Posted on 04/13/2007 8:33:45 AM PDT by BradtotheBone
GALVESTON — After devoting much of his life to protecting wild creatures, a prominent naturalist here now faces trial on a felony charge of cruelty to animals.
Jim Stevenson, 53, a well-known bird-watcher and founder of the Galveston Ornithological Society, was indicted this week by a Galveston County grand jury on charges that he killed a feral cat Nov. 8 with a .22-caliber rifle.
"What really bothers me, this cat was down there killing endangered species of birds and others protected by law," Stevenson said in an interview Thursday. "Feral cats are not protected by law, and I stopped a cat from doing that and I get arrested."
Assistant District Attorney Bill Reed declined to discuss Stevenson's view of the law.
"All of those issues, I'm sure, will be flushed out in court," Reed said.
Stevenson, who has lived on Galveston Island since 1996, has traveled the world studying birds and published four books, including the Wildlife of Galveston. and publishes the Galveston Ornithological Society's quarterly newspaper, Gulls N Herons.
Despite his deep involvement with nature, or perhaps because of it, he has been accused of an aversion to feral cats because they prey on the birds he has studied.
Stevenson said the cat he is accused of killing had previously been captured and would have been euthanized had it not been spayed and and released.
Stevenson believes that there is no law protecting feral cats.
An official with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has said the law is unclear.
Although he admitted in a 1999 Internet posting to killing two dozen feral cats near his island home, Stevenson told the Houston Chronicle in November that he is fond of cats.
His arrest last year surprised and saddened many environmentalists.
"Jim Stevenson is not a bad man," Dori Nelson, chair of the Seabrook Eco-Tourism Committee, told the Chronicle soon after his arrest.
The arrest came after a toll-booth worker at the San Luis Pass Bridge told police that he heard two shots fired, then saw a white van speed away with Stevenson at the wheel.
One of the toll-booth employees, who had been feeding several feral cats and considered them pets, found the dead cat and pursued Stevenson. The employee said the cat already had a limp from an earlier bullet wound.
Stevenson is free on $10,000 bail. If convicted, he faces from six months to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Oh is this where that shooter worked? LOL. You can’t be serious. First of all, most of those pet cats have never been outside. And second, this source is hardly a RELIABLE source with their skewed statistics. Do they have stats on pesticides? Such BS.
Fawn,
This is just one of many articles that can be found about the impacts of cats on wildlife. It is very easy to find them if you wish. It is hard for me to believe that all the studies are wrong. If you choose to bury your head in the sand well, so be it. As I said earlier, loving your pet is one thing but loving something to the exclusion of all else is insanity!
Subsequently, Stanley Temple from the University of Wisconsin gathered some stronger data for Wisconsin. He estimates that there are over 100 million cats in the United States. These include house pets as well as rural, free-ranging cats that are not considered house pets. The latter cats include “barn cats,” left to fend for themselves. From U.S. census data, we know that over 30 percent of the households in the United States have at least one pet cat. In the United States, Temple found that 70 percent of the prey killed by cats are small mammals, particularly rodents. About 20 percent are birds and the remainder are other types of animals. In Wisconsin, Temple found that most house cats on average kill 14 animals per year. Rural cats kill far more.
Temple coupled his information on predation rate with estimates of the number of cats in Wisconsin. He estimates that Wisconsin cats alone kill somewhere between eight and 217 million birds each year with 39 million birds per year being the most reasonable estimate.
Extrapolated countrywide, Temple’s studies suggest that cats are important sources of bird mortality.Ê Temple argues that cats are one of the most important causes of extinction for some birds and small mammals; he claims cats may be second only to habitat destruction as a cause of death. For example, cats have been implicated in the decline of Piping Plovers, Least Terns and Loggerhead Shrikes as well as Marsh Rabbits in the Florida Keys.
Based on Temple’s work, significant tension has developed between groups that seek to neuter feral cats and let them roam free and others who favor the capture of all feral cats. The people in the former camp believe that most bird mortality can be pinned on humans (buildings, pollution, habitat destruction) and that cats are scapegoats.
