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I can think of three understandable reasons for being angry at cats: cats pee and poop in flower beds; cats leave tracks on cars; cats decimate wildlife. While it's true that cat owners bear all of the responsibility for these problems, it's their cats who are vulnerable to retaliation, and I consider it probable that people who dump cats' mutilated remains in their owner's yards (see last post) are trying to send a message to everyone who has outdoor cats.
When I moved into this creek-side neighborhood 28 years ago, it contained an abundance of squirrels, raccoons, nutria, songbirds, opossums, non-poisonous snakes, and waterfowl. Roughly ten years ago, multiple neighbors got multiple outdoor cats (one neighbor had eleven), and I watched in horror as those cats decimated the wildlife. Thanks to irresponsible cat owners, the birds that lay their eggs in the high grass across the street are all gone as are the non-migratory waterfowl (dead migratory birds being replenished by new arrivals). I went from finding several garter snakes and king snakes a year in my yard to only seeing one in the past eight years. Even the nutria, opossums, and raccoons have been hard hit, presumably because cats target their young.
I got cat shit on my hands so often while working in my flower beds (buried cat shit blends in nicely with dirt clods) that I finally took to wearing plastic gloves. Then there were cat tracks on my car and the trauma experienced by my own cats every time they see outdoor cats in their yard. People who have outdoor cats claim that I should take all this in stride. Their arguments take six forms: (1) It's inhumane to keep cats indoors*; (2) I really need to lighten-up about cat shit in my flower beds and cat tracks on my car; (3) Cats are natural predators, so it's only natural that the local wildlife be decimated by a superabundance of recreational killers; (4) Cats only "cull" old and weak birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals; (5) Numerous studies and my own abundant observations notwithstanding, cats are such sorry hunters that they rarely kill anything; (6) Finally, there are those whose poor self-image cause them to take pride in their cats' hunting prowess.
If I had previously disliked cats or was indifferent to them, what I have witnessed in this neighborhood would have turned me into a bonafide cat hater. But is killing cats the solution? Surely, a dead cat can't harm wildlife or poop in flower beds, but would the benefits of killing cats outweigh the downsides? Unless it's done on a large scale (as by the government in Australia**), I can think of several reasons why it wouldn't, and I'm going to devote the rest of this post to arguments I might offer someone who was thinking of becoming a cat killer due to legitimate concerns regarding the damage done by outdoor cats:
(1) There being so many ways to bring good into the world, is one that brings death to cats, grief to their owners, outrage to the community, and stress to yourself, worthy of your time and talent?
(2) Would you want your child to follow your example?
(3) How much would you worry about being caught, and if caught would the satisfaction of having killed however many cats justify the resultant hatred, job loss, criminal prosecution, and abandonment by friends?
(4) Studies show that many cats seldom if ever hunt, and still others are too old to hunt (cats begin to decline, mentally and physically, at age seven), which means that the bulk of the killing being done by a limited number of cats. How, then, would you know which cats to target?
(5) There's a saying that goes: Behave as if your actions were to become universal law. If you wouldn't approve of all of the world's people using unilateral violence to solve problems, would not your use of violence suggest egotism and arrogance?
(6) Would you be saddened by the need to erect a lifelong wall of secrecy between yourself and others, a wall consisting of the times you hid in the shrubbery on dark nights slaughtering cats? Or would you boast of your killings to everyone you trusted, only who could you trust, not just today, but next year when you and they had an argument?
(7) When you caress a loved one, would the memory of the terror and death that your hands inflicted put a distance between you?
(8) What would you do if an innocent person was openly accused, possibly assaulted, and had his property vandalized?
(9) If people came to surmise that an environmentalist was responsible for the killings, how would you feel about their resultant hatred of all environmentalists and their possible targeting of a specific environmentalist?
(10) How many cats do you plan on killing--one, three, a hundred, as many as possible every weekend for years--possibly branching out from your neighborhood to other neighborhoods and even to other towns?
