Category: Animal Cruelty

‘Fry the ferals’ – the war against feral cats.

Everyone loves cats, right? That’s why they are arguably the most popular pet in the world. Wrong. For every person that likes cats at least another hates them, particularly feral cats. Not just individuals, but governments, institutions, conservation organisations, scientists and even some animal charities. How can this be?’

“now they’ve been exposed as the instigators of a backyard holocaust far worse than ever suspected”.

Their crime? Pursuing their natural instincts and behaviours as predators. Bird and small mammal enthusiasts are appalled that they chase, play and eat birds and small mammals feeling they are sadistic.  The media do not help the cats’ PR by ludicrous comments such as “now they’ve been exposed as the instigators of a backyard holocaust far worse than ever suspected”.

Cats, feral, colony, cat cruelty, animal welfare

Inexplicably everyone appears to ignore the fact that they are predators and no matter how you try you cannot take the killer instinct out of a predator. In fact it is unfair to do so, or even chide them for following their natural instincts.

“stop pussyfooting around and fry the ferals”

Feral cats bear the brunt of this fixation. Estimates of how many cats inhabit the globe put the figure at around 600 million, but realistically it is impossible to know how many live wild and the amount of damage they do. Most feral cats live alongside us, but stay disassociated from us, preferring to scavenge and hunt and this is why they are viewed as pests.

In New Zealand, Gareth Morgan, a businessman and philanthropist, began a “Cats to Go” campaign aimed at eradicating all cats from the country as they were destroying native animals. The campaign accused the local NZSPCA of not getting real and he stated that the country should “stop pussyfooting around and fry the ferals”.

The Australian branch of the Cats to Go campaign reckon they are far ahead of their New Zealand counterparts, “who lack spine in dealing with wandering cats, by compulsory microchipping, fines and legislated areas which prohibit cats being outdoors” instead of killing them.

Two million cats to be eradicated in Australia by 2020

Australia has a feral cat population of between 20-30 million and the Government announced that 2 million were to be eradicated by the year 2020 to save native wildlife, which obviously upset cat lovers the world over. They are blamed for killing 75 million native animals and have allegedly driven at least 27 mammal species to extinction.

Cat, street, feeding
Not everyone hates cats – Asian street cats being fed.

Gregory Andrews, the threatened species commissioner for the Department of the Environment stated: “We don’t hate cats. We just can’t tolerate the damage that they’re doing to our wildlife”. All kinds of methods including poisoning are used to exterminate them and they have been eradicated from over 50 islands and large areas of the Australian and New Zealand mainland.

In the USA, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute accuses cats of killing 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.9 to 20.7 billion mammals each year.

The UK Mammal Society believe 275 million animals are killed by cats annually in the UK, including 55 million birds and 80 million mice. They have even been implicated in the death of 230,000 bats. Bizarrely the top three birds allegedly killed by cats are house sparrows, blackbirds and starlings which we look upon as pest species anyway in the UK and slaughter in their millions. The whole debate then becomes rather meaningless.

Surprisingly, the RSPB, the UK’s leading bird conservation organisation, have supported the cat in the past pointing out that:

“there is no clear scientific evidence that such mortality is causing bird populations to decline. This may be surprising, but many millions of birds die naturally every year, mainly through starvation, disease or other forms of predation. There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds”. RSPB

But most authorities believe extermination is the answer and decry any other initiative such as trapping, neutering and releasing as it is not viewed as cost-effective and doesn’t decrease numbers because you need to neuter all of them and not allow any to be abandoned.

Feral cats face unpleasant and agonising deaths through poisoning and trapping.

They reckon neutering and releasing only maintains large cat colonies which still cause havoc in nearby sensitive wildlife areas. They may not be able to breed, but they can still eat is the stance that the exterminator lobby take.

Feral cats face unpleasant and agonising deaths through poisoning and trapping in many countries through no fault of their own because of the historic legacy of our insistence on introducing them into sensitive areas such as islands as pest controllers and then as pets and in recent times allowing them to breed out of control.

The lines are drawn between those who want to kill all the ‘nuisance’ feral and stray cats and those who wish to neuter and release them and it is pretty obvious which side will prevail. This is particularly so in countries like Australia, New Zealand and islands who have vulnerable rare native species of birds, mammals and reptiles.

