Petition: The Neighbours Heard the Air Gun. Then They Heard Tubby Screaming.

Tubby was a stray, the kind a street collectively decides to look after. He got into a neighbour’s chickens in Lee County, Florida, and killed some of them. A neighbour then heard an air gun firing in a back garden, followed by the sound of the cat screeching. A couple of hours later Tubby came limping home with a broken leg. Nicholas Laney was arrested on 19 August 2026 and faces an aggravated animal cruelty charge. Please sign the petition asking the State Attorney’s Office to seek a lifetime ban on animal ownership as part of this case.

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The provocation is real and it is also beside the point. A cat killing chickens is a genuine loss to whoever kept them, and there are lawful ways to deal with it: fencing, secure coops, animal control, trapping and rehoming. Florida law does not include shooting a cat with an air gun among them. The state treats aggravated animal cruelty as a third-degree felony, carrying up to five years, precisely because the alternative is a neighbourhood where disputes about animals get settled with whatever is to hand. Laney has been charged and not convicted, and is entitled to due process.

What lifts this above one injured cat is what neighbours told reporters afterwards. They say the same person had previously grabbed a husky by the neck and threatened to kill her, again over the chickens, and again on the basis of an accusation the dog’s owners dispute. If that account holds up it describes a pattern rather than a single loss of temper, which is exactly what a lifetime ownership ban is designed for, since a sentence ends and an animal in that household does not get to wait it out. One neighbour also raised the question underneath all of this, asking why chickens were being kept loose in a residential street in the first place. One Green Planet has covered how to report suspected animal cruelty, and the arrest is reported by WBBH via CNN Newsource. Tubby survived.

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