(11) When you die, would your unknowing loved ones wrongly praise you as having been a man whose life was a blessing to all who knew him, who loved children and animals, and who devoted himself to making the world safer and kinder for all its inhabitants?
* If your cat spends much of its time alone, and you don't provide him or her with abundant opportunities for exercise and stimulation, this is true, but then you shouldn't have a cat.
**https://www.smh.com.au/national/war-on-feral-cats-australia-aims-to-cull-2-million-20170214-gucp4o.html
16 comments:
Our government (and the community groups apparently being paid to take part) have been very, very quiet on this issue.
Sadly I think it was designed to take some of the attention away from and the heat off our environment's biggest despoilers - ourselves.
First of all I believe your logic (sound as it is) will fall on deaf ears. Anyone who would callously take a life like that doesn't care about the moral or legal repercussions of their actions.
I live in a small town full of feral cats. We still have squirrels, rabbits, birds, and several other wild animals. People who own cats should take care of them. Allowing them to run wild is endangering even if there is no executioner running loose.
I see the cats hunting in our backyard, lying in wait, attacking. I would never kill a cat without absolute surety that they are the ones killing out birds. However, I have strongly considered killing one or two who have done horrible damage to our birds. I would not enjoy it but I wouldn't feel guilty about it, particularly at this time of the year when baby birds are beginning to show up
"Our government (and the community groups apparently being paid to take part) have been very, very quiet on this issue....I think it was designed to take...the heat off our environment's biggest despoilers - ourselves."
I would have thought that mass outrage against killing cats would have been a complete PR nightmare for the government rather than a way to lull fool people into thinking that an important step was being taken when none was. I would support the government, by the way, but then I would likewise support a government program to eradicate excess humans, it being my belief that the life of a human is of no more intrinsic value than the life of anything else, and that we could well do without such people as psychopaths and other parasites.
"Anyone who would callously take a life like that doesn't care about the moral or legal repercussions of their actions."
I don't consider it evident that people who kill cats to save wildlife are necessarily callous (I wonder how you would feel about Charles--please see his comment and my response to it). However, I think that people who dismember and decapitate cats, cut cats in half, and eviscerate cats (all of which have been done in Portland), and then leave the remains in the owners' yards are terrorists pure and simple, and should be treated accordingly. Peggy disagrees with my belief that these things are being done to send a message, holding that it's the work of sadists, period. I have no proof one way or the other, but I question that a sadist would first torture an animal to death and then go one step further and dump the animal in a place that would guarantee a lifetime of heartache to the people who loved that animal UNLESS the killer had it in for those people for one reason or another.
"I have strongly considered killing one or two who have done horrible damage to our birds. I would not enjoy it but I wouldn't feel guilty about it..."
I am in sympathy with your predicament. I know a man here in town who shoots squirrels to keep them from his bird feeder (he uses .22 slugs that are powered by the cap alone so they will make little noise and won't travel beyond his yard). I feel badly about him doing this because the squirrels only want to eat, and I consider it damn ungenerous of him to deprive them of sustenance when he owns so much. Cats killing baby birds are another matter, and despite all I said in this post, if the situation was dire enough, I don't know what I might do, and this week is especially trying. A few months ago, I put up a bird feeder, resolving to chase cats away everytime they entered my yard (I've literally run from the house in the rain in my pajamas to chase after cats). We soon had a pair of collared doves, these being fairly large birds who only fed in pairs and only eat on the ground under the feeder despite their size making them slow to take to the air. This week, we're down to one bird. The message of the people who have outdoor cats is, "Look, we want to own all the cats we feel like owning, and we're perfectly fine with them roaming the neighborhood killing things and otherwise creating a nuisance, and if you feel otherwise, tough shit. This is not a message that's easy to swallow. Every time I see a cat walking around with a bird, a snake, or a young squirrel (I've yet to see a cat kill a fully grown squirrel) in his mouth, I see red. Too many humans think that they and their pets should be able to take up all the land they please, and that if other animals are unable to somehow squeeze in around them, those animals will just have to die. Likewise, if other humans don't like what they're doing, those humans can always move.
