The Neighbors Are Torturing And Killing My Cats

Yesterday was supposed to be a good day.

As I left the house to go do adult things, I just knew it was going to be a good day. And I'm not usually wrong about these things. But yesterday, July 29th, 2024... I was very very wrong.

Many people know I have a cat colony up at my house.

All of my cats are fixed, and 80% of them are rescues. I owned a thrift store, and I was a proud supporter of my local humane society. I became a drop-off point for people who wanted to donate food, bedding, and other supplies for the local fosters of the humane society. Most people saw my sign indicating that I was a supporter of the humane society and a drop-off point for them as a sign that also read: "Bring me all of the animals you find I can help them."

My sign did NOT actually read that, but many people assumed it did. I found that approximately only 1% of people read signs that are hanging up in doorways for their convenience. But over the course of two years, I was brought 6 cats, none of which the humane society had the ability or resources to help me with.

Most of them, when I had them were found as TINY kittens, who still needed to be bottle-fed. I have a long history of helping with rescue animals, down to my childhood, so I didn't feel all that much pressure. I'd bottlefeed these kittens and raise them up old enough, and by then I didn't feel the need to rehome them because I was bonded with them.

My cat colony ended up reaching 17 cats. And yes, it's expensive to feed 17 cats. Now normally, anyone with 17 cats, I would be like: "Whoa. That's...a lot. Is that sanitary? Or safe?"

But you see. I wouldn't have made my cat colony if conditions wouldn't have suited them, myself, or my neighbors. I own 3 acres of land, 90% of it is wilderness forest. I live in a holler, and my closest neighbors are half an acre down the hill. Most of them are purely outdoor cats - because that's how the cats like it. The others are partially indoor outdoors, while 4 of them are only indoor cats.

My Forest Cat Haven

I clean my litter boxes 2 to 4 times a day (depending on how many kitties want to come inside and hang out that day. And yes, I really do that many times a day), so my house does NOT smell like a cat (because I HATE the smell of dirty cat boxes, which is why 13 of the cats were trained to ask to go outside to potty like dogs).

All of the cats are fixed and vaccinated too. Yeah. I've spent a lot of money on these cats. Because I love them, and they each have a personality. I have bonded with them all, and know each of their boundaries and personalities.

For example, two of my pure outdoor cats. Faith likes to lay on the chicken coop, in hopes one of them will come out and she can pounce on it and eat it. Leo, her boyfriend, protects the chickens and keeps her out of them. Some of the younger boys are on snake patrol, and they enjoy hunting down and killing the snakes that are within the vicinity of my house.

I love my little apex predators, because I have young children who like to play outside - and in my opinion, the cats are worth their weight in gold because they eliminate threats to my children while playing in our forest haven, and keep my garden clear of snakes too.

A few months ago...

I had just barely gotten over the trauma of looking out my door and seeing one of my grey cats, trying to walk home. His back end flopping back and forth, falling and staggering up the hill. I ran outside barefoot calling his name: "Baby Cat! I'm coming, Baby! I'm here!"

When he heard my voice, he stopped and laid down and just waited, an exhausted lump on the ground. I reached him and knelt down talking.

"I'm here honey. I'm here." A soft weak meow was the only response as I picked him up. The first thing I noticed was the shit smeared down him on one side from the top of his head to the tip of his tail. It looked and smelled like human feces - when you work with animals a lot, yes, you can tell the difference oftentimes. It was in his open, bulging eye that looked like a shattered camera lens. It was deep inside his ear, crusted with blood. I picked him up and ran inside yelling for help.

Checking his body... no signs of damage to his body. But his head... I thought at first he was kicked by a horse. There's a few in the field below the house, and he often went down there to hang out with them. But I realized the way he was crawling he had been crawling up from the opposite direction... from the hill down my driveway where I have neighbors resting at the bottom of the hill.

I think back to a couple of years ago when I didn't have as many cats, and another grey cat had crawled home in this condition. She hadn't made it. Neither did Baby Cat. We drove to the animal emergency hospital - the best in the state even. In the end, they didn't have hope for him and even suggested euthanasia to spare him.

