“They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom! Except maybe to keep pet cats.”
Mel Gibson’s iconic pre-battle rallying cry as Braveheart’s William Wallace might have to be amended if some Scottish politicians get their way and restrict the ownership of pet cats.
Cat lovers in Scotland were up in arms this week after several reports in Scottish and UK media said the Scottish National Party — Scotland’s most powerful political party, which controls almost half the seats in its parliament — is looking to ban cats in a bid to protect local wildlife.
They point to a recently released Scottish Animal Welfare Commission (SAWC) report that claims there are some 800,000 outdoor cats roaming the country, and those felines are responsible for 27 million birds every year, in addition to small mammals.
Meanwhile, other Scottish press pushed back on the claim, saying the SNP hasn’t voted to ban cats yet and isn’t really looking to stop people from having pet cats.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. The SAWC report did blame cats for killing tens of millions of animals annually, and it did recommend legislation to limit or prevent people from keeping cats in some areas.
In addition to a law requiring people to keep their pet cats indoors, the report suggested curfews and, yes, legislation that would forbid people from keeping pet cats if they live in certain places deemed “vulnerable” to feline predatory habits. That means if wildlife biologists identify an endangered bird that nests in an area, for example, people who live there would not be permitted to have pet cats.
However, the report does not call for a general or widespread ban, as some media reports suggested.
The report credited Australia, where several states have enacted strict measures forbidding people from allowing their cats outside, prohibiting them from owning cats in some places, and even embarking on an infamous campaign to kill three million domestic cats by air-dropping sausages laced with a poison that is lethal to felines, but supposedly not harmful to other animals.
That measure preceded several years of “biblical” rodent plagues, with hordes of mice rampaging across entire swaths of the country and causing billions of dollars in damage to residential and commercial property. Cats are, of course, the natural predators of rodents, and domestic cats wouldn’t exist as a species if they weren’t attracted to human settlements where mice and rats feasted on grain reserves.
I haven’t had the chance to take a deep dive into the SAWC report yet, so I don’t know precisely how the commission arrived at the numbers it did, or if the research is original. Hopefully I’ll have a follow up on that soon.
While the truth is somewhere in the middle, so is the solution. People who love cats are happy to voluntarily meet certain guidelines, and they should be, because if we’re uncooperative, someone will eventually turn to compulsion through law. Likewise, concern for the welfare of cats and wild animals aren’t mutually exclusive.
In the meantime, Scotland’s government is likely to spend more money studying the problem before acting.
Pain In The Bud 
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha – exceyuse me while I fall about laughing at the “Scottish Government” this is a bunch of people who have conclusively been proven to be sex pests, outright fraudsters and racist mysogynists. I also read this and its yet another distraction from the criminality of the Scottish Parliament and particularly the SNP…
However as with all Government there is an output eventually and it will generally have a net negative effect, here’s hoping the output is many many years away…
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Yeah they’re gonna spend more money studying the impact on wildlife, apparently, which I hope means doing it the right way, the way the DC Cat Count did it. If you have solid data on the stray and feral populations, you have a baseline for understanding ecological impact, as DC has shown.
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And the ferals will be slaughtered. Mark my words.
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I published a Post last week that addressed the very clear fact that domestic cats in particular are being targeted more and more, in books, on screen, and in real life. And my take on what might be causing this reaction because it just seems to be getting worse. Bottom line: Weaker people fear what they don’t understand or cannot “seemingly” control;
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I don’t think it helps that there’s an ongoing effort to politicize the ownership of pets and brand dogs and cats according to political affiliation. There are also constant news stories about people shooting cats with BBs, arrows and even handgun rounds, and psychos killing cats. The penalties for animal abuse/murder still aren’t severe though.
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That’s what they’ll do if they continue to follow the Australian/New Zealand blueprint. I hope it doesn’t come to that.
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That’s my fear as well
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Unrelated to the Post…are you have issues not seeing your latest activity stats in the Dashboard? Perhaps it has been “cancelled” for us non-paying users because as of this morning it’s gone. Poof!
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I’m not sure, as I pay for this wonderful service lol. Lots of things glitch out though.
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I read M post fairly quickly as i have little time today. Something about cats sensing evil. I absolutely believe that as how my cats reacted to my sisters shitty pet ownership through the years. Not going to say what she did because i do not want to think about it. Not to mention my other sibling taking her cat and throwing it away like trash in Prospect Park. But everytime she was in the house my cat would go under the bed and not come out. Anytime my friend came over my cat would come out.
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Our cats are strictly indoor kitties. I think I would be very offended if someone told me I had to get rid of them to protect the wildlife. (They appear to know how good they have it. We’ve never had an escapee.)
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Apparently the Scottish reps who were most keen on this idea are backpedaling now after realizing how unpopular it is.
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If you want wildlife to flourish, preserve their habitats. We lived in a forested neighborhood. People no doubt abandoned cats on the roads. But cats weren’t found living in the forest, they came to the houses. Felis doesn’t really live in sylvestris any more … Now we live in an old city neighborhood being taken over by high rises. We have all the area birds because we let the yard grow, no doubt annoying the city … We also feed the ferals, but they don’t hunt the birds, they come to the windows, and hollar. Surely people in Scotland would want to preserve their beautiful wilderness areas anyway!
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“Felis doesn’t really live in sylvestris any more.”
Well put. A lot of people have this idea that cats don’t need us, that they can just live happily in the wild. They can’t. The same genetic processes that made them our companions also robbed them of much of the agility, speed, reaction time and senses they had as wild animals.
They still have those abilities, but to a lesser degree, which is why they don’t do well and live short, miserable lives as strays and ferals.
I can’t remember where I read it, but a Marine in WWII wrote about a kitten he adopted and raised in Asia, and how he observed the kitten playing and interacting with wild kittens. The difference was striking.
Cats need us. They’re our responsibility.
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