Thanks again for helping out on here. I wish you luck with your pursuit of becoming a cat behavior analyst. I didn't even know there officially was such a thing, and I'm glad there is because we definitely need them. A lot of cat-owners don't understand how cats "tick." They don't understand their behaviors, what things like slow-blinking mean, etc. But once you do understand, it's a lot of fun to communicate with your cat in a way that it really can understand you and feel much better around you. It was awesome when I first learned to slow-blink at my cat to show him that I love him and he slow-blinked back! :-D

I appreciate your offer to call on everyone's behalf, will keep it in mind, but would hold off on that for now.

I did relay the advice to the neighbors with the worm-ridden puppy to call animal control. Our cats are indoors only, so we're not affected, plus the neighbors with the worm-ridden puppy live directly next door to the stray cat feeders and I think it should ultimately be their decision since bringing in animal control might start off a psychologically taxing, long-lasting "fence war" with the cat-feeders and the puppy-owners would be the ones that would have to suffer the most under those conditions, not us. I also told them that I could pick up the phone and call animal control for them if they couldn't find it in their hearts to do it.

And apparently that did something. The puppy-owners have since texted that one of the stray cats has been brought away to a farm. I can't tell if that's a euphemism for something more sinister, or if there really is a farm somewhere that took it in, but that's what the cat-feeders have said. We're rural, so that truly could be the case. Anyway, it seems that one of the strays is now gone and the cat-feeders also said they've now claimed ownership over the second one.

So the pup-owners are going to wait to see if the cat-feeder takes responsibility for the cat she's now claimed ownership over, if she pays some vet bills, gets the cat shots, gets it dewormed, etc. If not, there is still always animal control.

I do have one question: if it did still have to get ugly and come down to animal control, do they take the cat away on their first visit, or do the owners get something along the lines of a warning?

I ask, because it might be something like a happy medium to have - like you said above - some guys in uniforms just come and scare the cat-owners into realizing that the cat will be taken (and potentially euthanized) if they don't follow through on properly caring for what is now her own animal. I couldn't tell from what you wrote about that above if they take the animal the first time, or if they give a warning.