I carried him home to our vet in a cardboard box so we could get their cremation services, sobbing the whole way home- racked with guilt that I couldn't save him and sobbing for our family's loss. Baby Cat was one of our OG Colony cats, and he had been in the family for almost 4 years. My whole family cried for days.

I made a police report on my neighbor because of how he had come crawling back, and the fact of the matter is.. my neighbors are fucking weird, racist assholes. This is the whole neighborhood's thoughts on them, not just mine, since years before they began to kill my cats. They have caused issues with everyone, especially one neighbor who has a darker tinge to his skin than the others in my hollow. There have been previous incidents, instigated by the people at the bottom of my hill. Threats of shooting people, even, from these people I suspect have been braining my animals. So it's NOT a far stretch to put two and two together after finding two of my cats crawling bludgeoned to almost death from THEIR driveways.

A couple of weeks ago - I found one of my mail parcels left for me at the foot of my drive smashed and torn open in front of their gate too.

I made a police report on this too.

Yesterday

The neighbors cut a new driveway. The way our hollow is laid out, we have large chunks of property and small private roads that fork out to lead to them. The new driveway cuts down to the edge of the fork in the road that leads out of our hollow.

As I was driving down the hill and out the hollow to go do menial adult tasks... I make it to the fork in the road and I see a little black mass in the road. I slow down, and it looks up weakly. I can see it's a cat. I get out of the car and squint... and realize it's one of MY cats.

Pitch. Named for his deep solid black fur that was soft and thick, and medium length. Large beautiful jade colored eyes. He has an identical twin named Shadow, but Shadow didn't rip off his collar.

"Pitch, baby is that you?" I ask, and I hear the familiar loud and masculine meow that I know to be Pitch. And yes, I know the sound of almost all of my cats meowing. I can tell you 80% of the time who is meowing without seeing them. Because that is how much time I spend bonding with EACH of my cats.

I get to him. It had just rained, so it could have been because he crawled through wet grass to get to the road, but he was soaked and covered in mud, as someone held him down in a muddy puddle. His eyes were both bulging out of his head. One was bloody, one was milky and white with his third eyelid up over it. His jaw was unhinged, teeth missing. Blood pouring out of his nose and every breath he took was accented by the sound of him gurgling and struggling from the blood in his lungs and throat.

The rest of his body is perfectly fine. Uninjured.

I pick him up sobbing, and race to the vet. I get him in, and I'm on the phone with my fiance sobbing. He's telling me to use the money, the precious money we don't have a lot of, usually only just enough to pay our bills, and a vet check if we need to.

The vet comes out and sits down next to me. I can see the answer on her face.

"I... am pessimistic. His jaw his broken and dislocated. His entire forehead and nose is shattered. And ... even if we were to get him to a specialist vet who can do this kind of surgery... he may not even survive. There's a lot of swelling in the brain, he's completely blind and he will have brain damage. do you know what happened?"

Sobbing, I shake my head.

"I don't know, I found him in front of my neighbor's driveway in the middle of the road."

"I hate to say this, and I don't like painting this picture. But... if Pitch had run under a car, even just his head... I don't think you'd have found him alive. I think... someone did this to him. It looks like he was hit in the head with something several times. These wounds are fresh. Maybe only an hour old..."

I called the police immediately. They came, and just like with Baby Cat, took video and photo footage.

I've decided since all of these things with my neighbors started that the most frustrating occupation in America has to be being a police officer.

Each time, especially with the cats, the police officer's faces were ravaged in sympathy. It's hard not to have that face when the woman you're talking to is holding a dead cat in her arms, sobbing in between answers to questions I guess. Both officers in both incidents admitted to wishing they could do something.

First officer: "I've been a police officer for 40 years and I have seen people do a lot of horrible things... And that little guy you are holding... I bet he was better than every human I have ever met in this job. If that was my animal... I know I would do and I can't advise you to do the same. If I could do something, I would. Because no human should ever do this to an animal. I'm sorry. But because there were no witnesses and there's no evidence so my hands are tied."

