Cats of a Feather
First off, I have cats. Four of them if you must know, although at one time ages ago my wife and I had seven. All of them are rescues (one was a kitten pulled from a drain pipe in a parking lot) and all live peacefully with our two German Shepherds. I mention all of this because my wife is heavily involved in taking care of feral cats, her daily visits meaning a stop at five locations, changing the frozen water for fresh, refilling their food dishes and making sure that the shelters provided haven't been disturbed (a local agency creates straw-filled foam shelters with an accompanying label identifying it as a humane shelter not to be disturbed). She has also been active in the CNR or Catch-And-Release program which several agencies support by providing the traps and vouchers to have the feral cats fixed and then released back into the same location once healed. It takes close to two hours of her day each and every day, and it is what can classically be described as a passion.
Anyone who has a dog or cat can relate to that bond that emerges when caring for an animal, wild or one raised at home (our cats are all indoor-only cats), and to the almost violent reaction emerging in Australia and now New Zealand which announced plans to eradicate all invasive predators. Not counting humans, the assumption was that the target was feral cats (last year, Australia announced a culling program of 2 million feral cats). To look at that country's situation, Australia's human population of 23 million is matched only by that of its cats...3 million pet cats and an estimated 20 million feral cats. Cats of course, tend to be introduced to such places as islands with good intentions (initially to keep rats off of early sailing ships), let loose to eradicate vermin such as rats; but as time marched on, the cats remained hungry (and kept reproducing) and food grew scarce...except for the population of birds. And here rests the current controversy -- feral and domesticated outdoor cats are now estimated to kill up to 4 billion birds in the U.S. alone (throw in the mice and such and estimates jump as high as 22 billion mammals overall...U.S. pet ownership of cats is estimated to be around 100 million).
Add to this the cat litter industry (itself controversial in the areas being mined) and the monies spent to feed and care for our pets and you have the mystery presented in the review in The Atlantic by author Britt Peterson: What makes an animal a pet—a creature to which our emotions attach, sometimes in logic-warping ways—is surprisingly difficult to pin down. Cats are a particularly puzzling case. Domesticated some 9,500 years ago, they still don’t strike humans as completely tame. They live with us, but even indoor cats aren’t entirely dependent on us, certainly not in the emotional way dogs are. They do many things that seem to defy rational explanation, which is no small source of their allure: the blanket-attack ritual, the full-body keyboard plop, the blank-wall stare, and perhaps most dramatic, the post-poop freak-out...Even the discoveries, in the past several decades, that cats carry a parasite that could contribute to schizophrenia, and that outdoor cats wreak ecological disaster, haven’t budged a curiously imbalanced relationship with this furry companion—or maybe cohabitant is more accurate...Their owners feed them, stroke them, shovel their litter, spend ages trying to photograph their yawns from the cutest angle for Instagram. They ignore their owners, mostly sleep, intermittently deign to serve as purring lap warmers, and occasionally drop a half-dead mouse on the rug. Mysterious as cats are, however, the greatest mystery about cats centers on humans. Why do so many of us love them so much when they are so bad for us, and for our planet? And if we could resolve this first mystery, would we be any closer to solving the world’s cat problem?
Books about cats are many as are broadcasts and podcasts such as the series from Nature which said: Cats are among the most feared and revered creatures on the planet. Their power, strength, and enigmatic nature have fascinated us for centuries. They’ve dominated human culture since the dawn of civilization. Or National Geographic which added: More than 600 million claim residence in households across six continents, and now they may have dethroned dogs as the most popular pet on earth. An exterminator, fierce hunter, and favorite companion—aloof and affectionate at the same time—the cat leapt out of the woods and adopted us on its own terms thousands of years ago. But how did man and beast form their unconventional relationship?
But those birds. Pick up any bird (good luck) or find a feather on the ground and you'll be dazzled by the almost-unrealistic beauty of the colors and intricacy that goes into such a creation. The subject of feathers became the cover story for Audubon and provided a rare glimpse into the up-close beauty of feathers as well as the increasing demand for such adding to the decline of bird populations (a better view of some of the photos comes from an earlier review in the magazine). Ages ago I remember reading about light refraction and how a blue jay's "blue" feathers are actually brown, our eyes picking apart the blue spectrum when the sun hits at the right angle (explained in a simplified form by both Audubon and The Cornell Lab). Put pigment and melanin and porphyrin into the picture and you emerge with a world of striking colors, think pink flamingos gobbling down so many shrimp that the pigments turn their feathers famously pink.
As with so many issues, there is so much to learn on both sides (one tidbit I remember from a book on birds was that each egg produced by a bird drains their body of calcium so that by the later stages of life, a bird's bone structure is as hollow as a spider's web, something you can often see when snapping open the bone of an old chicken...and good luck with that since the majority of today's commercial chickens are processed after just 6 weeks of life, far short of the 6 years they would live in the wild; one such place that protects its wild chickens is the Hawaiian island of Kauai, even allowing such hotel chains as the Marriott to eliminate feral cats if they are thought to be threatening or killing the wild chickens). Cats and birds, lifelong enemies with us humans picking sides. Both are mammals, like us, and both offer a wide range of emotions from love and loyalty to aloofness and an inability to remove the wildness. Perhaps in seeing them and in seeing this current struggle, we are merely seeing ourselves in our own valiant attempt to figure out our own emotional offerings and our own place in this world...loving and aloof, loyal and wild. The world is a stage but the question is, how many parts are there for an appearance in the spotlight?
