The Times News reported yesterday on a meeting in Carbon County held to discuss the feral cat problem. The article noted that the Amazing Grace Spay Neuter program will give residents with feral cat problems financial assistance to trap, neuter, and release the cats. It’s called the TNR program.
Once the cat is released into the wild, what does it eat? Songbirds, small rodents, baby rabbits, reptiles, and any other animal or bird that it can get its paws on and teeth into.
Why are feral cats, a species not native to the Pennsylvania outdoors, deserving of more sympathy than a garter snake or wood rat, which are? If the cat can be captured, it can be euthanized. And yes, I am fully aware that “euthanized” is another word for “put to death.”
The problem with “animal rights” people is that they think in terms of individual animals, not the species. They will protect feral cats but show little concern for the endangered wood rat. A feral cat is not a pet. If it can be made a pet, fine; if it can’t, it certainly should not be re-released into the wild.
By the way, one solution would be to mandate that owners install ID microchips in their cats. We could then track the irresponsible owners who dump their cats in rural areas.
Yes on microchips. Then they can vote. Got to have ID
ReplyDeleteTrapping and/or sterilizing and testing as a solution is a failed concept from Day-One.
ReplyDeleteThere are now about 150,000,000 feral-cats just in the USA, PLUS 86,000,000 pet-cats (60,000,000 of which are still allowed to kill all wildlife), this means the population is already oversaturated for a long time. Nobody wants more than 86,000,000 cats for pets. There's only 311,000,000 people in the USA. 2+ cats exist for every 3 people, from infant to senior. Thanks to those who outlawed destroying them in a more efficient, often more-humane, and more cost-effective manner by shooting them. While they also promoted their slow, random-chance, inefficient, and failed trapping programs. TNR people (criminally irresponsible cat-hoarders in reality) claim trap and kill is also a failure, and they'd be right. The problem has always been the trapping, slowing things down far below cats' breeding-rates.
Keep in mind their exponential growth-rate. An average litter of 5 cats every 5-6 months (some say 3X's a year), breeding as early as 6-months of age. 2 can become 42 (up to 252) cats in only 1 year. No amount of trapping them (if you could even get them all to enter traps), nor valuable resources (transport and vet costs, etc.), man-hours, nor money will ever catch-up to their growth rate. You have an ecological, human-health, animal-welfare, and financial disaster on your hands, ALL thanks to cat-lovers and TNR-advocates. The faster that cats are destroyed the better. Even using guns and having all stray and feral cats shot-on-sight we still might not be able to catch-up to their exponential growth. Not even until every last land animal (including humans) is gone from this earth, due to cats destroying the whole food-chain, with nothing but cannibalistic cats left walking the land. No exaggeration. Do the math. Ask any TNR group how many cats they've trapped. They haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the problem THEY CAUSED and are only exacerbating with their blatant lies and deceptions. Using the birth-rate, guess how many feral-cats alone will be born just this year? Even when underestimating by 1/2 to be safe -- 1 BILLION 575 MILLION CATS. Got enough traps? Got enough centuries to trap them all while they're still breeding at exponential rates and annihilating all wildlife? Trap-advocates cost you to lose the feral-cat-explosion race long ago.
On advice of the sheriff, I alone was able to completely rid my land of ALL these INVASIVE-SPECIES feral-cats by shooting. Cats had annihilated the native food-chain for ALL native wildlife, destroying not only all the prey that their cats disemboweled and cruelly tortured for play-toys, but all the predators that depended on that prey, starving all native predators to death as well. (Now there's REAL animal cruelty for you, caused by cat-lovers. They should all be in prisons for life.) Shooting cats is perfectly legal where I live, and is even a more humane method when done right than terrorizing trapping and animal-shelter methods. One moment they are happily stalking defenseless animals to cruelly torture again, the next they are dead and don't even know what happened. Making your land 100% cat-free is something that cat advocates haven't been able to solve nation-wide for 30-40 years. On my land only 1 person in only 2 seasons was able to accomplish what they couldn't attain in decades. Why is that? It's also been over a year since, guess how many replaced them. NONE. Another flat-out TNR LIE. It's time for you all to grow a spine and get enough strength-of-heart to do what needs to be done. If it's not legal where you live then use the "SSS Cat Management Program", for Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-Up. That's legal everywhere in the world. It may be the only thing that saves us from this ecological disaster caused by spineless and ignorant lawmakers, as well as all the heartless and disrespectful cat-advocates that they defend. Don't waste your time arguing with ignorant cat-lovers either, as I stupidly tried to do for 15 years. Just do what needs to be done FIRST. Only later, after you've made your land 100% cat-free should you take your time to try to educate the ineducable, as I am attempting to do now.
ReplyDeleteThe Feral-Cat Solution:
Make new cat-ownership AND care-taking of feral-cats a felony, with fines and prison for anyone failing to comply until this problem they created is brought under control by any and all means possible. Shoot-on-sight is, without a doubt, the fastest, most economical (0.3 cent to 3 cents per cat depending on ammo prices), and most effective method available. It's how I was able to rid my own land of this invasive-species nightmare (legal where I live). This is also the only method that doesn't endanger nor harass any other animals, like what frequently happens with non-discriminatory random-chance traps. If it's not legal where you live then use the "SSS Cat Management Program" -- SSS = Shoot, Shovel, & Shut-Up. Though avoid use of poisons if at all possible, that once entered into the food-chain, will go on to destroy more of the very wildlife that you are hoping to save from destruction by cats. Whatever you do though, please bury or incinerate the carcasses so all the deadly diseases that cats now carry won't go on to further infect the native wildlife, nor any other humans that might come in contact with them. Following is some good documentation on the most humane ways to confront a feral-cat problem where you live, including the best firearms, air-rifles, and ammo required. Though avoid using their suggested slow and inefficient trapping methods that got us into the ecological-disaster that we have now. http://deenawinter.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/ec1781.pdf
Here's another kicker that trap-advocates fail to realize, in their infinite ignorance of how animal-behavior and evolution works.
ReplyDeleteThose cats that have learned to avoid and evade all trapping methods are the next generation to survive. Ever hear the old adage, "If you invent a better mousetrap nature will just invent a better mouse."?
So now, thanks to the supreme stupidity and ignorance of trap-advocates, we have a race of freely roaming cats in all countrysides of every continent which are passing on their "how to survive" behavior to all their offspring, both genetically and behaviorally. Now the next phase of millions of feral-cats won't even be able to be trapped. This is just how amazingly stupid trap-advocates are. You thought 150,000,000 feral cats was bad? In colloquial terms, "You ain't seen nuthin' yet!"
There's a reason the phrase "hunted to extinction" is so well-known in all cultures across all lands. It is the ONLY method that is faster than a species can adapt to.
Stick that in your TNR-pipe of deceptive and deceitful ignorance and smoke it. You might as well, because you all have obviously been smoking something.