Pets and other peoples uncovered food scraps- Dilemna

[kira000]

Evening all,

I'm having a debate with my OH about something, and thought i would see what you good folks think...

So, earlier today, i was sitting in my living room, when in bounces one of our cats, she makes a peep peep excited sound and pounces on something on our rug and starts try to eat it.
When i get a glimpse of it i see it is a big chunk of cabbage/brocoli stem. (yes i know, she is an odd cat that likes fruit and veg!)
I manage to whip it away from her.
Out she goes through the cat flap, and several minutes later,peep peep,pounce, and its a manky piece of chicken skin. Again i grab it before she can eat it all. And again she dashes off and returns with more brocolli stem.

Off she sets again, so i grab keys ad shoes and go off to see where she is getting it.

I track her round the corner, when i find some twit has put a little bin of kitchen scraps on the floor outside their front door, totally uncovered. So not much i can do to stop her taking things out.

Went home and told my OH, who says "Oh, not much we can do then".

Whereas i am of a mind to go and drop an really polite note asking if they could cover it up with a lid, as not only is it not nice for me to have to clean cat sick off my carpet, but open food rubbish attracks rats and other scavengers which is why compost bins are away from houses and are supposed to be lidded.

What would you do? Leave it or say something?

[Jugglering]

I can't really answer your question as it would depend on how your neighbours take your request on board.. but one of my neighbours got into the habit of putting their food waste (we can recycle it here) into the food recycling bag and leaving it outside their back door.. My WeeThug took great delight in ripping open these bags which often had cooked meat leftovers (I'm veggie so there's nothing like that coming from me, she only gets cat food). To resolve the problem, I bought a proper dustbin, put in my front yard (easily reached by neighbours) and suggested to neighbours on both sides (hehe a bit of politics here) that we all could use my bin for food waste - it would save on recycling bags and keep cats and flies off the food waste. We now have a really good system whereby we all take it in turns to empty the bin etc - WeeThug no longer brings home scraps of food she has *hunted down*.

You might like to suggest something similar to your neighbour, if that would work.

[paraffin]

Hi kira:

If this happened to me, and we have 2 moggies, I would certainly approach the neighbour who is almost certainly unaware that there is a problem.

I think it would be only fair to give them a chance to hopefully help prevent the problem recurring.

I would definitely not try to solve it by leaving notes on the neighbour's rubbish. That would only inflame the situation. Imagine if someone unknown did something similar to you - would you like it?

I'd be fairly confident that if you approach the neighbour in the right manner, the chances are that they will see your point of view and hopefully do something about it.

Good luck.

[terambulan]

If you thanked your neighbour for feeding your cat & saving you expense am sure they'd soon seal up their bin!