Regardless of your position, everyone who owns cats should do all we can to minimize the number of birds our pets kill. The best solution is to keep your cat indoors. If your cat does roam outside, put a foot-high fence around your bird feeder. When the cat jumps over the fence, the birds have enough time to detect the cat and escape.
DOMESTIC FELINES CAT-ASTROPHIC FOR COLORADO SONGBIRDS
Cats help rid households of mice, but charming kitties kill more than just rodents. Predation on Colorado’s bird populations, and other wildlife, by free-roaming and feral cats is a daily occurrence.
Although there are no laws against cats preying on birds, squirrels, baby rabbits and other small species, the Division of Wildlife suggests cat owners keep their pets inside to protect vulnerable wildlife.
Outdoor felines are usually active hunters and will occasionally bring home a “gift” for their owners. “Everyone has had the experience of a cat bringing home a bird,” said the Division’s Dean Riggs, district wildlife manager in Pueblo. “But cats hunting at their own free will is equivalent to allowing hunters to go out without a license and shoot everything they see,” he said.
Cat owners need to realize that for every bird their cat drops on the doorstep, there are many more injured and dead that we do not see, he added. According to the Lindsay Wildlife Museum of Walnut Creek, California, cats kill between 4 and 5 million birds a day in the United States, or more than a billion birds a year. Studies show that felines are dangerously depleting ground-nesting birds and killing countless numbers of baby songbirds in the spring.
Domestic cats are the most numerous pets (60 million—30 percent of households have them). And research shows that the problem is not just free roaming “house cats,” but also feral cats. According to the publication Birder’s World, there are 60 million wild cats roaming the country. With 120 million cats hunting in rural and urban areas, songbird populations have been seriously affected. Statistics show a decline in the numbers of songbirds such as, tanagers, warblers, vireos and others.
Although loss of habitat also contributes to the decline in birds, cats play a major role in dwindling number of songbirds in the North America. Jake Rodriguez, district wildlife manager for Canon City, said he sees a fair number of songbirds killed by cats. “People need to realize that their cats are detrimental to the bird population,” he said.
Even well-fed cats are predators, apparently out of instinct. According to Linda Cope of the Wild Forever Foundation in Colorado Springs, wildlife veterinarians in Colorado see thousands of birds each year that are injured by cats. Birds that fall prey to cats usually suffer before dying, Cope said.
“Although cats are predators by nature, very rarely do they eat the birds they catch,” she said.
Cope says that rehabilitators save the lives of less than half the birds they receive from cat attacks. Birds attacked by cats that do not die immediately may later die from infection.
“The bacteria in a cat’s mouth is quite deadly to a tiny bird,” Cope explained.
Rodriguez said that baby birds just learning to fly are particularly vulnerable because they can’t get away from predators. He recommends that if homeowners notice a nest in a nearby tree, they should keep their cat inside during the spring until the fledglings learn to fly.
A four-year study of cat predation by the University of Wisconsin Department of Wildlife Ecology revealed that most bird kills occur in spring and summer, although predation at winter bird feeders can be substantial. Many of the spring killings are nestlings and fledglings. The majority of the kills are songbirds, but larger birds are also killed, especially as nestlings.
Some say domestic felines out for predacious prowls are just doing what comes naturally. Although predation is natural, domestic cats are not native to the United States, are not wild animals, and are maintained at artificially high numbers by humans who provide food, shelter and veterinarian care.
Many veterinarians suggest that owners use a bell to keep cats from hunting successfully but there is growing evidence that bells don’t work because birds do not associate the sound of a bell with danger.
“Birds are very visual,” Cope said. “It is very important that people with bird feeders keep the grass cut short around the feeder so the birds see the cats as they approach,” she said.
Riggs recommends that people just keep their cats indoors, particularly during the evening and morning hours when birds are most vulnerable.
“Cats are healthier and live longer if kept indoors, and not given the privilege to hunt,” he said.
The United States Humane Society reports that indoor cats live an average of 17 years, while free-roaming cats typically live less than five years because in many cases the hunter often becomes the hunted.
“We get numerous reports from homeowners in the Pueblo West area of coyotes, foxes, owls and other predators killing pet cats that were allowed to roam,” said Riggs.
