Catseroles and kitten mittens.

[urbpan]

Domestic cats are some of the worst invasive species when allowed to roam free and breed. They kill native prey species and compete with native predators. (They also spread diseases like rabies and toxoplasmosis.) In Australia, a place free of placental mammalian predators for millions of years, they are especially bad. That's why they can get away with a feral cat recipe contest while in America we couldn't get a simple hunting season going, on the grounds that it was "cruel and inhumane" (As if somehow hunting feral cats is more cruel than hunting feral pigs, or for that matter, any animal.) Unfortunately for those who would eat cats to extinction in Australia, it turns out they aren't especially good eatin'. Their fur could be a good product to motivate a cat hunt, but you couldn't import it into Europe. Fur, useful as it may be, has fallen out of favor in recent decades, anyway.

What do you think? Any good way to control feral cats that you can think of? Capture/Sterilize/Release is one solution, but still puts cats out in the wild, to kill birds and spread disease. Part of my new job is dealing with feral cats, and not all of them are saved. It seems like a waste to toss a carcass in the trash, or incinerate it, when it's made of useful meat and fur. Or is pragmatism uncalled for with the sensitive issues surrounding beloved species? Do all cats (and horses) deserve decent burials? What to do with the glut of unwanted and pest animals?

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

burying ONE kittycat every 10-15 years in your backyard is one thing.

scale that to a good sized dog. a lot of work, and well, that's a lot of animal. go deep. ricky raccoon might try to dig it up.

large pig? horse? ELEPHANT? okay, how about a beached whale (don't use a bomb)... those gotta go somewhere...

and in the case of a zoo, more often than 10-15 years. i'd hazard a guess they have to dispose of quite rather a lot of feces... elephant poop is at least valuable on its own. the rest? expensive pickup? BODIES? oh deer, that's probably off the scale.

what to do... what to do... i'm thinking in terms of old style working farms... i'd hazard a guess they'd probably take waste meat, chop it up some, and feed it to the hogs.eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

as for wild populations, not so much here in the sticks... the fishercats, coyotes, and other animals are apparently doing quite well eating cats and the occasional fido. oh, yah too, the owls and hawks are having fun too.

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[vesme.livejournal.com]

Yeah that's right, because the average pet owner is going to have to bury an elephant.

Obviously a zoo is going to have to dispose of corpses differently then burying it in the back yard.

I simply asked why cremation was the only option.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

kitty cat burial scales. each of your neighbors does it. perhaps they don't do it well enough. perhaps it happens more often than not. then it gets to be problem in a city area without enough land...

which leads to the elephant/horses/cows... a large enough farm with a backhoe could bury a few, but after a while. well, where do they go? and an elephant? non trivial. the zoo has to pay someone to dispose of it. burying it? where. who'd take that? landfill? no. cemetary? not likely (unless it was the royal pet)... dump at sea? blow up? ... it's gotta go somewhere, and most of the [legal] options i can think of for disposal are expensive.

the idea of having the animal sent back to the ecosystem by having it eaten by higher animals than worms and insects is appealing, but how? where? fly them to alaska and let polar bears munch them? tricky.

where are the elephant graveyards when you need them?

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[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Farms deal with most of their animal deaths by engineering them. It's only when they're unplanned that they have to rent a backhoe.

As you guessed, the zoo has to pay to have the dead hauled off. They pick them apart, to see what made them tick (and to see what pathology was inside) and sometimes they save pieces (especially from endangered species) for educational purposes, but they incinerate the rest (which has to fit into smallish bags) Fun times out back with big handsaws.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Well, while a zoo might not have the land area available to deal with large animal bodies and waste material, there's plenty of farmland. Even if you don't want to feed dumbo to the hogs, that's a lot of organic material that can go in the compost heap.

Just run a rail spur to the zoo, and ship that poop to the midwest!

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Bodies are burnt, but poop is mostly saved for the compost (most municipalities seem to have compost heaps these days).

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

I understand the corpses are cremated. My point is that it's not the only option, even if burying them at the Zoo won't work due to an overconcentration of decay in such a small area.

As far as hunting feral cats... There's going to be lots of problems posed. Many of them live in cities, and hunting in cities presents a lot of opportunities for collateral damage. Even if you're bowhunting. And while I respect the ability of the Chinese palate to handle just about anything that won't poison a human outright, I find that most predators taste like ass. I haven't ever eaten a cat, but I suspect they won't be much better than bear or coyote. (On the other hand, alligator tastes pretty good, so I could be wrong. But cats are a lot closer to coyotes than gators.)

And hunting them in the wild... Man. That would be quite a challenging experience. They're very small, very nocturnal, and very fast. Not to mention that fact that they're senses are a lot better than most people's. Finding them and drawing a bead before they run off would be even harder than hunting rabbits, I'm guessing. At least rabbit hunting happens during the day!

Humane traps would probably be a more effective option, but it would be important to focus on the "humane" aspect of it.

I don't think I've ever seen tanned cat hide, so I don't know if the fur can survive the process. Some animals' skins don't fare too well in that regard. And, as you mention, there isn't much of a fur market anymore. My uncle used to work as a trapper, and he said it wasn't worth the effort of tanning most things, for what you'd get for them. It's a fairly labor intensive process. Well, at least by hand it is. I guess the big fur farms have a better method. Or they just use cheap labor, like everything else these days.