cat colonies – Pain In The Bud

This Is What Happens When People Demonize Cats

Cats were poisoned, shot with a handgun and killed with blow darts in separate incidents this week.

It’s been a while since we touched on the topic of thinly-veiled cat hatred masquerading as academic rigor in studies blaming cats for killing improbable numbers of birds and small mammals in countries like the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Unfortunately those “studies,” which have little relationship with reality, have serious consequences. In places like New Zealand, it’s the widespread government-sanctioned slaughter of felines and the rise of vigilantism by creepy people who clearly enjoy killing cats.

Now that sort of thing is happening with greater frequency in the US.

In Brooklyn someone poisoned a group of at least seven community cats. A man who cares for the colony of strays found the felines dead under his deck, where they usually sleep. The cats were all bleeding from nose and mouth, and authorities believe someone put rat poison in their food.

Lab tests and necropsy results are pending. St. Vincent Feline Rescue and state Sen. Steve Chan, a former police officer, are offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to the identification and arrest of the person or people responsible. Cats from two other nearby colonies have gone missing and authorities believe they may have met the same fate.

The deaths have taken a toll on Albert Vincent Berto, a Brooklyn man who has been caring for and feeding the strays for years.

“ It gave me purpose. It gave me something to get up in the morning for,” he told The Gothamist. “ I’m just bewildered. I’m just, I feel lost. I’m so lost right now.”

Two cats eating on the ground, one white with brown patches and one grey and white. — Credit: Pexels

Meanwhile a man in West Palm Beach, Fl., has been shooting cats.

A local rescue managed to get footage of the man during his latest attack. The video shows the man riding up to the exterior of a closed flea market at night and taking shots at cats with a hand gun.

A cat named Zoe survived a gunshot wound, but the bullet shattered a front leg, which had to be amputated.

Staff at a local rescue stressed that the flea market shooting isn’t the first of its kind. They believe the same person may be responsible for shooting other cats in the West Palm Beach area.

“This is not an isolated incident from what we know,” Gabby Gluck of Furry Friends told WPBF, a local ABC affiliate. “This is just the incident that we have footage of.”

Furry Friends has announced a $5,000 reward for anyone who can help police identify the man in the video footage. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office is handling the investigation.

Those weren’t the only similar incidents this week. In Tennessee, three people were arrested after killing several cats and severely injuring a kitten with blow darts. In Hawaii, two men face murder and assault charges after allegedly attacking a man and his sister, who were feeding stray cats in Maui. Alfred Kailihiwa, 71, who was well known as a caretaker of local strays, was rushed to the hospital after the attack but died of his injuries a short time later. And in Rochester, NY, a local shelter’s outdoor cat homes were smashed by cat-hating vandals the week prior, and not for the first time.

Colony Feeders Assaulted In The Latest Example Of Australia’s Freak-Out Over Cats

Vigilantism against stray cats and their caretakers is on the rise in Australia and New Zealand amid increasingly pitched rhetoric from conservationists who say felines are responsible for driving other species to extinction.

Antone Martinho-Truswell wants to get rid of every free-range cat in his native Australia and says “it’s time we outlawed pet cats” as well.

The University of Sydney academic, who styles himself as a zoologist and makes impossible claims about the number of animals supposedly killed by felines every year, doesn’t mince words when presenting his argument, which boils down to a logical fallacy. He says he’s an expert, he says cats must be driven to extinction, ergo it must happen.

“Your cat is a killer and it cannot be permitted to live here,” Martinho-Truswell said.

With rhetoric like that, and special interests groups claiming cats are the primary force behind the pending extinctions of native flora and fauna, it’s not a surprise when people think they should take the problem into their own hands. In Australia and New Zealand we’ve already seen vigilantes who fail at hiding their joy at killing felines, and now volunteers helping cats have to worry about their physical safety.

A colony manager and two other volunteers were feeding strays in western Sydney on April 17 when a man in a gold Nissan stopped and asked them if they were helping the cats.