 

Related Articles:

The reasons we are so intolerant towards cats.
We need a UK Cat Act
U.K. cats always lose out at any mention of legal status.

Big Game trophy hunting always in the headlines.

Big game trophy hunting has recently hit the headlines yet again with another American huntress causing worldwide outrage by posting photos on social media and causing widespread attention. It could be said that they do it on purpose. And of course that is exactly want they want to do. They want us outraged, and strange though it may seem, they want the publicity so that they can get the notoriety and associated celebrity they crave and social media is the best way of doing so.

The culprit this time is a lady from Kentucky named Tess Thompson Talley who stated:

“prayers for my once in a lifetime dream hunt came true today. Spotted this rare black giraffe bull and stalked him for quite awhile. I knew it was the one. He was over 18 years old, 4,000 lbs and was blessed to be able to get 2,000 lbs of meat from him.

Dead giraffe, posing hunter, Big Game trophy hunting
Tess Thompson Talley with her aged victim. ©Independent Digital News and Media Ltd.

They know what they do is perfectly legal and that they have the backing of many conservationists, wildlife experts and scientists. Many are coming around to the idea that perhaps it does benefit some animals in the long-term to be hunted for money which can be used to pay for their protection and habitat.

“Lions need trophy hunting just as much as trophy hunting needs lions”

Dr Craig Packer, an eminent American professor with a passion for conserving lions is one of them and has stated: ‘Lions need trophy hunting just as much as trophy hunting needs lions’. He believes their long-term survival depends on big money coming in to protect them and was also quoted as saying:

“Trophy hunting is not inherently damaging to lion populations provided the hunters take care to let the males mature and wait to harvest them after their cubs are safely reared. The dentist [who shot Cedric] was unlucky and not altogether to blame. Trophy hunters are no angels, but they actually control four times as much lion habitat in Africa than is protected in national parks; and 80% of the world’s lions left in the world are in the hunters’ hands”.

For the countries involved, such as Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique it apparently benefits their economy greatly. Advocates are quick to point out that by encouraging ‘hunting farms’ wildlife and natural habitat is also encouraged and not used for livestock, therefore benefiting conservation.

“you can often be sharing the dinner table with hunters who have just shot one of the animals you came on safari to see”.

Hunting farms are on the increase and are shooting galleries full of semi tame animals that are easily tracked and shot. They have the dual purpose of being ‘private reserves’ providing luxury safari accommodation for tourists. Ironically at these places you can often be sharing the dinner table with hunters who have just shot one of the animals you came on safari to see.

The subject is of course extremely divisive and in recent years we have had the story of Cedric the lion in Zimbabwe. He was shot with an arrow, then tracked for hours and finally shot dead by a trophy hunter paying US$35,000 dollars for the privilege. The main reason this story attracted so much attention was that the lion had a name making it more personal to us and was wearing a tracker collar for an Oxford University research team to follow him.

He didn’t realise the lion was so popular and had a name, otherwise he wouldn’t have shot him.

The American dentist, who committed the outrage, apologised for his actions. He said that he didn’t realise the lion was so popular and had a name, otherwise he wouldn’t have shot him. The apology was absurd as basically he was justifying his actions by claiming that shooting some other semi-tame non-celebrity nameless lion would have been acceptable, which bizarrely is probably correct.

What is noticeable is that so many of the hunters are north american, presumably because of the gun culture there and that they are bored with shooting bears, coyotes and pumas in their own part of the world.

There are hundreds if not thousands of iconic wild animals such as lions and bears being bred for the sole purpose of being shot for gain and pleasure, just like game birds. All over Africa big-game hunting is big business, with hunters lining up to pay huge sums to kill ‘trophy’ animals, so that they can display the heads and body parts around the home.

“Everything I have done is legal, so how can you fault someone because of their hobbies?” Sabrina Corgatelli, another ‘celebrated’ hunter.

Big game hunting will never be eradicated in the present climate as there are so many mixed messages coming from all those who should be campaigning against it.

There seems something very wrong in breeding ‘wild’ animals to order, just to be shot to raise funds to supposedly conserve others. If that is the future for the planets’ wildlife, which it seems it is, I just wonder whether it is worth bothering to save animals for future generations.

Updated February 2020

Hunting with dogs and the “unenforceable” ban.