If you are a cat lover, don’t read any further. You’ll only be upset and if you share
the characteristics of most ailurophiles, you will almost certainly get angry.
OK. You have been warned. Here goes:
The ducks around our house are starting to get
frisky. This morning I watched
five mallard drakes relentlessly chasing the females up and down the stream
making a dreadful noise. Spring is
coming but they’re wasting their time, as you will see.
I don’t like domestic cats. They serve no purpose other than as a source of comfort for
certain people. To those people I
say: eat chocolate or get a hamster.
Better still, get a dog!
Most domesticated animals such as horses, cattle,
sheep, camels, goats and dogs serve a purpose, either as food or to help mankind
in its endeavours. Indeed,
progress would have been slower and more difficult without the horse for transport
or the dog for hunting.
Even today, when hunting with them is illegal, dogs still perform essential tasks in helping the blind, in crowd control, law
enforcement and searching for missing people or illicit drugs.
But what do cats do? Nothing! Don’t
tell me that they provide companionship.
That’s what television is for.
Cats do nothing useful but they do a great deal that is destructive,
damaging and harmful. Terry Pratchett got it right:
“If cats looked like
frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are.”
When we lived in Cayman, I would sit on my porch and
watch a black and white cat while it hunted lizards. I would often see it, staring defiantly at me with a lizard
hanging motionless from its jaws.
The lizard was then dropped, dead or severely mutilated. That cat wasn’t hungry. It never ate the lizards and so it
didn’t hunt for food. It killed
because it could.
One day Bernard, my neighbour in Cayman, told me that he had
seen this cat squashed flat on Shamrock Road just outside the entrance to
Prospect Reef where we lived. He
said that he had scraped it up with a shovel and dumped it in the ditch so that
its doting owner would be spared the horror of seeing the evidence of its
demise. I was delighted and so
were the local lizards when I told them.
Six weeks later, I was snoozing in my recliner on the
porch when I heard a rustling in the shrubs in front of me. I looked up expecting to see an iguana
or possibly a snake emerge but got the shock of my life to see a black and
white cat staring defiantly at me with a lizard hanging motionless from its
jaws. I went straight to the ditch
where Bernard said he had thrown the cat, but I couldn’t find any trace of it
but that could be because decomposition and decay are rapid in the tropics.
What Jesus had done in three days this cat had done
in about 40 but I suppose it would take longer as it had nine lives to
resurrect.
One of the joys of moving to rural Buckinghamshire
has been the increased number of different bird species that I have seen. Two weeks ago the ground was covered by
several inches of snow and we put bird feed on the table outside the
window. For an hour I watched and
kept note of the birds that came.
In that hour I saw these species: Blue tit, Great tit, Waxwing, Chaffinch, Sparrow, Robin, Nuthatch, Goldfinch, Greenfinch
and Greater Spotted Woodpecker.
The woodpeckers had great difficulty getting on to the covered bird
table because they are much larger and considerably less agile than the other
visitors and consequently were very clumsy in their attempts to get at the food
but it was fun to watch them.
The bird table was often heavily
overcrowded and a number of wood pigeons, moorhens and coots gathered around the
base to pick up any seeds knocked off.
Fifteen yards away a heron stood in the stream that borders my garden
looking on at it all disdainfully.
It has been conservatively estimated that there are nine million British domestic
cats and a third of them are habitual killers. They kill at least 55 million British birds every year and have been blamed for contributing to the long-term
decline of garden birds like the house sparrow, dunnock and robin. Populations of other garden birds also suffer from predation by cats.
Some cat owners try to alleviate the carnage by using the technique of attaching a bell to a cat's collar to
warn birds of its approach but this is losing its effectiveness because cats
are learning to move without ringing them.
Last spring the ducks on the stream
and the small lake that runs alongside the drive had about 60 ducklings. I don’t think any of them lived longer
than a week. Cats! Last April on a Saturday morning, I
watched while two cats, almost acting as a team, stalked and killed three
day-old ducklings in twenty minutes.
I know someone who has a powerful airgun
that he uses to kill squirrels because squirrels eat bird’s eggs and eat bird
food from bird tables. I’ve asked
him to use it on the cats but he won’t because for reasons beyond my
comprehension, the law protects
domestic cats and it is an offence to trap, injure or kill them. Is there an answer? I don’t think there is.
Ridiculous!
