’t the enemy within – what if we humans are to blame? We take what is not ours; we covet thy neighbour’s cat. Really, it is not the cat’s fault. They are just doing what is natural. Butcher tells me that about 50% of cats have a second home they frequent regularly. He has heard of four people believing they own the same cat. Cats are sensitive to changes in their home environment: new babies, flooring or pets may prompt them to relocate.
It is a disobliging truth: cats do not obey humans. Their capriciousness is legendary, their cynicism ancient. There is probably a cave painting of a cat skulking away from its owner in search of a warmer fire. “You cannot reduce a cat to a possession, because it will not allow it to happen,” says Butcher. “It’s too wilful.”
You can never really own a cat, only rent its affections for a while. One day, it will slink out of the door: a heartless courtesan, in search of a better prospect.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/22/claws-out-why-cats-are-causing-chaos-and-controversy-across-britain
Forget teenagers with asbos or improperly demarcated boundary fences. Cats are the great neighbourhood menace of our age, as likely to rip apart once-harmonious communities as Japanese knotweed. They pad between homes, destroying civic feeling, pitting us against each other in our search for their devotion. Think politics creates division? Cats are worse.
Last week, it was reported that a Hammersmith couple, John and Jackie Hall, had waged a legal battle to prevent a nearby resident, Nicola Lesbirel, from stealing their maine coon, Ozzy. The Halls accused Lesbirel of repeatedly feeding Ozzy, taking him into her house and replacing Ozzy’s collar with one that had Lesbirel’s phone number and the words “My home” on it.
As the situation escalated, emails were exchanged. “He is very loved and well cared for and he is very attached to his territory, and to me,” Lesbirel wrote. “Surely leaving him where he is determined to be and where you can be reassured he is settled and happy and healthy is the best thing for everyone involved, both feline and human.” Jackie responded: “He is not your cat and we are not just giving him over to you.” In a subsequent email to Lesbirel, she wrote: “‘The question we all have asked ourselves year after year: why doesn’t Nicola just get her own cat? Why can’t she just leave ours alone?’”
“It’s a sad case,” says the Halls’ barrister, Tom Weisselberg QC. “If she’d seen sense, everyone’s time and money would have been saved.” He worked pro bono on the case, because the Halls are friends. There are few legal options for someone wanting to stop their neighbour stealing their cat. Technically, it’s theft, but generally the police won’t get involved. “You have to show that they intend to deprive you permanently of possession,” Weisselberg says. “That’s a high threshold to satisfy.”
When he was a junior barrister, Weisselberg worked on a legal dispute between Kuwait Airways and Iraqi Airways. The Kuwaitis argued, successfully, that the Iraqis had in effect stolen some Kuwaiti planes, because they had painted their own colours on them, thereby converting them. “I said: ‘Look, if the Kuwaitis can say the Iraqis converted their aircraft by putting different colours on the planes, why can’t you say the defendant has converted your cat by changing its collar?’” Weisselberg planned to use this precedent in court but, at the courthouse door, Lesbirel agreed to a number of restrictions on contact with Ozzy.
Ozzy isn’t the only cat tearing communities asunder. “We thought it would be our forever home,” sighs Lana, 49, a company director from London. In 2017, Lana, her husband, their children and their three cats moved to rural Scotland. It was a stretch to take on the mortgage, but it was the home they had always dreamed of and the neighbours were welcoming – at first.
In October, however, the shooting season started. “A neighbour said: ‘I’d keep your cats in. We know the groundskeeper has shot 12 cats to stop them taking the game birds.” Lana and her husband were appalled, but thought that, if they reasoned with the local landowner, he would have his gamekeeper leave the cats alone. They were wrong. “He said: ‘It’s my land, I’ll do what the hell I like. Who do you think you are? You’re not even from round here!’” Once-friendly neighbours took his side. “We were shunned. He had a lot of influence in the community.”
t is easy to pin neighbourhood strife on cats. Cunning little things; the tyrants of our homes. But what if cats aren’t the enemy within – what if we humans are to blame? We take what is not ours; we covet thy neighbour’s cat. Really, it is not the cat’s fault. They are just doing what is natural. Butcher tells me that about 50% of cats have a second home they frequent regularly. He has heard of four people believing they own the same cat. Cats are sensitive to changes in their home environment: new babies, flooring or pets may prompt them to relocate.
It is a disobliging truth: cats do not obey humans. Their capriciousness is legendary, their cynicism ancient. There is probably a cave painting of a cat skulking away from its owner in search of a warmer fire. “You cannot reduce a cat to a possession, because it will not allow it to happen,” says Butcher. “It’s too wilful.”
You can never really own a cat, only rent its affections for a while. One day, it will slink out of the door: a heartless courtesan, in search of a better prospect.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/22/claws-out-why-cats-are-causing-chaos-and-controversy-across-britain
