138 



THE GAME BREEDER 



not a sunflower, wild rose or even a weed 

 remains on vast areas. There is abso- 

 lutely no cover and no food and under 

 such conditions laws prohibiting shooting 

 at all times will not save the game and 

 certainly they will not restore it on miles 

 of land where it has been extirpated. 



In many of the Eastern and Southern 

 States the conditions are quite different. 



Where agriculture has waned and where 

 the weeds, brush and briars are over- 

 abundant the ground should be made at- 

 tractive by cutting openings and rides 

 through the brush and by making many 

 attractive fields, small ones will do, where 

 grain and other foods are planted. It is 

 far more difficult to control the vermin 

 on such areas than it is on the closely 

 tilled farms of the West. 



LEGAL RIGHTS OF THE CAT. 



By Edward Howe Forbush. 



During the past century cat lovers have 

 made many attempts to prove that their 

 pets are entitled to some rights under the 

 law, but English law seems to find little 

 merit in their claims. An articled clerk, 

 writing to the London Standard, says : 



It is clearly laid down in "Addison on 

 Torts" that a person is not justified in 

 killing his neighbor's cat or dog which he 

 finds on his land, unless the animal is in 

 the act of doing some injurious act which 

 can be prevented by its slaughter. If a 

 person sets on his land a trap for foxes, 

 and baits it with such strong-smelling 

 meat as to attract his neighbor's dog or 

 cat on to his land to the trap, and sucn 

 animal is injured or killed, he is liable 

 for the cat, though he had no such inten- 

 tion and though the animal ought not to 

 have been on his land. 



The French courts have given the cat 

 owner no damages in such or similar 

 cases. The local magistrate of Fontaine- 

 bleau heard a case in which a man, an- 

 noyed by neighboring cats, kept traps in 

 his garden and caught fifteen. The 

 neighbors combined to bring him to jus- 

 tice. The judge decided in favor of the 

 neighbors, but in a higher correctional 

 tribunal the decision was reversed.* In 

 ' some European countries cats are outside 

 the law the moment they leave their 

 owner's premises, or as soon as they have 



*The Cat, Past and Present, translated from 

 - the French of M. Champfleury, with notes by 

 Mrs. Cashel Hoey, 1885, pp. 65, 66. 



passed beyond a certain radius from a 

 building. In certain German cities cats 

 are licensed also, but have no rights when 

 they have passed certain limits. Herr 

 Friedrich Schwabe, head of the von Ber- 

 lepsch School of Bird Protection at See- 

 bach, writes a? follows to Mr. William P. 

 Wharton of Groton (translated from the 

 German) : 



The law for killing roaming cats varies 

 according to whether it is carried out by 

 those empowered to do so or by owners 

 without authorization. The former may, 

 without further ceremony, shoot any cat, 

 whether roaming wild or not, which they 

 find on their beat, no matter whether the 

 owner is known to them or not. But they 

 (the shooters) must keep a certain dis- 

 tance away from any inhabited building, 

 this distance varying in different States 

 (usually it amounts to 200 metres). In 

 most domains, those having the legal 

 right to shoot may even demand a tee 

 from the owner of the cat, which fee the 

 owner must pay. The owner of a garden 

 or park who has suffered damage on ac- 

 count of bird-catching cats need only 

 refer to paragraph 228 of our code of 

 civil law if he wishes to legally justify 

 the killing of cats. "After this any one 

 who harms or destroys a foreign object 

 in order to ward off threatened danger 

 from himself or from some other person 

 does not commit an illegal act, provided 

 the harm or destruction is necessary for 

 warding off the danger, and provided the 





