By Dominick Mezzapesa
Australia's Wollondilly a town on the south-western edge of Sydney is all set to go to war with feral cats. Wollondilly Councillors have discussed the possibility of a introducing a cat curfew, and will investigate measures to reduce the number of cats roaming the shire at night. How they expect to enforce a curfew is beyond me. There is an old saying "It was like trying to corral cats" which means they are nearly impossible to catch. Dogs, the're easy, show a piece of food and they'll come running to like you were BFF's It's amazing that these politicians wait till there are over 20 million feral cats in Australia to say "Hey I we may have a problem here" You think! Cr Landow said options included an education campaign on responsible pet ownership or disallowing cat ownership in certain areas, but he would like to see the introduction of a car curfew. The former mayor said he was responding to community concern about outdoor cats and their destructive impact on native wildlife, particularly when left to roam free and unsupervised at night. The same politicians who were years late in realizing they had a problem, now want to discuss their plans on Facebook on how to deal with the problem. They will chat, text and tweet until there are 30 million feral cats and then claim "Our plan would have worked at 20 million but 30 million... we need a new plan. Wildlife Planet wants to help our friends down under out. Here is the plan T-N-R It means Trap-Neuter-Return, community cats are humanely trapped (with box traps), brought to a veterinarian to be spayed or neutered, vaccinated, eartipped (the universal sign that a cat has been neutered and vaccinated), and then returned them to the spot they were trapped It's simple, clean and while it will take a few years to really have an effect, you won't have millions of cat lovers beating down your door protesting if you choose to euthanize them as a quick way to solve the problem you were to stupid to realize. There are a million articles on line "Google it" but to think a curfew will work is beyond stupidity,. Hell, I can't even get my cat to stop walking across my keyboard, no matter how many times I scream no while holding down the back space button in a futile effort to keep my story from having a bunch of efwihfruipghuehu[h[ all over it. Enforcing this rule and fining the owner will be on par with corralling a cat. You'll likely won't find the owner because hardly any cat owner ever puts a collar on their cats. Cats are not like dogs. If there were something shiny or smelt like salami a dog would chase it forever and then an hour later, cry "Where the hell am I?" hence the need for a collar, with a tag that says "If you find me call..." on the other side of the tag it would read "I love salami...Feed me" Cats walk around like they haven't a care in the world, and they will come home when they are good and ready and not a second later. If your enforcement officers start trying to catch a cat at 2am the moment you get near them... Out come the claws, Biotch. Please stop with the debate and the back and forth, start T-N-R today and by 2020 you'll see it had a huge impact on controlling the population. By 2030 your Feral Cat nightmare shall be over. In a study taken during the observation period (January 1991 to April 2002) the cat population was reduced by 66%, more importantly there were no kittens in sight. Using a cat's average lifetime, and taking this program to it's natural conclusion this 155 cat colony that started in 1991, most likely will be zeroed out within 15 years from the starting point. T-N-R CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE: A comprehensive long-term program of neutering followed by adoption or return to the resident colony can result in reduction of free-roaming cat populations in urban areas. Click Here for the full report If this town did nothing in 1991 that 155 unowned free-roaming cats would have grown to at least doubled within a few years. The time to act has long since passed and the time to debate what to do with your Facebook friends would accomplish nothing except creating more of a problem that these innocent cats did not cause in the first place. |
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