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

[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.