Originally posted by: Shadowknight
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Originally posted by: LordMaul
Well, more power to you then, I guess. Though the difference between spending hundreds upon hundreds of dollars on a random cat wandering the street is different than a human going to the hospital. Though maybe you're a hardcore PETA subscriber and thus that sounds entirely unreasonable, I don't know.</end quote></div>
Long story short, I got a family of cats (the parents and two kittens) hanging on my porch for a month so I put food out. As time went by, more and more strays/ferals found out about the food source, and since I've been told by the Friends of Feral Felines that they stop hunting, I can't stop feeding them or else they might starve to death

Trust me, I'd rather not if it meant I could save some cash. I've tamed a few and am trying to break in one so I can adopt him out, and another was as friendly/tame as Traya and I've given him to an adoption group.
The thing with Traya is that when I saw her, I wasn't sure what to do. Being injured and all, and a stray feeding on my porch. I'm against killing animals (such as the pound) but didn't think I could afford the vet costs. When I went to put some food out, she and her mom went behind the bushes, like the other strays when I come out to put food out. When she immediately came back and started purring and rubbing all over me for attention, something that no feral has ever done, I didn't feel like I could condemn her to death (via the pound) or let her die from her wound. Didn't really have a choice at all.

Poor kitty. She's been happy the whole time, and having a rotten tail (albeit with dead nerve endings according to the doc, thankfully) and then having it cut off seemed to bother her not at all. The only "wild" aspect to her behavior is that she tends to bite my hand a lot when playing, but she never uses her claws, but otherwise you'd never know she wasn't born and raised in a home environment.
Make no mistake though, I am NOT a PETA person, though I'm trying to humanely eliminate the feline population that comes to my porch by way of capturing, taming, and adopting (as opposed to "humanely" killing them), but that's it. There are tons of cats out there, especially at the college not too far from here, but I want to get rid of those relying on me for food so I can save $$$ while simulatenously keeping them from starving to death by simply skipping to not putting out food period.* Oh, and PETA's been known to murder animals and dump them in trashcans behind businesses, and I don't swing that way.
* Screw the family of raccoons, though, that keep trying to eat the foodstores I put out.