Anyone who has a dog or cat can relate to that bond that emerges when caring for an animal, wild or one raised at home (our cats are all indoor-only cats), and to the almost violent reaction emerging in Australia and now New Zealand which announced plans to eradicate all invasive predators. Not counting humans, the assumption was that the target was feral cats (last year, Australia announced a culling program of 2 million feral cats). To look at that country's situation, Australia's human population of 23 million is matched only by that of its cats...3 million pet cats and an estimated 20 million feral cats. Cats of course, tend to be introduced to such places as islands with good intentions (initially to keep rats off of early sailing ships), let loose to eradicate vermin such as rats; but as time marched on, the cats remained hungry (and kept reproducing) and food grew scarce...except for the population of birds. And here rests the current controversy -- feral and domesticated outdoor cats are now estimated to kill up to 4 billion birds in the U.S. alone (throw in the mice and such and estimates jump as high as 22 billion mammals overall...U.S. pet ownership of cats is estimated to be around 100 million).
Add to this the cat litter industry (itself controversial in the areas being mined) and the monies spent to feed and care for our pets and you have the mystery presented in the review in The Atlantic by author Britt Peterson: What makes an animal a pet—a creature to which our emotions attach, sometimes in logic-warping ways—is surprisingly difficult to pin down. Cats are a particularly puzzling case. Domesticated some 9,500 years ago, they still don’t strike humans as completely tame. They live with us, but even indoor cats aren’t entirely dependent on us, certainly not in the emotional way dogs are. They do many things that seem to defy rational explanation, which is no small source of their allure: the blanket-attack ritual, the full-body keyboard plop, the blank-wall stare, and perhaps most dramatic, the post-poop freak-out...Even the discoveries, in the past several decades, that cats carry a parasite that could contribute to schizophrenia, and that outdoor cats wreak ecological disaster, haven’t budged a curiously imbalanced relationship with this furry companion—or maybe cohabitant is more accurate...Their owners feed them, stroke them, shovel their litter, spend ages trying to photograph their yawns from the cutest angle for Instagram. They ignore their owners, mostly sleep, intermittently deign to serve as purring lap warmers, and occasionally drop a half-dead mouse on the rug. Mysterious as cats are, however, the greatest mystery about cats centers on humans. Why do so many of us love them so much when they are so bad for us, and for our planet? And if we could resolve this first mystery, would we be any closer to solving the world’s cat problem?
Books about cats are many as are broadcasts and podcasts such as the series from Nature which said: Cats are among the most feared and revered creatures on the planet. Their power, strength, and enigmatic nature have fascinated us for centuries. They’ve dominated human culture since the dawn of civilization. Or National Geographic which added: More than 600 million claim residence in households across six continents, and now they may have dethroned dogs as the most popular pet on earth. An exterminator, fierce hunter, and favorite companion—aloof and affectionate at the same time—the cat leapt out of the woods and adopted us on its own terms thousands of years ago. But how did man and beast form their unconventional relationship?
But those birds. Pick up any bird (good luck) or find a feather on the ground and you'll be dazzled by the almost-unrealistic beauty of the colors and intricacy that goes into such a creation. The subject of feathers became the cover story for Audubon and provided a rare glimpse into the up-close beauty of feathers as well as the increasing demand for such adding to the decline of bird populations (a better view of some of the photos comes from an earlier review in the magazine). Ages ago I remember reading about light refraction and how a blue jay's "blue" feathers are actually brown, our eyes picking apart the blue spectrum when the sun hits at the right angle (explained in a simplified form by both Audubon and The Cornell Lab). Put pigment and melanin and porphyrin into the picture and you emerge with a world of striking colors, think pink flamingos gobbling down so many shrimp that the pigments turn their feathers famously pink.
As with so many issues, there is so much to learn on both sides (one tidbit I remember from a book on birds was that each egg produced by a bird drains their body of calcium so that by the later stages of life, a bird's bone structure is as hollow as a spider's web, something you can often see when snapping open the bone of an old chicken...and good luck with that since the majority of today's commercial chickens are processed after just 6 weeks of life, far short of the 6 years they would live in the wild; one such place that protects its wild chickens is the Hawaiian island of Kauai, even allowing such hotel chains as the Marriott to eliminate feral cats if they are thought to be threatening or killing the wild chickens). Cats and birds, lifelong enemies with us humans picking sides. Both are mammals, like us, and both offer a wide range of emotions from love and loyalty to aloofness and an inability to remove the wildness. Perhaps in seeing them and in seeing this current struggle, we are merely seeing ourselves in our own valiant attempt to figure out our own emotional offerings and our own place in this world...loving and aloof, loyal and wild. The world is a stage but the question is, how many parts are there for an appearance in the spotlight?
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