dlowan wrote:Lookit, if I wanted to playu it the way the big guys play it, I would simply have lied to the UN, invaded Hungary, stuffed up the Congo,, murdered Allende, and starved the cats to death as part of agriculture reform.
I wanna play it ethically and legally.
OK, fine, throw the lawbook at it.
Or the bible.
First off, in 1232, Pope Gregory IX declared that the cat was a diabolical creature. So extinguishing the cat is at the very least a way to serve the Lord, which by definition is ethical.
Second, it's a question of self-defence. According to the English Witchcraft Act of 1563, persons who kept cats are themselves to be suspected of "wickedness", liable to be put to death along with their cats. So you'd better kill it before you get the bullet yourself.
Third, the status of the domestic cat in common law is very clear: cats are property. In 1769 already, William Blackstone, in applying theories of property argued by Hobbes and Locke, in his famous "Rights of Things" wrote that the value of animals "kept for pleasure, curiosity or whim", such as cats, depended wholly "on the caprice of ownersÂ…" With regard to tame animals, he wrote that "[A] man may have as absolute a property as in any inanimate beings". James Kent in 1896 also wrote that any animal regarded as "tame" is "the subject of absolute property".
So basically, you can do whatever the f you want with it, according to the esteemed legal scholars of lore.
Mind you, it is true that in Celinski v. State, 911 S.W.2d 177 (Tx. Ct. App. 1995) the Texas Court of Appeals found an appellant guilty of committing cruelty to two cats, but that was because he had microwaved respectively poisoned them. So I suggest shooting instead.
Ok, so it wasn't a very good joke. But, I tried.
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