Unaware they were being recorded, elected leaders in a small Texas city let their imaginations run wild in a closed-door meeting about dealing with feral cat colonies.
One proposed mass poisoning to take out as many as 50 cats at a time. Another, perhaps fancying himself a mafia hit man, envisioned taking care of the city’s cat “problem” execution-style with a “.22 round to the back of the head.”
A third proposed dumping the bodies of the dead cats in an area the city already uses to dispose of unwanted animals.
“We have a location on this property that’s called deer heaven,” the committee member told colleagues at the Nov. 6 meeting. “I’m sure it could be kitty cat heaven too.”
Now the city council and wildlife advisory council of Granite Shoals, a city of about 5,100 in central Texas, are trying to explain themselves to an infuriated public, the local Humane Society and their own police, who rebuked them in a public statement that asserted their plans are illegal.
State and local laws “do not allow any cruelty to animals, including feral cats in our community,” police chief John Ortis wrote in a letter to the public.
The Hill Country Humane Society took the extraordinary step of “terminating its relationship” with the city, calling the committee’s plans “blatantly unethical and illegal” in a statement posted on Facebook.
“This recording reveals that not only was there an attempt to develop a plan to inhumanely shoot captured cats and dispose of their carcasses, but there was open discussion between members of the committee and the City Manager about the need to conceal such activities from the general public,” the Humane Society wrote.
Staff at the Humane Society said they’ll still take in stray cats from the city, but they’ve ended their official partnership.
Todd Holland, the committee chair, denied that his members wanted to keep details of their plans from the public and told local newspaper the Daily Trib that the committee was merely trying to work out the “intricate details” of how to handle a population of about 400 cats. It’s not clear how the city arrived at that number, and there’s been no mention of an official effort to get an accurate tally.
“It’s not like we’re a bunch of cowboys running wild,” Holland said.
But in the recording, committee members clearly discussed hiding details from the public, and the Daily Trib noted that the committee used the word “remove” interchangeably with “euthanize” in written materials detailing the plan, perhaps to soften the language or obscure the fact that the proposed solution was to kill the cats.
Granite Shoals Mayor Ron Munos called the recording “disturbing” and said the committee’s plan will not be put into practice.
“The city is not doing this,” he told the Daily Trib. “We’re not going out and killing cats.”
Here at PITB we feel like a broken record regularly referring back to the junk studies blaming cats for killing billions of birds annually, but the reason we do is because those studies have real-life consequences.
Ill-advised, unethical and illegal plans to eradicate stray cats wouldn’t be explored at municipal and county levels if elected leaders weren’t told that trap, neuter, return (TNR) programs do not work and that outdoor cats pose the most significant thread to local wildlife.
Likewise, we wouldn’t hear about schools sponsoring cat hunts for children or so-called conservationists gunning down entire stray colonies if a small but vocal group of ostensible scientists weren’t routinely publishing dubious studies making improbable and unsupportable claims about feline predatory impact.
In plain terms there’s been a concerted effort to paint domestic cats as dangerous, ruthless killing machines, the media hasn’t treated the claims with skepticism, and the result is a whole lot of cruelty and misery inflicted on innocent animals.
City councils, wildlife biologists, park rangers and others are not armed with the facts when they rely on those studies, and the result is bad policy and decision-making.
Stories like this one out of Texas have become more frequent over the past few years, and we suspect things will get a lot worse for cats without injecting some much-needed sanity and evidence-based solutions to counter the tidal wave of misinformation.
Pain In The Bud 