“Too many cats are allowed to run free,” he added. “That’s the problem.”
1. In 1987, Peter Churcher and John Lawton asked the owners of cats in a Bedfordshire, England, village to keep any ‘gifts’ brought to them by their cats; owners of 78 house cats participated (all but 1 cat owner in the village), with the researchers extrapolating from these findings to estimate that the 5 million house cats in England were responsible for killing approximately 70 million animals each year, 20 million of which are birds. [PB Churcher and JH Lawton, 1987, “Predation by domestic cats in an English (UK) village. Journal of Zoology. (London.) 212:439-455.]
2. A four-year study in rural Wisconsin by Coleman and Temple confirmed the UK findings; 30 cats, radio-collared for various periods of time, led researchers to conclude that, in Wisconsin alone, cats may kill 19 million songbirds and some 140,000 game birds in a single year. The researchers focused on rural areas, where residents averaged more than 4 cats apiece, working out to a density of 57 cats/sq mile. [JS Coleman and SA Temple, 1993. “Rural residents’ free-ranging domestic cats: a survey. Wildlife Society Bulletin 21: 381-390] In urban areas, however, cat populations can be more than 2,000 cats/sq mile. [Marin Conservation League, Sept 1995 issue of the MCL News, “Is There a Fluffy Killer in Your Home?”] Temple, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin, also stated that house cats are probably the principal predator of birds and small mammals in many areas of rural America. Using figures from Wisconsin and Illinois, he found that outdoor cats kill 47 million rabbits a year - more than human hunters kill with guns. Temple points out that cats may also be the chief threat to some bird populations, especially grassland birds (many of which are in decline already due to habitat loss.)
3. In Virginia, Dr. Joseph Mitchell, an ecologist at the University of Richmond, and his colleague, Dr. Ruth Beck, conducted a study using their own cats. During the 11 months of their test, their 5 cats killed at least 187 animals, mostly small mammals. Of special interest to the researchers was the impact on songbirds, which are in decline in the state - they conservatively estimate that domestic cats each kill at least 26 birds each year in urban areas or 83 in rural areas, representing over 26 million birds in Virginia alone. Mitchell says “The figures may be conservative, because the study only counted confirmed kills - not cases in which cats ate their victims or left the bodies hidden.” [JC Mitchell, 1992. “Free-ranging domestic cat predation on native vertebrates in rural and urban Virginia.” Virginia Journal of Science, Vol 43 (1B):107-207.]
4. Worldwide, cats may have been involved in the extinction of more bird species than any other cause, except habitat destruction. Cats are contributing to the endangerment of populations of birds such as Burrowing Owls, Least Terns, Piping Plovers and Loggerhead Shrikes. In Florida, marsh rabbits in Key West have been threatened by predation from domestic cats. Cats introduced by people living on the barrier islands of Florida’s coast have depleted several unique species of mice and woodrats to near extinction. [Humphrey, S.R. and D.B. Barbour. 1981. “Status and habitat of three subspecies of Peromyscus polionotus in Florida.” Journal of Mammalogy 62:840-844. Gore, J.A. and T.L. Schaefer. 1993. “Cats, condominiums and conservation of the Santa Rosa beach mouse.” Abstracts of Papers Presented, Annual Meeting of the Society for Conservation, Tucson, Arizona, June, 1993.]
5. Many humane societies and rehabilitation centers doing education, quote the following for a country-wide estimate of the impact of owned cats on birds. Richard Stallcup of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory estimated that of the 55 million domestic cats in the US, excluding Hawaii and Alaska, some 10% never go outside, and another 10% are too old or slow to catch anything. Of the remaining 44 million, a conservative estimate is that 1 in 10 cats kills a bird a day - this would yield a daily toll of 4.4 million birds - or 1.6 billion cat-killed birds in the US each year. [”Cats take a heavy toll on songbirds / A reversible catastrophe,” Observer, Spring/Summer 1991, 18-29, Point Reyes Bird Observatory; Native Species Network, Vol 1 Issue 1, Fall 1995.] Research has shown that rural cats, with more wildlife contact, kill many more, with the result that the feral cat population, most of which is rural, has an even more significant impact on the bird population. Alley Cat Allies estimates that there are 60 million feral cats in the United States. Combining feral and domestic cat predation, it is estimated that more than 3 billion birds are killed annually.
