83. Nasty, cruel little bastards

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!