When they said they were, the man became violent and attacked the colony manager, a 31-year-old woman, and a volunteer who tried to protect her, a 33-year-old man who was knocked unconscious by the suspect, police said. The man drove off before officers arrived.

The victims were treated at a local hospital. Police have a description of the suspect and a license plate number, according to local media in Sydney, but it isn’t clear if they know his identity.

A spokeswoman for the volunteer group, Community Helping Campbelltown Cats, told Sydney’s 9News that the resources the government makes available are “simply inadequate,” leaving volunteers to do the bulk of the work and fundraising for trap, neuter, return (TNR) and colony management.

“It is left to volunteer rescue groups and members of the community to do what they can to stop the breeding and get cats off the streets when they can,” she said. “These individuals risk their welfare day in day out; it is simply not right.”

As for the conservationists who advocate extreme measures, they need to dial it down a bit with the apocalyptic talk. There are productive ways to handle this problem, and they don’t involve demonizing animals for behaving the way nature intended, whipping people into a frenzy, and calling for the violent extinction of an entire species. Cat owners will need to be onboard for any effort to come up with a meaningful solution, and you won’t secure their cooperation if you’re constantly telling them their companion animals are “murderers” who need to be killed.

Cat Lady Day: Celebrating The Unsung Heroes Who Improve Life For Felines

From TNR to managing colonies and finding homes for friendly strays, cat ladies never stop working to make life better for our furry friends.

Hat tip to Mollie Hunt for making us aware of Cat Lady Day, an unofficial holiday that is part of an effort to reclaim the concept of the “cat lady” through positive association.

That’s a noble goal, and at PITB we’ve long scoffed at the idea that gender makes a difference in appreciating felines.

Cats are paradoxically regal yet derpy, imperious yet loving, and their antics are always amusing. Those are qualities that can appeal to anyone regardless of gender, nationality, age or cultural background.

But I think we should also use a day like this to thank the innumerable cat ladies in every city, town and village across the country who work tirelessly to improve the lives of strays, ferals and shelter cats.

These are the people who walk the walk, who do the hard work of TNR (trap, neuter, return), managing colonies, and protecting cats without homes from animals and mean-spirited humans.

Cat ladies find homes for friendly strays, keep colony cats fed, and obtain veterinary care for the sick and injured.

More often than not, they provide help out of their own pockets when donations can’t cover all the costs.

Not only is it thankless work most of the time, but misguided bureaucrats sometimes take it upon themselves to make life more difficult for the cat ladies caring for local strays and ferals.

Yet these women persist because they’re driven by one thing — love for our furry friends.

That’s absolutely worth celebrating.

His Mission: Save Cats, And Prove Men Can Love Them Too

Abdul Raheem found peace when he adopted his beloved cat, Bambi. Now he wants other men to know felines are awesome.

There’s something to the idea that people who aren’t fond of felines just haven’t met the right cat.

For me, it was the experience of interacting with a friend’s affable tuxedo — just one, since all my experiences up to that point had been with people who kept an unreasonable number of cats.

For Abdul Raheem, it was adopting a cat named Bambi after he and his wife fostered and fell in love with her.

“She brought me so much just happiness, and she made my mental health better,” Raheem told the Washington Post. “My anxiety was better when I was around her. So I just want to give other people that feeling.”

Raheem and his wife, Shamiyan Hawramani, became regular fosters for a shelter near their home, and Hawramani began filming her husband’s doting interactions with the baby felines.

Raheem with one of his bottle babies. He and his wife have fostered about 200 kittens and cats since the COVID pandemic.

Their friends found the videos amusing, and lots of people online have too. Abdul’s Cats, an Instagram account documenting Raheem caring for fosters, has a large following — including young men, many of whom are thinking about adopting a cat for the first time because Raheem is showing them something that challenges stereotypes.

My favorite anecdote is about Raheem’s enthusiasm for cats spreading to his friends. At first, they got accustomed to the idea of baby cats jumping in their laps and taking curious swipes at controllers on nights when they’d hang out and play video games.

Then they came to the same conclusion Raheem had: hanging out with cats is relaxing. Several of those friends have since adopted their own feline overlords, and Raheem says one friend now has four cats running around his house.