6. Cat predation can also negatively impact our native predators, including raptors (hawks, falcons, and owls). A study in Illinois concluded that cats were taking 5.5 million rodents and other vertebrates from a 26,000 square mile area, effectively depleting the prey base necessary to sustain wintering raptors and other native predators. [WG George, 1974. “Domestic cats as predators and factors in winter shortages of raptor prey.” The Wilson Bulletin 86(4):384-396. O Liberg, 1984. ‘Food habits and prey impact by feral and house-based domestic cats in a rural area in southern Sweden.” Journal of Mammalogy, 65(3): 424-432.]
7. Domestic cats have passed diseases (feline leukemia, distemper, and an immune deficiency disease) to wild populations of felines, including the endangered Florida Panther. [Jessup, D.A., K.C. Pettan, L.J. Lowenstine and N.C. Pedersen. 1993. “Feline leukemia virus infection and renal spirochetosis in free-ranging cougar (Felis concolor).” Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine 24:73-79. Roelke, M.E., D.J. Forester, E.R. Jacobson, G.V. Kollias, F.W. Scott, M.C. Barr, J.F. Evermann and E.C. Pirtel. 1993. “Seroprevalence of infectious disease agents in free-ranging Florida panthers (Felis concolor coryi).” Journal of Wildlife Diseases 29:36-49.]
Now, please give me some citations of the studies that have been conducted that state that cats do not kill birds or mammals and if they do, there is no impact?
Exactly! Why is it that cat owners (most) feel it is important to let their cats roam the neighborhood while we dog owners are forced to keep our dogs restrained/confined? I personally don’t have anything against responsible cat owners, it’s the ones who feel that they are being “cruel” in depriving their “pet” the opportunity to roam.
There are a couple of folks on my street who feel obligated to let their cat out to roam with no collar, etc. I haven’t seen them actually let the cats out as they seem to just “appear”.
I have problems with a cat (I’m guessing it is one of these) crapping in my backyard where my dog roams (confined).
I have posted a sign on the mailbox notifying cat owners that if their cat comes up missing to not be surprised as I will have taken care of it for them. I’m not sure yet how I will deal with the animal once I get it, but I will deal with it.
Responsible pet owners know better, some cat owners don’t and one or more on my street will learn a bit about being responsible.
SZ
Cats come into my yard and catch my birds. I put a trap out
and if they have a collar I take it to the human society.
If it is unidentifiable I take it way out into the country
and turn it loose as coyote food. A little tuna fish is by
far the best bait. I hate cats!
ANd they are all crap. The statistics are always gathered by bird lovers and tell me how many of them do studies on pesticides and urban sprawl, windmills, windows, cars, electric wires, etc. I’ve seen TONS and TONS of these articles and if you go to the cat sites, you will see opposite stats. Tell me, how do these people know feral cats kill birds? Who goes around and counts them? It’s bogus. All of it. And a lie. Tell me...how many raccoons steal bird eggs every year? Find me that stat.
Many studies have shown that cats do not have a detrimental impact on wildlife on continents. However, many people still feel that cats are to blame for the depletion of songbirds and other animals. Two studies most often quoted to support placing blame on feral cats are the Stanley Temple study and the Churcher/Lawton study. Some individuals and groups use these studies in misguided efforts to discredit Alley Cat Allies’ and others work to humanely control feral cats. However, over sixty studies on feral cats have been written from different continents throughout the world—all showing three very important points:
Even though some cats can become efficient hunters and do kill birds, many international biologists agree that only on small islands do cats pose a severe threat to the wildlife populations. They agree with biologist C.J. Mead that “any bird populations on the continents that could not withstand these levels of predation from cats and other predators would have disappeared long ago.”
And finally, while many concentrate their efforts on blaming cats, the real culprit, homo sapiens, goes free; continuing the destruction of habitat, hunting, killing, and using pesticides that endanger entire populations of wildlife, including millions of birds. The following is a collection of opinions from experts who have studied feral cat predation and who do not blame cats for detrimentally impacting wildlife.
