I stopped at a garage sale at a home near a golf course and was looking at the various things in the owner's garage. I'm always looking for tools and odd things and ignore the piles of clothes and old dishes. I spied a gun like thing leaning against the man's work bench and asked what it was. He looked around and the asked if I liked cats. After I said no, he got a wry grin on his face and told me what it was. It had an aluminum tube that had the same inside diameter as a golf ball. At one end was a lever hooked to a valve that looked suspiciously like a trigger. At the end of the contraption was an quick detach air hose connector.

He said he used it to shoot the cats that come into his yard from the golf course, and the cats he sees hunting
mice on the course. We took it and an air tank to his backyard and he demonstrated it when the fairway was
clear. He said so far no one has figured out what is killing the cats because no one has made a connection to
the cats and the golf balls laying near by. I congratulated him on his resourcefulness and left after buying some extra aluminum tubing he happened to have.

Sounds like purrfect employment of urban cammo in concept... and did you happen to see any books by Keith on the shelves?

Dan

Pres., TYHC

www.BigBore.SingleShots

The neighbors and I have problems every now and then with Toms marking their territory.Ain't nuthin wrong with that ,just don't use my front porch as a Bulliten Board.
These 'Taggers' are fools for cat food inna Hav-A-Hart.They are then transported to different locals,ritzy tree hugger neighborhoods are the norm.
Now I ain't saying I was in on it or even knew the guys that pulled this off,(they did have lottsa cold beer,from what I heard.)but it was the talk of my small neighborhood.
It seems that a large orange Tom was seen running up the middle of the street with a large black plastic trash bag tied to his tail.Bailing wire they said.The faster he would run, the more noise the trashbag made,therefore acting like Nitrous Oxide.Run Tom,Run.
The fun was just starting.A UPS truck was coming from the opposite direction of the crat-cruise-missle.The driver swerved to avoid whatever the hell it was racing towards him.We...er...ahh..the story goes,that they could see the drivers eyes from 75 yards away.Kinda Owl looking eyes.
Anyway,as they passed,the bag got hung on the big bumper sticking out the back of the UPS truck.Crat going one way 15 -20 mph,Big Brown going 20 - 25 the other way.Bag reaches end of its stretch.The crat emits a sound similar to a hog gettin' nutted.The bug-eyed driver is coming down the street towards some drunks...er..upstanding citizens,they are pointing and laughing with tears running.
Said crat is bouncing off of the side of the truck,jumping up and down and all around and screaming like a Bobcat.If heard at nite , it would stand a big mans hair on end.
Just a few feet before Mr. Driver stopped,the crat managed to free itself from the bailing wire/trashbag contraption.As the driver was trying to figure this all out, the ballistic crat ran by us...er...the crowd of well wishers and at twenty feet you could see the felines tail was stripped to the bone.
I heard this happened last Saturday around noon and we...they figure that crat is still runnin' today.

I like the golf ball idea ,what kind of sights ?

At the GF's house there is a steel dumpster with a steel lid.
Prop the lid open at a 45 degree angle , set boxs in the dumpster to set a can of cat food on flush with the top .
Wait for targets to appear and shoot with CB long's.
Any misses will deflect into the dumpster.
My best record is 11 in just over 1 hr, then I took the garbage out to cover the cats.

Some really good "alternative" hunting techniques!

Poletax,
In my youth we trapped 'coons for sport and profit.. Once you started to skin the tail with maybe an inch slit at the base you could take a pair of pencil sized sticks on either side of the tailbone, grab them firmly, and skin the tail out with one pull, ZIPPP.... Next time you catch a crat in your Hav-a-hart I'll show ya how.. You hold the crat and I'll skin the tail.. Then you can then turn him loose to go home if you want... Cute, huh??

Hi Pat B.
Welcome to the insanity.
I'll try yer method. Thanks

OEH let us know how your new golf ball bazooka works out. I might need one too. PT we are not alone. There was a time when I too transported felonius felines to the upscale parts of the community for adoption. But then it came to me that some of those sob's, on their big, tree filled estates, in cul-de-sacs, and remote dead ends, were probably shooting them like I was and having better surroundings to do it in. So I changed for a while. I never let one go over there without giving it a big splash of skunk scent from the "Old Time Trapper's Supply Co.". Occasionally I would give one of those puss cats a splash of "Fox "N Heat" as it took off. I had to stop though. The transport box finally got so raunchy I would rather get whipped than stick another cat in it. Then I started tying ribbons and bells on their necks so they looked real cute(?), after making sure they were full of fleas, and leaving them at the Ladies of the Animal Welfare Society Club in a big cardboard box full of cat doo after sprinkling the things well with sheep burrs. That way they would get to know those cats really well as they cuddled them. I remember old Wolfer used to get a few cats with his 44M in the dumpster at the Bloody Bucket. Bet that was great fun, and a valuable public service too. The old ways were good ones!

Poletax,

In your neighborhood is the UPS truck now known as the United Pussy Service truck? In Santa Ana, California, some of the neigborhood dads were accused of dropping cats off of over passes to the Santa Ana Freeway which is eight lanes wide at that point. They were assigning points based on how many lanes of traffic the cat could cross before getting flattened. Extra points were assigned for creativity like dropping a cat in a passing convertible, getting a cat stuck on a grill, or dropping a cat into the lap area of a passing motorcyclist.
Luckily no humans were hurt. Can't say the same for the cats.

What a brilliant idea.
I was trying to figure out how to stay out of trouble when mixing crats and air intakes on passenger jets.

An alternative to the golf ball laucher, sometimes used by the kids in my own neighbourhood is a potato gun. It's made out of plastic waste pipe and propelled using cheap hairspray.
The kids got quite creative with soaking the potatoes first then hitting the cats just right to smack them down and have the projectile expolde at same times.

ScotsGun, welcome to this thread.
Yer opening a real can of worms there about Spud guns.
Awhile back on this forum it seems some of our more genius tinkerers were building Spud guns big enough to launch crats.
If my feeble mind remembers,they were having a hard time getting a unwilling projectile into the barrel so they came up with a Duct Tape Sabot.