As for stereotypes, I think cat ladies get a bad rep. They’re the ones who do all the hard work of managing colonies, trapping, fostering, volunteering in shelters and placing cats in good homes.

When you think of the sheer volume of work, and the things they’ve accomplished — including a dramatic reduction in euthanized cats thanks to TNR efforts — they are the unsung heroes. They do it because they love cats.

Jordan Poole is one of several NBA players who have professed their love of felines. In the off-season Poole volunteers with his local shelter.

But it’s also good to toss aside labels and outdated attitudes, like the insistence that cats are companions for women only, and that adopting and caring for a feline friend is somehow unmanly.

Like Jordan Poole, the NBA guard who evangelizes the awesomeness of cats to his fellow players, men like Raheem show guys that they can adopt too.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Bud and I have a busy day of lifting weights, watching football, working on the hot rod we’re restoring in the garage, and drinking beer. Then we’re gonna chant Viking drinking songs until we pass out.

Header image credit Abdul’s Cats

Happy Tuesday Blog Hop

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Local Politicians Have No Clue How To Manage Cats

Feeding strays is now punishable by a $150 fine in an Ohio town, the latest municipality whose elected leaders chose to ignore expert guidelines on managing feline populations.

Every time the stray cat issue comes up, local town boards and city councils act as if they need to reinvent the wheel.

Imagining that they are the first to deal with this extremely common problem, they make decisions from positions of ignorance, dismissing the concerns of people who actually work with cats. Or they “do the research” and come up with their own ineffective policies instead of simply looking at what other towns and cities have tried in the past.

At least that way, you know what works and what doesn’t, and how much your decision’s going to cost taxpayers.

But that would be the smart thing to do, which is why our local elected leaders don’t do it. Instead they pull stunts like the village board of Mogadore, Ohio, a town of 3,700 about 10 miles east of Akron.

The Mogadore board just passed a law that makes feeding strays and ferals punishable by a fine of up to $150, as if that will stop cats from finding food and breeding.

Tellingly, Mogadore’s elected leaders say their ordinance applies to “wild, stray, or un-owned” cats, which means they don’t understand they’re all the same species.

Apparently neither do the reporters at WOIO, a local news station in Cleveland. A story from the station is confidently incorrect in telling readers “[d]omestic cats that have become wild, meaning live outdoors, roam free, and rarely interact with humans, are also considered feral.”

Stray cat and kitten — Credit: Sami Aksu/Pexels

Felis catus is a domestic animal. By definition a domestic cat is not wild and cannot become wild. Evolution cannot happen to a single animal.

While evolution is a constant process, speciation — wolves becoming dogs, wildcats becoming house cats, wild boar becoming docile farm pigs — is a species-wide shift that takes at least a few hundred years but often much longer, “from human-observable timescales to tens of millions of years” depending on the species.

The whole process results in changes at the genetic level. The transition from wildcats to domestic cats, for example, involved changing only 13 genes.

This is not rocket science, it’s basic stuff we all learned in high school science classes.

But that’s almost beside the point.

Fining people for feeding stray cats, including caretakers who voluntarily manage cat colonies, will not solve the problem. It doesn’t work. It has never worked in any town anywhere in the world.

It also creates a needlessly adversarial relationship with the passionate people doing the hard work of managing the feline population, often thanklessly and at their own expense. Why make enemies of them when they’re doing a public service?

Mogadore’s village board had a representative from Alley Cat Allies and people from local rescues on hand to inform them that fines don’t work, and to offer the humane and effective option of trap, neuter, return. TNR may not be perfect, but it’s better than anything else people have tried.

Mogadore’s board and mayor ignored the experts and went ahead with their plan to fine people instead.

They’re not alone. This happens thousands of times across the US, Europe, Australia and most other places where domestic cats live. Japan and Turkey take a more humane approach, and they’re better for it. But here in the US, we often deal with issues by ignoring precedent and engaging in wishful thinking.

If the residents of Mogadore are lucky, their elected officials will realize their mistake sooner rather than later.