The following is an excerpt from Roger Tabor’s Understanding Cats, (The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.: New York/Montreal, 1995).
“From the mid-nineteenth century mankind’s own numbers and destruction of huge areas of virgin planet surface have exploded exponentially. As man thrived, so did the domestic cat due to the massive increase in food supply for both house and feral animals.” (pp. 8-9)
“Cats hunt, catch prey, and eat it—they are carnivores. To expect them not to hunt is unreasonable both because of their biology and the natural order of things. Almost incredibly, in the USA there is a growing idea that carnivores are somehow immoral. Although that view may be extreme, that cats catch birds causes cat-owning bird lovers much concern…
“While the size of the range of rural feral cats reflects their prey requirements, prey is not necessary for the survival of domestic house cats, their range sizes are independent of its abundance. While this could make them more of a danger to wildlife, this does not occur for a number of reasons….Not all house cats are competent hunters and most only catch prey occasionally….Although cats are superb hunters, it is their scavenging ability that allows them to survive as feral-living animals and live with us eating food off a saucer.
“Contrary to common belief, cats do not catch many birds, but mainly small mammals. Proportionately, town cats will catch more birds than their country cousins. What is often overlooked is that although cats are far more common in towns than in the country, so are birds! As well as feeding cats, we also feed birds. We provide artificial nest sites in the form of nestboxes and buildings. Our gardens provide good habitat in the form of rich scrubland, with excellent insect support due to an increased flowering time in the year, and lawns with abundant earthworms. Our actions can be seen as providing optimum conditions to maximize bird numbers! Consequently, when Chris Mead of the British Trust for Ornithology assessed the numbers of ringed garden birds caught by cats, he found that they were not having a harmful effect on bird populations.”( pp. 101-102)
Jeff Elliott wrote an extensive article for The Sonoma County Independent, “The Accused,” (March 3-16, 1994), which investigated frequently used studies that implicate cats in the decrease of wildlife populations. Following is an excerpt from the article listing the studies and his findings of their accuracy.
“But what do those studies actually say? And how good is the science in them? Here’s some background on the two most frequently mentioned studies, cited in Cats and Wildlife: A Factsheet from the National Audubon Society. “Britain’s 5 million cats kill about 20 million birds per year’
“Studying the hunting trophies brought home by 78 cats in a single English village, Peter Churcher and John Lawton found birds were 35 percent of the kill —by far the highest estimate in any such study. In a 1989 condensation for Natural History magazine, they multiplied their results by the estimated number of cats in the entire nation. Rarely are projections made with such limited data, except in junior high science projects—which may be an appropriate comparison, considering Churcher teaches at a boys’ school.
“Researchers in Wisconsin cite cats for killing 19 million songbirds.
“Doctor Stanley Temple, co-author of this frequently quoted work, seemed exasperated when asked again to rehash his findings. ‘The media has had a field day with this since we started,’ he sighed. Those figures were from our proposal. They aren’t actual data; that was just our projection to show how bad it might be.’ No one interviewed has seen Temple’s unpublished research.
“But the [Sonoma County] supervisors appeared to give special attention to a letter written by Drs. Peter Connors and Victor Chow, UC/Davis researchers working at the Bodega Marine Laboratory. By projecting the numbers cited from Wisconsin and Great Britain, they estimated 500,000 Sonoma County birds are killed by cats annually. In a telephone interview, Connors said he has read only the condensation of the British study and has seen only “extracted forms” of Temple’s work, which of course were guesstimates for the proposal. He was surprised to learn this study was unpublished. ‘Look, we’re not cat researchers,’ said Connors. ‘I’ve never worked with cats at all; I’m an ornithologist.’ Then what expertise does he have about cats? ‘Vic (Chow) has been participating in a mentor program with Piner High School students on a project tracking feral cats,’ he explained. ‘We had (radio transmitter) collars on three animals. We didn’t do a full study; it’s just a program with high school students.’”
The following is an excerpt from Peter Neville’s Claws and Purrs: Understanding the Two Sides of Your Cat (Sidgwick and Jackson: London, 1992), p. 164. Mr. Neville is the Director of the Center of Applied Pet Ethology in the United Kingdom.
