GT Editor Gets On Board. Blaming Cats for World Issues.

I was reading the online GT today, something I do less and less of. In the opinion section, they give a raspberry to some people who damaged a mink farm. But, out of the blue, for some reason, without any explanation, they mention how destructive feral cats are, like they hate cats so much they were looking for any reason to work their hatred into an entirely unrelated subject.

A better article to mention along with cats would be the one about the grass seed farmers and the voles. The grass seed people are getting exemptions from the EPA to treat entire fields with zinc to kill voles. This is the same substance that leached into a Keizer pond and killed dozens of geese. The EPA assures people the amount a single vole will ingest with field application is not enough to kill raptors. Have they heard about the higher up on the food chain a predator is, the more toxins get concentrated in their systems? Because raptors aren't going to eat a single vole. They'll eat lots of them. That zinc stuff will leach into the waterways, too. That's the way things work. Think I'll drink water from elsewhere this summer.

Speaking of windrowing during harvest, do you know how many animals and birds those windrowers mow down and maim, from fawns to any ground nesters? But let's blame cats for everything. Let's somehow blame them also for the vole outbreaks. The farmers I knew that had a lot of barn cats didn't have as bad of vole problems that year. The farmers who shoot cats and skunks for sport did.

Also, why are grass seed farmers getting this exemption? They must be special. Grass seed isn't something we eat. It's a product, not a food crop.

Feral cats are far less destructive than humans to our environment, far less destructive than pesticides, insecticides, cell and radio towers, window glass, jet airplanes and CARS to bird populations. A recent study in Iowa I think it was, that studied roadkill on only 11 miles of rural/urban streets, found, in one years' time, massive carnage on the roadways inflicted by humans and cars.

The vast majority of species killed were amphibians and led the researchers to wonder if cars killing frogs might not be the real cause of so many frog species dying off to the point of extinction. Birds were also found dead in high numbers.

I'm tired of people blaming cats for almost everything. A Wisconsin study found 300 birds on average killed per night at the base of one radio tower (from hitting the tower or wires). This was during migration times and most of the birds were small migratories. Large cities have great problems with bird mortality from hitting skyscraper windwos.

But hey. Let's still blame everything on cats. It is so much easier than changing our own behavior.

The fatal flaw in blaming cats is this: the problem will never change if the focus of blame is "feral cats". The blame lies upon human shoulders, upon those people who do not fix their pets. Feral cats are the DIRECT result of people who do not fix their house pets. You can kill feral cats until you are drenched in their blood and you will change nothing. Because it is not a cat problem, it's a human one.

If you are a cat hater, you should be on your knees kissing the feet of us cat fixers. We might hate you cat haters and you us, but the cat trappers and fixers reduce the problem by magnitudes.

If you really want to fix things, so to speak, then every community must have easy access to low or no cost spay neuter, coupled with mandatory spay/neuter laws and landlord enforcement of fixed pet only rules. And, people like me, going door to door, to locate unfixed cats and get them fixed. Then, when you fix feral colonies, you don't have an endless new supply of abandoned house pets starting new colonies.

The Feral Cat Coalition coming around three times a year doesn't touch the problem. Or hit at the root of the problem--those who create feral colonies by abandoning or dumping unfixed house cats. You have to stop the problem before it starts, and get the house cats fixed at extreme rates. That's how you solve the feral cat problem.

That's the way you end the feral cat problem. Blaming is always so easy. Doing something about it, well that's left to the few, the action heros, unsung, put down, yelled at, abused and used.

That's a load off. I feel better now.