Cats & Cat Health

Here in New Zealand, where it is summertime, we had a beautiful Christmas Day. We opened our presents outside and Alfie sat and watched us.

I hope you all had  a lovely Christmas. Our best wishes to you for a sucessful and happy 2008 (with no cat-astrophes!)

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I keep on reading about the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) going on about how cats must be imprisoned to protect birds. I have mentioned this before but having read an article on the topic recently I will do so again.

Keeping cats inside to save birds isn’t necessarily going to work. Sounds like it would work, but have they done any studies on it? Well here in little old New Zealand they have. Here is the most recent finding on this topic. This is taken from the New Zealand Herald 12 December edition.

“Department of Conservation efforts to wipe out cats on Little Barrier Island to protect the Cook’s petrel backfired as rats became an even more deadly threat.

Efforts to rid the island of feral cats in 1980 failed to reverse the decline in numbers of the native Cook’s petrel, says Matt Rayner, a PhD student at the University of Auckland’s School of Biological Sciences.

While 32 per cent of breeding burrows fledged a chick when both cats and rats were preying on the petrels, only 9 per cent produced chicks after cats were removed from their breeding areas, he said in research published yesterday in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The cats were suppressing the rat numbers, so the removal of the cats allowed rat numbers to increase, and as rat numbers increased … they [hunted] petrels more heavily,” said Mr Rayner.

Cook’s petrels used to be found everywhere in New Zealand, but they disappeared from the mainland in the 19th century through human impact on their habitat.”

So you see it isn’t always as cut and dried as it would appear. This is not the only time this has been observed. If you get rid of cats you must get rid of the prey the cats keep down if that prey is itself a danger to wild life. Taking one without the other is a big mistake.

Or, here’s an idea…let’s populate with colonies of feral cats, all those habitats that have birds plus rats but no cats!!!

On that note did you know that cats were persecuted in the Middle Ages due their association with witches. It has been said that if there had been more cats around the Plague would not have gained ground and killed so many thousands of people. The Plague was carried by the fleas on rats.

Clea Simon made some helpful suggestions on her blog but she does advocate keeping the cat indoors. I don’t but then I don’t live in the USA and we don’t have any coyotes in our suburbs thank heavens!

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Story by Maude Standis

A little known Chicago law makes it illegal to own outdoor cats. I was unaware of this until the other day when I opened my front door and a cop spied my mean street cat prancing up the stairs for his breakfast.

“Miss?” the cop asked. “Is that you cat?” At first I ignored this city’s civil servant dressed in her crisp blue costume of authority and started to talk to my roommate who was locking her bike to the neighbor’s fence.

The cop, not liking my disdain for her ticketing powers informed me that it was illegal, yes illegal, to own an outdoor cat in Chicago. And that she had the authority to drag me down to court, impound my cat and ticket me for up to $500. I scooped up my cat and placed him inside. Not wanting to mess with this poor woman’s obvious ego issues, I didn’t object to the ridiculousness of such a law, rather I politely asked, why outdoor cats would ever be illegal?

“Because the neighbors don’t like them, and they pee on lawns making them smell bad, and they eat birds, and other small critters.”

She then told me she was going to let me off this time, but that I better keep my cat locked up, because she would be back to check up on me and then resumed issuing tickets to cars without permits.

Thinking that this lady was just obsessive enough to be back, I figured I should check out the law. Turns out, she was right. It is illegal to have outdoor cats in Chicago. But while she could impound my outdoor cat, she had not right to ticket me or take me to court.

The law dictates that a stray animal, such as my grey and white darling, on public property or upon private premises of any person other than the owner shall be immediately impounded by an animal control officer. A representative from the City Clerk said that they were not sure when exactly this became the law, but that he believed that it happened when Chicago’s municipal was rewritten in the 1950s.

So for the last 60 odd years all of these cats promenading up and down the sidewalk, climbing fences, striking down finches and returning to our homes have been illegal.

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