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

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

Whoee. Look what you started. I think the problem is a non issue out here, because the weather precludes cats and dogs from staying feral long. It's also mostly a set of walled suburbs, so I think the idea of letting your animals roam loose just isn't practical. The few loose animals I see in our neighborhood are rare enough that we know them all and everyone knows the house they actually live at. The only thing close to a feral cat I see out here is an old female with a missing tail, who I've taken to calling Ahab, but I think she has a home. She hunts the pigeons in my back yard and on one memorable occasion, a rat. We watched that hunt from out kitchen window.

I suspect we'll come around to the idea of keeping pets inside, or at least in our yards fairly soon, just like we came around to using seat belts. There's going to be some growing pains during the transition, though.

As for the animals at the zoo, how come you don't feed the dead to your big predators?

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Zoo animals aren't fed the remains of their fallen brothers in the collection for a few reasons:

1. Dead zoo animals are necropsied under non-sterile conditions, (meaning that you are left with a dismembered carcass that could harbor disease) and there is nothing like a butcher's freezer to store a rack of zebra, say.

2. Zoo diets are pretty strictly codified in husbandry manuals, and deviating from them is frowned upon.

3. Zoos that have experimented with feeding off one part of the collection to another have found themselves facing negative publicity. This, I suspect, is the main reason--zoo guests become attached to individual animals, and if word got out that Fluffy was consumed by Leo, revenue-affecting publicity would result.

Plus, as you can see from discussions above, sentiment trumps logic, always.

[miz-geek.livejournal.com]

What about feeding them the feral cats? I suppose that would fall under #3 as well(and probably 1 & 2). And I suppose the parasites and other possible bugs might be too dangerous to risk exposing expensive zoo residents to?

One of the wildlife centers I used to volunteer at would recycle what they could (mostly small prey species that died before they'd been medicated). We'd try to save them for the coopers hawks and other picky eaters.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Surplus chicks and mice are fair game.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm. I suppose #3 is the same reason you don't sell the bones for art or decorative purposes. I imagine the skulls in particular would bring a lot of revenue to the zoo.