Abstract
I recently gave a little talk to a bird club about the perils and pitfalls that commonly await the budding aviculturist when he runs into local government; including Zoning, Building & Safety, Animal Regulation, and the Department of Health. In the question and answer session that trailed the meeting, one of the more heated problems that came up for discussion was what to do about cats. From this voluble shouting match, I learned a number of things which I will share with you.
The world is divided into two parts - those who love cats, and those who can't abide them. Members of both these worlds sometime join together in the raising of birds and their approach to dealing with Felinus domesticus is influenced greatly by their membership in their respective spheres of cat-hating or cat-adoration.
There is a consensus of opinion, generally shared by the law, that while one may have title to a cat, one may never really own a cat. A cat is a four-legged free spirit in animal form that is both ever present and phantasmagoric. While corporeal, it defies reduction to possession and the tight little definitions of ownership that so appeal to the orderly mind. Like owning a natural-gas well, you know when you have one, but it is hard putting your finger on it all the time, and once it gets loose in the community, you can play hell reducing it to your possession again.
The cat lovers were of the opinion that they had never met a bad cat, only untrained cats from irresponsible cat owners. It was their view that cats provide a much needed service to the world in the form of companionship to those who need it, a symbol of individuality and freedom in a world of suffocating conformity, etc., etc., and so forth. This was greeted by boos from the cat haters who were of the view that cats made a good form of weighted ballast for gunny sacks to be dropped in the nearest body of water.
I could tell right away, that this was no place for a neutral to be, but the doors were all closed and I couldn't get out with anything approaching the dignity I like to affect. (Personally, I would just as soon have been in a good knockdown custody dispute where two battling spouses are using their innocent children as handy targets to get even with one another.)
From all the caterwauling, a few points emerged that may be useful to those who will listen. Most jurisdictions will allow, assist, and even sometimes supply traps for the trapping of cats that come upon your property. After they have been trapped the cats then can either be returned to their so-called owners with appropriate comments about hope for reformation of their errant ways, or they can be turned over to the local version of the Animal Regulation Department for further disposition, ie. placement, drowning, or gassing.
Some participants felt that this approach took away the joy of self-help, the satisfaction of revenge, and the finality of execution on the premises. "A good cat is a dead cat." However, there are a number of bad aspects to such a swift and sure resolution of the problem. One being that cat owners, like parents, sometimes take a very dim view of others who mete out punishment to their charges. They can get uptight or even emotional, and then where are you? You not only have a corpus delecti on your hands, you have an angry neighbor to deal with - and who among us needs enemies when friends are so hard to come by? So beware the cat that prowls, but take only such action as is neighborly and designed to alleviate your suffering, not increase it.
All of which leads me to the second part of this missive. Cats can be very effective mousers and help you in keeping down the population of rodents that tend to congregate around avranes, The mouse, and his overstuffed cousin the rat, are harbingers of all sorts of evil, not to mention the tithe you pay to them in additional feed for your aviaries so that they are well fed and in condition to propagate.
I have had a strong aversion to rodents ever since as a child I was subjected to one of those patriotic horror films during the early days of WWII (when our side was losing), where a rodent faced Japanese torturer was depicted as feeding some screaming white lady to a pen full of hungry rats. As I grew up I changed my ideas about the Japanese, but my feelings towards the rats have remained the same.
Diseases and rodents are just natural allies. They co-exist and persist in their efforts to get us down. A young businessman of my acquaintance was done in. some time ago by a rather rare disease known as leptospirosis, which he had allegedly contacted from rat borne contamination he had picked up in the import-export business. With all our progress in public health and medicine, we are still hostage to these creatures and their infective vermin.
If you need any further motivation to set about an effective program of rodent extermination, let me lay this one on , you. There exists in California's outback, a large reservoir of bubonic plague in the mice, rats, and ground squirrels that inhabit our mountains and forests. The bubonic plague was also known as the "black death" during the middle ages, and wiped out perhaps a quarter of all the people in Europe at that time. The plague kills a few people in California nearly every year, but the victims have thus far been usually confined to veterinarians and others who have occasion to be in contact with infected carriers. From what I read, it seems that the principla means of transmission is from the fleas that infect rodents in the wilder areas of the state.
Now, picture the following Hollywood, film for television, scenario (no rights reserved). A camper and his family go out on a weekend to the Tehachapis (the transverse mountain range that divided Southern California from its drought stricken counterpart to the north) where the last known victim was done in a month or so ago. The camper's dog and children play around in the great outdoors and come into contact with a sick but cute ground squirrel. Fleas from the ground squirrel get a free ride on the dog and the clothing of the children. Dog and children return to the Los Angeles area, and the fleas take up residency in the neighborhood. A few weeks later, people start showing up for medical care with unusual symptoms, and by the time we know that we have bubonic plague among us, it has become a scene right out of the middle ages.
Your chances of being done in by the bubonic plague are not as great as say falling into a crack in the San Andreas fault, or being vaporized in a nuclear war, however, it is something to think about, and I hope that it might get you started on a...