They shoot kitty cats, don't they?

Falling into the category of gratitude fuel is the news that cat hunting may soon become legal in Wisconsin. True, here in California we may hunt feral pigs, but we leave the cats to the coyotes.

I lived in Wisconsin for more than ten years, and at no point did people stop saying, "You're not from here, are you?" And this was the scene in my former "hometown" yesterday:

At a rally in Madison on Monday, scores of cat fans gathered around protest signs. Some featured photographs of kittens and pleas written in blood-red ink: "Please don't kill me!"

At least a thousand men and women — some in camouflage shirts and hunter-orange ball caps, others with "Free the Cats!" T-shirts — crammed into chairs and squeezed onto the carpet inside a meeting hall at the Alliant Energy Center.

For more than an hour, the residents debated. Some people were so upset, they cried. Others left in disgust. Jim White, a hunter from Belleville, Wis., was simply flabbergasted.

"People shoot cats. It's just the way things are out here," said White, who attended the meeting wearing a T-shirt that read "I do what the voices in my tree stand tell me to do."

"Why is this coming as a surprise?" White asked.

Nearby, Carolyn Pagel fiddled with the fabric cat ears perched on the top of her head and listened in horror.

"We're talking about cats," said Pagel, 28. "They purr. They want love. How can you possibly want to hunt a kitty?"

"I do what the voices in my tree stand tell me to do..."

I'm just sayin'...I'm glad I moved.