AITA for asking my neighbor to keep their cat inside at night?
I live in a large American west coast city in a neighborhood with a lot of outdoor cats. Most of them are not a nuisance and are pretty cute, aside from one. This one cat is literally terrorizing our house at night and making our lives hell. The smaller issues are that he pees and poops in our yard, vegetable garden, and on our front porch.
The bigger issues are that he antagonizes our indoor cats through the windows, and sprays on our windows, making our cats go into a frenzy and attack each other. This happens almost every other night. On top of that, he has killed three families of house finches (protected native birds) that nested on our porch. We put out cat repellant powders and bird spikes on our porch near the bird nest. It doesn't stop him.
I hit a breaking point a couple days ago when I was woken up at midnight by my cats loudly attacking each other. I ran downstairs and saw them fighting by the window and knew that cat was out there. I went outside and saw the fresh cat pee sprayed all over our porch, and blood and feathers streaked across the deck. I checked our security camera and sure enough, the cat had jumped over the bird spikes and killed another house finch that was sleeping in its nest. The sound the bird made was horrible. I sat outside on the porch crying for these poor birds for an hour in the dark. Since they're a protected species, we're not allowed to disturb or move their nest, so we just have to keep watching them lay eggs there and be killed, over and over again. We plan to put something up to stop them from nesting there next year, but its heartwrenching to watch this happen and not be able to do anything to prevent it right now.
I took the pictures I had of this cat and made posters that explained what the cat had been doing, and asked the owners to at least keep the cat inside at night. I know its somebody's cat and not a street cat because he wears a reflective collar with a tag. I talked with a friend who has an outdoor cat about this and she urged me to make the signs, saying if any of her neighbors ever complained about her cat she would keep him inside in a heartbeat. I put up 20 posters around a few blocks with my contact info in case the owner wanted to reach out to me.
The same day I had angry neighbors texting me and telling me I'm the "whiniest asshole loser in the neighborhood" for putting up these posters. I went for a walk today and saw someone ripped down almost all of the posters already.
I feel like I'm in the twilight zone or being gaslit or something. This cat is literally terrorizing our house, local wildlife, and my indoor cats are being hurt, and I'm being told by neighbors that I'm an asshole for asking the cat's owner to keep them inside at night. Not even all the time, just at night, which I thought was pretty normal practice. Am I really the asshole for asking my neighbor to keep their cat inside at night so it stops making our lives hell?