There are many well looked after/well fed cats in my neighbourhood and most are outdoor at night. We used to have two until they died of old age.
Together with most neighbours we take part in the twice annually bird count in the garden (organised by the dept. of conservation) and while numbers are down in some bird species we have been told that this is mainly due to diminished hedgerows for nesting, ever growing concrete/tarmac surfaces and car ports but mostly due to the worryingly low numbers of insects.
I think you give way too much credit to the cat killers. I don't really believe that they do it for any well thought through reasons, just that the cat annoyed them or the owner annoyed them or that cats are the biggest animal they would be able to kill without any significant effort or risk. I think they think the owner deserves the terror simply because they own a cat. People who do this stuff don't actually think, they just react.
While we talk of ferals, we have wild horses living in our alpine region. They do infinite damage to a very delicate ecosystem. They also have some relationship to our Australian mythology. Just this week a motion to cull the horses was not passed through parliament because of their "heriatage value".
I don't want to see the horses killed but of more importance is the ecosystem which is also our heritage and a whole lot older. Humane culling would ALWAYS be my preference with any variety of feral
I've got two really lousy neighbors behind me who allow their cats to use my yard as day care. I would never harm these six cats, but I would like to charge the neighbors for my time, the stress it creates on my contained cats and for cleaning up poop. I fed birds, to entertain my cats, who watch them but cannot get to them. Not one that I know of has been successfully killed by these overweight over aged house free roaming cats, but the birds no longer come. The feral population is caused by bad owners who don't fix their house cats, leave them behind or ignore them to roam and breed and start feral colonies. I'd love to see bad owners face the punishment not the cats. Anyhow, as for decimated wildlife populations Vox Felina's blog is a very interesting read. Peter Wolf carefully and methodically debunks much of the research. I cannot imagine a cat attacking successfully the young of raccoons, possums or the also invasive nutria. They would be dead cats. Raccoons and possums both kill a lot of cats, with the former being the most prolific at it. And nutria, no cat would take on a nutria and win. I've been chased by them in barns. Those large yellow hollow front teeth are formidable and have sunk into many an ankle. Thus far, not yet mine.
I should add the birds that would come to my feeder are also considered invasive---mostly English Sparrows. The scrub jays that come kill their babies in the nests anyhow, as scrub jays do. If too many Mourning Doves come then also comes the Coopers Hawk. There seem to be an abundance of hawks in town lately. I was driving down Marian St near the police station when a Red tailed hawk took out a gull mid air not twenty feet in front of me. Destruction of habitat, use of pesticides, cars, windows, wind turbines, lead pellets, airplanes, all kill thousands upon thousands of birds, as do farmers of all sorts, with permission from the government and often with their help. So I find it a bit ridiculous the war on cats as cause of world problems.
"I don't really believe that they do it for any well thought through reasons, just that the cat annoyed them or the owner annoyed them... I think they think the owner deserves the terror simply because they own a cat. People who do this stuff don't actually think, they just react."
Kylie, your comment to my last post inspired this post... Now, you might want to Google "environmentalists kill cats." If you do, you'll find that many defenders of wildlife are keen supporters of killing feral cats, and that some do so extralegally and encourage others to do the same. This suggests that it's at least possible that some few environmentalists might kill with open brutality as a way of scaring people so badly that they resolve to keep their cats indoors. Then there is that other main category I covered, which is pissed-off neighbors, by which I mean people who might (or might not) have a legitimate grievance, but address that grievance in a way that is so cruel that I can't imagine how they live with themselves. As for the local killings that I wrote about, the killers haven't been caught, so I can only speculate as to what their motives might have been, and this post represents my effort to do so. I have observed that when a horrendous crime is committed, many people are content to say, "He did it because he was insane," or, "She did it because she was evil," and let it go at that, but these are not explanations; these are implied claims that the minds of some criminals are undeserving of understanding and that anyone who tries to understand them wishes to excuse them. The problem with such arguments is that it's hard to put an end to a behavior if one has no knowledge of what caused it.
