"shannie" wrote in message ...

"pied piper" wrote in message
...
sorry to hear of your loss some people are just so ignorant and dont give
a
rats arse about anyone or anyting have u anyway of finding out who was
responsible



No way of knowing at all. We live in a very isolated area, no other houses
for a couple of miles and surrounded by farmland. We have a theory that
some farmers have been baiting meat with rat poison to kill fox's and
badgers that my be killing lambs. We initially thought that it would be
because they (the cats) had eaten infected vermin themselves, but having
spoken to the vet it appears that farmers don't put down poison to kill rats
as they live in the ditches and pose no threat to livestock, although they
don't admit to baiting meat either, Im not sure but I've a feeling it's not
quite legal. To make our theory more viable the queen was expecting kittens
and was very close to her time so she was not in "hunting mode" and the tom
was one of those big lazy one's who's only pleasure in life was being
groomed by the other females. I've never seen him with a kill, so the
'eating a poisoned mouse or rat' theory goes out the window. We have another
sick cat today so it only strengthens our idea that they are eating baited
meat from one of the nearby fields. The irony of it is we never feed our
cats meat, just dry food, so they obviously find this stuff and think it's a
wonderful treat

You need to find out what they are using - very probably something worse than normal rat poisons. If you're in the North
it's almost certainly illegal, in the Republic I wouldn't know. Problem is you have to catch the b******s red handed to
have any chance of making charges stick.

Rod