Same story with Pitch's police officer.

"I just went through something similar with my German Shepard. It's like I lost my brother. I'm sorry. I wish I could do something more than just make a report for you. Someone torturing and killing animals for spite is a felony, and if I had something to go on, I'd have them in cuffs within the next 5 minutes."

I cried all day yesterday, my eyes and head still hurt, and right now as I cry while I type, it burns like a bitch.

Almost two years ago, Pitch had been born into our house. One of our cats (who has been recently fixed thank goodness) is a master escape artist. She's supposed to be a purely indoor cat since she disappears for weeks at a time and makes us mourn her at least 4 times a year thinking she's gone forever. The last time she had disappeared before her spay date, she'd come home swollen with kittens.

Oreo, Pitch and Shadow were the result. And they were a celebration. They had a little sister born into their litter. She was a dwarf. Underdeveloped, poor baby didn't have a chance. But instead of abandoning her, the three boys supported her. Kept her warm, played with her, and stuck close to her. I had never in my life seen a litter of kittens pull together for a sick litter mate the way I saw these ones do. Most of the time, a sick kitten is abandoned or killed by the mother and littermates.

Naturally, Fluffette didn't make it. But she survived a month. She never grew and I had to bottle-feed her, and help her go to the bathroom for her entire life. But those boys mourned her when she left. They lay huddled in her bed for days after her passing. We all did. It was a dark day in the House of Hope. I had decided then that those boys were never going anywhere - and those babies were the most amazing kittens on the face of the planet.

They were very spoiled before they were allowed to explore indoors. As full-grown cats at almost 10 pounds each, they all love to be picked up, flipped on their backs, and held like babies. Fixed, vaccinated and sweet. They never leave my property. Some of the cats might - I'll admit. But most of them don't.

Pitch was one of the cats that never left. But he was so trusting and sweet that all someone would have had to do was: "Here kitty kitty, come here.." with a few little typical cat summoning sounds. He was a cat that had no clue that there are evil humans out there. He just wanted to be loved...all the time.

And I can't get their broken crushed faces out of my mind.

Last night, my dreams were full of cats with crushed faces, blood pooling from their eyes, ears, and mouths. They blamed me.

"You let me out of the house last night... I could still be alive if you had just made me stay inside..."

"Why didn't you hear me meowing for you, Mommy?"

"Why didn't you teach me about evil humans?"

"Why did you let me outside?"

I am so filled with guilt. I'm not the one who hurt them, and my family assures me it's not my fault. But the neighbors. After Baby I was careful... but not careful enough. I'm the Mom of the house. I'm supposed to keep my children safe, all of them. Even my fur children. I failed, and now another one of our precious babies is dead. Tortured and left to suffer until he either suffocated on his own blood or was found by its owner.

All of the cats, except the ones who pee everywhere and the ones who don't leave the porch, are inside. I want to bring them inside too, but I know if I do it will be a battle of scrubbing pee spray off everything, and my big fat queen kitty Athena will go bald with stress if I make her come inside.

Going around my neighbors, a few of them actually told me in hushed worried whispers, about how over the years a suspicious amount of domesticated cats and dogs went missing - and then their corpses were found later in the field nearby, or they were never seen again. Brained and bashed, just like my cat was.

One neighbor said: "It's animals for now... but how long until it's a kid we find in a field near here?"

And that reality hit me like an avalanche of freezing fear.

Yeah... it's my cats for now? Could it turn into one of my kids?

Yesterday, I felt loss, despair, fear, and oppression.

Today... I am fucking angry. The dangerous kind of anger. The kind of anger that eats away at your soul, no matter how much you try not to think about it or not acknowledge it, and you try to cope with what happened.

