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

[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.