“In England, at least, there is no evidence to suggest that the occasional high mortality of birds due to pet cats has had any damaging effect on even one species of bird, however distressing to birds, bird lovers and cat owners that predation may be….
“In any case, as we have seen, the strategy used by cats for catching birds is not hugely successful at the best of times and only increases in efficiency when the birds stalked are more vulnerable or less able to escape.”
B.M. Fitzgerald, Ecology Division, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Zealand Mead has studied various aspects of feral cats (home range, effect on birdlife, food) and the effects of various predators on local wildlife, since 1970, in New Zealand.
“As Mead (1982) emphasized, the birds in suburban and rural parts of Britain have coexisted with cats for hundreds of generations. And they may now be under less pressure from cats than they were in the past from a variety of assorted natural predators. Any bird populations on the continents that could not withstand these levels of predation from cats and other predators would have disappeared long ago.”
The following is an excerpt from Gary J. Patronek’s, VMD, Ph.D. Tufts University, “Letter to Editor,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Vol. 209, No. 10, November 15, 1996.
“If the real objection to managed colonies is that it is unethical to put cats in a situation where they could potentially kill any wild creature, then the ethical issue should be debated on its own merits without burdening the discussion with highly speculative numerical estimates for either wildlife mortality or cat predation. Whittling down guesses or extrapolations from limited observations by a factor of 10 or even 100 does not make these estimates any more credible, and the fact that they are the best available data is not sufficient to justify their use when the consequences may be extermination for cats.
“If asking for reasonable data to support the general assertion that wildlife mortality across the United States attributable to cat predation is unacceptably high can be construed as ‘attempting to minimize the impact,’ then I am guilty as charged. What I find inconsistent in an otherwise scientific debate about biodiversity is how indictment of cats has been pursued almost in spite of the evidence.”
The following is an excerpt from a speech by John Terborgh (Director of the Center for Tropical Conservation, Duke University) at The Manomet Symposium in 1989, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
“The global environmental crisis has caught up with migratory birds. There are simply too many people making ever increasing demands on a fixed supply of resources. It is inconceivable that we can continue on the same reckless path for very long.
“The conversion of forests to cropland, pasture and urban sprawl, the downgrading of virgin stands to second growth, and the conversion of mixed forests to pine monocultures… The inescapable implication of this for conservation is that there is only a limited amount of time left in which to slow human population growth and to institute other fundamental changes in the countries of this hemisphere or many of our migratory birds will be little more than memories.
“One country after another will pass the 100 per square kilometer population threshold in the coming two or three decades. After this has happened, there is really not much that can be done to salvage winter habitat for migratory birds.”
The following is an excerpt from a speech by biologist Dr. Robert Berg.
“Habitat destruction: As man’s development of the planet continues, available habitat for animals and plants is being carved up into smaller pieces. The fragmentation of ecosystems separates populations genetically from each other, and if a particular habitat is not large enough, remnant populations contained within them are doomed due to genetic inbreeding. If there are not enough large areas, chance occurrences such as an extremely harsh winter, floods, localized disease, etc., can drive remaining populations to the brink of extinction.
“Some species are dependent on environmental policy in more than one place. One endangered species of bird, Bachman’s warbler, is disappearing not because there is a scarcity of riverine swampland in the (Southeast) United States in which it breeds, but because it used to winter in the forests of western Cuba virtually all of which have been cleared for sugar cane.
“In some cases other birds have been responsible for the demise of some bird species. Kirtland’s warbler, already compressed into a small remaining jack-pine country in Michigan, was subjected to nest parasitism by the brown-headed cowbird laying its eggs in their nests. The baby cowbirds push the Kirtland’s own young from the nest and are then raised by these hapless birds. The European starling has spread across the United States since its introduction in the early 1900’s, depriving many of our resident and less aggressive birds of habitat. In the words of Pogo, ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’”
You’re so full of it. You don’t trap cats because they kill your birds. You trap them and set them loose(which is the same as setting a baby loose in a field—cruel and unimaginable) because you hate cats period. I hope to God that someone finds out who you are (obviously you will never say or admit it) because what you do is evil and against the law and you know it.....and you could go to jail for it....and I hope you get severly punished for it in your life. Or God will handle it I’m sure.
