And your point is...?

Sometimes I'm pretty sure people are messing with me.

Everyone now and then I get an email, via my website (which, I acknowledge, is out of date and needs some serious trimming. Can you say WORDY?)...at any rate. I'll get an email from a "person who needs advice." They'll have a fairly generic cat problem, and they'll ask for help.

In their letter of help, they will mention a variety of suggestions themselves. "Should I do this? Can you help me find this?" And the majority of those options will be cruel, not sensible, or illegal.

Now, I know from personal experience that some people are just plain clueless, and often make cruel, non-sensible, illegal decisions about cats. How often have cats been dumped at my place? Illegal, people!

But some of these email messages are almost certainly set-ups. Is as if the person wants to get a response from me that says "Oh, it's okay to just get that cat fixed and dump it somewhere" (the fish-and-wildlife stereotype of TNR).

Tip offs: the email is fairly intelligently written, but there are misspellings that people who DO misspell words would not make. It's as if the writer finished up, reviewed their message, and went "Hmmmmm...I need to make myself look more ignorant. I'll change this "o" to a "u." They also don't mention anything from my site. They haven't read it.

I sort of smile when I get these emails. They aren't a problem for me, because my answers are legal and humane, and my advocacy of TNR always includes a hat-wave to ownership (no abandonment--you fix it, you feed it, you monitor it). If I'm wrong and the person is legit, they are going to get the same answer as if their email was fabricated.

But then I get the creepies. Who are these people who run around to cat sites and send these "help" emails, hoping to trap the person into an illegal answer?

I once was on a wildlife listserv. A very well-known veterinarian, and indeed a member of a committee on feral cats for a very very respected national organization, put out a post asking wildlife control operators for situations where they had been harassed, had traps stolen, etc by "cat fanatics." Yes, indeed, he put it exactly that way. This gentleman is now tapped periodically as an anti-TNR speaker. He was not looking for objective experiences from wildlife folk with cat folk (and I personally know a number of wildlife control agents who provide TNR services--they are not all anti-cat by any means). He wanted dirt.

I was working in biology at the time and I was outraged to see an academic resort to such tactics. I did in fact email him. He seems like the usual sort of nice professional who has zero experience with actual physical cat problems. He went through the usual feather-smoothing motions that one makes in those situations. I'd like to get the chance to sit down with him someday, but the opportunity has not arisen.

I think of people like him when I get suspicious email. Is this someone trolling for dirt?

Why?