"nutria...English sparrows...invasive species..."
Nutria--as you probably know since you are intellectually curious, interested in nature, and live in Oregon--are a South American species that was brought to the US in 1889 to be factory farmed for its fur. It arrived in Oregon in the 1930s, and when the market collapsed in the late 1940s, thousands of nutria were released into the wild in lieu of any other great option.
Opossums are native to the East Coast, but I'm unaware that they cause any problems here in Oregon. As for them killing cats, the following is from (and I'm not making this up) the US Opossum Society (https://opossumsocietyus.org/faq-opossum/) in answer to the qu
"Answer: It is more likely that a dog will injure or kill an opossum. A cat may attack and kill young rat-sized opossums. Adult opossums and cats seem to have a mutual respect and leave each other alone. In general, opossums are docile, non-aggressive animals and will not attack your pets. They prefer to escape and avoid confrontations, if possible. If not, the threatened opossum may “play ‘possum,” show its teeth, or bite in self-defense, as any animal would."
This is certainly consistent with my experience with opossums, which my father had me start shooting, when I was eight, his objection to them being that they would get into his henhouse, not to hurt the hens but to "suck" their eggs, that is to eat the inside of the egg without breaking the shell.
My annoying invasive bird is the starling, which I would shoot if I didn't live in the city. The only good thing I can say about starlings is that they're only around for a small part of the year. As for how they came here, the following is from the Wikipedia article on Eugene Schieffelin:
"In 1890, he released 60 starlings into New York City’s Central Park. He did the same with another 40 birds in 1891. Schieffelin wanted to introduce all the birds mentioned in tThe nutria (Myocastor coypus), a large, semi-aquatic rodent native to South America, originally was brought to the United States in 1889 for its fur. When the nutria fur market collapsed in the 1940s, thousands of nutria were released into the wild by ranchers who could no longer afford to feed and house them.he plays of William Shakespeare to North America. He may have also been trying to control the same pests that had been annoying him thirty years earlier, when he sponsored the introduction of the house sparrow to North America."
I used to put up squirrel houses, but I finally had to take them down because the starlings would harass the squirrels until the squirrels would give up and leave, and I sure the hell wasn't willing to provide housing for starlings. Their invasion of squirrel houses only started a few years ago. For most of my time here, there were no starlings and therefore no threat to squirrels. The Ana Hummingbird is no invader, but it has been extending its northern range a little more every year for a couple of decades. When I came here in '86, the Ana's northern limit was San Francisco.
As for my speculation that cats are responsible for the almost complete disappearance of raccoons, opossums, and nutria, it was just that, a speculation based upon my observation that cats will kill anything that they don't perceive as a danger to themselves, and this would include the young of many species provided that the babies'r mothers were far away. About every ten or fifteen years, distemper goes through the raccoon community, in which case, I not only find dead raccoons, I see sick raccoons staggering about in broad daylight, but this has happened in a long time, so what the hell did happen to the raccoons? I know that dogs kill a few raccoons, nutria, and opossums (I knew a woman who had taken her pit bull to the emergency vet on three separate incidents in which the dog had tangle with nutria), but there has to be more than that going on, and I do know that the nearby creek is home to numerous feral cats. So, there you have it, cats in abundance in the very area that wild mammals go to give birth and raise their young. It's not proof, but it is surely strong circumstantial evidence.
"Together with most neighbours we take part in the twice annually bird count in the garden (organised by the dept. of conservation) and while numbers are down in some bird species we have been told that this is mainly due to diminished hedgerows for nesting, ever growing concrete/tarmac surfaces and car ports but mostly due to the worryingly low numbers of insects."
