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

[teratologist.livejournal.com]

Naturally we must introduce larger predators that eat cats! That always works so well.

Snark aside, I personally think that the decision to keep or kill feral cats needs to be weighed carefully, not only against the number of native animals killed by no-feral-cats, but by the number of native animals killed by other means of pest control. I don't have any numbers on this, but it may be that in some instances cats (especially well-fed ones who stick close to buildings) have less of an effect, ultimately, on native species per non-native pest killed than poisons or kids with bb guns or what have you. In other cases, obviously, this is not the case, and in those cases cats should of course be eliminated.

But I can't get behind using them for meat and fur. With dogs in the U.S., the fact is that the places where the population of feral dogs has come under control are identical with the places, not where the dogs are viewed pragmatically, but where they are viewed extremely sentimentally. Dogs viewed as 'members of the family' are more frequently spayed and neutered, more frequently kept in their owners' sight where they can't easily get at wildlife, and less often turned loose because they have become inconvenient than dogs regarded as tools. We should be encouraging people to regard their cats in the same light, and allowing them to purchase bits of feral cats while fostering that attitude towards domestic ones (including domestics that have strayed, since we definitely want people to be inclined to pick those up off the street before they breed ferals,) is, I think, expecting a little too much compartmentalization to expect even from the American mind.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Just convincing people that keeping cats indoors is in the cats' interest is expecting too much, it seems.

[vesme.livejournal.com]

Do you mean inside all the time or cat that that lives in house and goes outside sometimes?

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I mean indoors all the time. I grew up with indoor/outdoor cats (didn't everybody?) and they always died young--hit by a car, or in one grisly circumstance, drowned in the neighbor's pool. I don't really see much difference between a cat that goes out sometimes and a cat that's out all the time.

[roaming.livejournal.com]

I've had cats all my life. I let one out for the day -- well, he WANTED to -- and came home to find him lying across my doorstep, still alive, with smashed hips from being hit by a car. I have NEVER EVER let a cat outside again, I don't care how much they beg.

Now, the feral who lives in my yard has managed to survive for going on 14 years. And she still can get a bird. Which I hate, but who am I to redesign Mother Nature?

Life in the wild is short, nasty and brutish. Once in a while we humans can intervene to lessen pain. That seems to be about it. But it's worth doing because, frankly, I think it makes us "better" people when we are compassionate to everything. (Though I often have trouble being compassionate toward too many humans.)

[teratologist.livejournal.com]

Not expecting too much; it will just take a combination of educational and economic factors, just like it did with dogs. As cats become rarer they'll be more valued, and as cats become more valued they'll become rarer.

Of course, the issue of cats as agricultural rodent control will largely become moot once they're all indoors (they'll still be good for roaches.) Maybe we can convince people to create habitat for native snakes, but that'll take some doing.