Do you get upset and kill birds that poop on your lawn or car too?
Domestic animals show what we call domesticated behavior to a greater or lesser degree, because they were “imprinted” on humans at an early age. This is particularly true in the case of a feral mother cat and her kittens.
If the kittens are handled by humans from birth on, they will not have the behavior of the mother cat.
Having said that, a feral cat should be considered a target of opportunity to any armed citizen. There is no redeeming biological value to such cats.
In a nation engaged in a replay of the old Crusades (remember 9/11 and Islam?) and considering that much of the world has humans deserving even the most minimal help in order to even survive - HOW IN H#LL CAN AN ANIMAL “RIGHTS” NUT NOT PRIORITIZE HUMANS ABOVE MERE ANIMALS? ? ? ?
/rant off
Don’t know, as much as I love and enjoy animals, they aren’t people and people come first.
Is the last picture a Red Bellied Woodpecker? I was just looking at one in my yard with the binoculars 2 minutes ago. I saw a Common Flicker this AM, they are fabulous looking birds.
Or birds (carry most diseases of them all)...or racoons...or possum.....or woodchucks....or deer....or wolves....or bears.....or moose....or alligators. Let's just shoot them all. CAts kill rats and mice. Thus the reason why farmers like barn cats around. But, Put pitbulls and rotties on that list...they are certainly people killers.
Calm down you are going to give yourself a stroke.
Good advice....:)
Fawn,
Cats are immensely destructive to bird rookeries. The Greynold’s Park rookery was once world renown because it was an urban rookery surrounded by miles of north Miami concrete jungle.
It also had Scarlet Ibis which had been brought in from the Caribbean. Let me define why that rookery is now a thing of the past.
The water had trees growing in it, and alligators swimming in it. These provided the three basic requirements for a rookery:
1. Substrate - support on which to build a nest (the trees).
2. Freedom from predators - the gators ate the racoons and feral cats attempting to swim to the nests.
3. Food - the birds could find sufficient food within acceptable flight distance to support the adults and their growing young.
Once a dimwit lawyer forced removal of the gators, the racoons and cats killed so many birds that they left. Permanently.
Man has managed North America for at least the last 11,000 years. They managed it for man’s needs and any organism (plant or animal) that couldn’t adapt, went extinct.
Don’t worry about feral cats going extinct. Worry about the prey animals for a millisecond and then consider being concerned about your American culture going extinct.
We are, after all, in another battle of the Crusades and Islam is no “Religion of Peace”! American culture could also go extinct from the same thing that killed Rome - too many barbarians (Mexicans in our case) inside the gates.
If you still think killing feral cats is of surpassing significance I have only one question - Got Burka?
;-)
Fawn,
Cats are immensely destructive to bird rookeries. The Greynold’s Park rookery was once world renown because it was an urban rookery surrounded by miles of north Miami concrete jungle.
It also had Scarlet Ibis which had been brought in from the Caribbean. Let me define why that rookery is now a thing of the past.
The water had trees growing in it, and alligators swimming in it. These provided the three basic requirements for a rookery:
1. Substrate - support on which to build a nest (the trees).
2. Freedom from predators - the gators ate the racoons and feral cats attempting to swim to the nests.
3. Food - the birds could find sufficient food within acceptable flight distance to support the adults and their growing young.
Once a dimwit lawyer forced removal of the gators, the racoons and cats killed so many birds that they left. Permanently.
Man has managed North America for at least the last 11,000 years. They managed it for man’s needs and any organism (plant or animal) that couldn’t adapt, went extinct.
Don’t worry about feral cats going extinct. Worry about the prey animals for a millisecond and then consider being concerned about your American culture going extinct.
We are, after all, in another battle of the Crusades and Islam is no “Religion of Peace”! American culture could also go extinct from the same thing that killed Rome - too many barbarians (Mexicans in our case) inside the gates.
If you still think killing feral cats is of surpassing significance I have only one question - Got Burka?
;-)
%;9)
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