Wind turbines and high rise windows also come to mind, but just because the problem is many faceted, and nearly all of the facets are the fault of our own damnable species, doesn't mean that a whole lot of good can't come from the elimination of feral cats. To claim otherwise is to take the position that, given all the stresses that birds face, what matters one more, and an insignificant one at that. The problem is that housecats are not an insignificant threat to wildlife, particularly in some areas, my area being an example. It's also true that the more sources of stress a species faces, the less able that species becomes at dealing with one more. Not only do numerous studies prove that cats are a major threat to wildlife, especially birds, I have personally witnessed the damage, having seen numerous cats carrying dead creatures, and having personally found the mangled but uneaten bodies of creatures that were killed by cats in my yard or on my doorstep.
Well I like the way you attempt to understand cat killers and I agree that understanding such individuals might help us to stop them. The environmentalists clearly have made a decision which they have justified in some way. I won't say they are right but I do think they put some thinking in.
Aggrieved neighbours I can also understand, even though their logic is flawed. I still think there is a third category of people who like to cause pain and find cats an easy target.
I'm not seeking to explain it as evil or insane and avoid further enquiry, I'm just commenting on what I know of many people and that is that they do things without knowing why, without thinking through the consequences, their logic is imperfect or non-existent. I think that when people are logical, their actions can be predicted to some extent but these people I'm talking about are loose canons. It's not that we couldn't find their reasons or a way to stop them, it's that they might walk past 50 cats and ignore them and kill the 51st.
Of course, I'm only commenting on my observations of people and sometimes I have a very dim view of people
"I still think there is a third category of people who like to cause pain and find cats an easy target."
I never meant to argue with that. I simply didn't address sadists because I regard sadists as being in the same boat as psychopaths and pedophiles in that they were probably born that way and are not amendable to change, their behavior coming from an irreversible deficiency in whatever it is that makes us human. Of course, I could be wrong, so I'm not going to go balls-to-the-wall to defend a position of which I don't feel certain. However, as I see the world, the mere existence of such people is a crime, and I take no interest in understanding their mental processes.
"I'm just commenting on what I know of many people and that is that they do things without knowing why, without thinking through the consequences, their logic is imperfect or non-existent."
The people who kill cats in the ways I referenced in my last post displayed a degree of planning. I think of it as like the difference between second degree murder (manslaughter) and first degree murder in that manslaughter is an impulsive act while first degree murder oftentimes requires careful thought. These people had to find a cat, trap or lure that cat so they would have control over it, take the cat to a place where he or she could be tortured and mutilated, and then dump the cat on or near its family's property. Maybe one has to be a psychopath to carry out that level of cruelty in which case nothing I might say to such a person could make the slightest difference because a person without a conscience is not a person who can be reached. In writing this post, I was going partly by my readings regarding environmentalists who talked openly about killing cats, yet those environmentalists were content simply to kill cats, even giving thought to how to do so humanely. However, it occurred to me that if such a person could use the death of a single cat to discourage a thousand other people from letting their cats outdoors, that person might be willing to do whatever was necessary to accomplish that goal, and how better to accomplish it than by inflicting a gruesome death that would get broad news coverage, or at least by creating the APPEARANCE of a gruesome death because, for all I know, the cats might have been killed by some other means and then mutilated.
"Of course, I'm only commenting on my observations of people and sometimes I have a very dim view of people."
Same here on both counts. Maybe I'm all wet, and maybe these people are nothing more than sadists who enjoy making cats suffer, and then making the people to whom they belonged suffer. I really can't say. It's all speculation, Kylie, and these things upset me so much that I can't allow myself to study them beyond what I already have.
You have me confused. Do you only object to someone killing the cats because they left them in someone's yard? I did mention killing them "like that" meaning in such a sadistic way. Cruelty to any creature is unnecessary. If any animal must be eliminated, fast and sure is the only acceptable way.
I echo Emma's comments as they are spot on;
'Anyone who would callously take a life like that doesn't care about the moral or legal repercussions of their actions.'
'Cruelty to any creature is unnecessary. If any animal must be eliminated, fast and sure is the only acceptable way.' - Thank you Emma *smiles*
Having watched Judge Judy, it appears to me that there are a good few folks in the US that view cats as a kind of vermin and have no issue at all about both killing them nor telling anyone else they've done so.
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