It's a festering hatred. Any human who can torture an animal and leave it to slowly die and suffer is a fucking demon from hell and quite frankly, other humans should have the right to eliminate them and their households. The law can't even do anything to protect us from these monsters who are willing to torture and hurt helpless small animals. These humans who will eventually get bored of torturing animals and move on to humans, are worthless. They have no value to society. They are a waste of air, and water, and carbon footprint. There are so many halfway decent humans on the earth that it would only cost 25 cents to put a bullet in the freaks head and rid the world of a fucked up broken wrong individual that God had no hand in creating.

They are stains upon humanity. We SHOULD have the right to eliminate broken human beings who get off in some sick way to blood seeping from another living human creature's face. But we fucking don't - and that is the most infuriating frustrating thing of all. We don't have the RIGHT to protect ourselves from genetically fucked humans who don't NEED to exist. If a dog gets rabies and starts killing things - we shoot it, right? WHY is the concept not the same for humans? Just because they are human? Believe me, they are less than human, which is what makes them able to hurt and torture other living creatures - they don't need that kind of sympathy.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a process to make sure innocent humans don't get killed. But a lame horse gets put down. So should humans who hurt other humans and animals for fun.

There is a sick fuck in my hollow, and I intend to get rid of them.

For now - I'm sticking to all the legal means. I already had No Trespassing signs up, and a few property cameras but now... we're getting serious. The head of my security team, my Bubba, has ordered a game camera. We've fished out our extra cameras. There is more in the process. We intend on making it like Fort Knox up on this hill.

We're going to be lining our driveway and pointing one toward the road. If something happens, we WILL catch it on camera this time.

I've also initiated a few other protocols that I have up my sleeve too. Thanks to my questionable taste in a company that I had a few years ago, I have some people up my sleeve that... let's just say they're the kind of people that when they are on your side, you're glad.

I will be printing out the Tennessee laws on animal cruelty, and murder and be sending it anonymously to them in a blank envelope. It's easy to do when you know exactly which mailbox it is - so that their whole family knows that I know. I will be making a flier and sending it to all my neighbors, including them, about a dangerous monster of a human who is actively torturing animals in our hollow and my children's fear about how "Will the bad man who is killing our animals come to hurt us to mommy?"

I will be making an active display of how I am unifying the hollow against them. At the bottom of the flier, I'm going to put: "You all know who the neighbors in question are. If you see anything suspicious, please contact me OR call the police immediately and make a report. We need to be vigilant to make our hollow safe for our children and our animals again."

They will KNOW that as long as they stay here they will know they are cornered, stared at, judged, and ostracized and people will be whispering about how they bred, raised, and enabled an animal torturing psycho.

I intend to make such a display that they will feel like they need to leave and move from their home. And I will not lose a single wink of sleep over it. If the police won't do something about this monster that could eventually switch from torturing my cats to raping my daughters... I will ruin EVERYONE'S life and RELISH it if I have to. Because I'm not leaving my home- and I won't tolerate someone killing and torturing mine OR ANY of my neighbor's animals.

We are putting up signs that tell EVERYONE who looks at the ENTRANCE of my driveway that I have at least one gun. Minimum. Signs informing the public that they are being recorded the minute they get in VIEW of my property.

These are just all legal actions to protect my ass - because Tennessee is a stand-alone state. And if my neighbors get any funny ideas and put a foot on my property and I feel like my animals or family is in danger... I have the right to put a bullet in their head (I'm saying it straight forward but I'm going to emphasize here that they have to be ON my property and be an active threat. Since they have now killed TWO of my cats...THAT I KNOW OF... I consider them an active threat. Over the last two years, 2 other cats went missing and I have my suspicions now. How can I not?

I'm not really an individual that gets taken as a threat.

And that works in my favor. Everyone sees me, and thinks: "Oh Mom bun! Sweet face. Loves kid. I bet she's a pushover."

And let it be known that I used to be. There's a reason I write about trauma bonding and abuse. But I'm stronger than that now, and I tend not to be scared of much. And I will keep my facade up.

Either way, one way or another... whether it be by the law... or my other methods that make them feel unwelcome... or if I have to just lose my shit and make something happen. This fucking creep who keeps killing mine and my neighbor's animals WILL be gotten rid of.