Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Wildcat Wednesday . . . are you doing your part to stop wild animals from killing birds?
Best of all, you get the feral cat back to release into the wild!
You know, when I was a lad, every kid in the neighborhood had the equipment to handle a problem like stray cats, and the willingness to use it. And we never put anybody’s eye out, either. Too bad the obvious solution is a misdemeanor in St. Paul.
Joe Doakes
If we went with the obvious solutions, what would the dues-paying city employee do?
http://www.gamousa.com/
I remember reading an article a few years ago about this. The logic went something like;
So feral cats are bad because they kill birds and reproduce?
Yep.
How does releasing the now sterilized cat back into the wild help?
They can’t breed and create more cats, so eventually they won’t be around to kill birds.
Why not just kill the cats, then they won’t breed or kill birds?
Ew, killing is WRONG! Besides, then another cat would just move in to the area that isn’t sterilized and could keep breeding.
Per Smith’s and Swiftee’s comments, it strikes me that the best way to handle this is to explain to people that if they let their cat go feral, it is likely to die an unpleasant death. Nothing like real consequences for actions to drive home a point.
The latest public-shaming campaign I’ve seen on Facebook is over a woman veterninarian in Texas who posted a photo of her with a feral cat that she’d just killed with a bow and arrow. Now her state licensing board is being overwhelmed by phone calls and emails demanding that the woman’s vet license be suspended.
(Personally, I’m somewhat of the mind that the picture was photo-shopped and the story posted as a social experiment to monitor reaction and measure the impact of E-mobs in our public square.)
Feral cats deserve the same treatment as feral pigs get in the south, with the exception being I wouldn’t eat the feral cats.