“To believe we can live without taking life is delusional.”
— Barbara Kingsolver, ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’
What happens here is that people dump their unwanted kittens and cats because they can’t bear the thought of harming their cuddly pet who is all sweetness and innocence. Put them in a box, instead, and leave them in the parking lot at Roaring Beach. Perhaps, someone will come along and take them home.
This never happens and once out of the box, hungry and needing to survive, the once domesticated cats’ atavistic skills emerge and they quickly mutate into four legged furry feral psychopathic killers of enormous skill. They breed up and become a deadly menace to a native wildlife that is defenseless against their iuhunting skills. Left unchecked, feral cats can rampage through an intact eco-system faster and create as much lasting damage as a D9 bulldozer pillaging a rainforest.
As a wildlife rehabilitator, I see firs thand the damage cats do to birds. Of all the ways human beings casually slaughter “protected” wildlife, letting domesticated cats outside is by far the most egregious, and the most easily shrugged off. People who wouldn’t dream of taking a shotgun and blasting a bird out of a tree let their cats outside, which accomplishes the exact same thing but in a slower and more horrifying way. email from a “sensitive woman”
In Tasmania, humans are the only predator that can control them.
Therefore, I choose to kill. If there are long term implications to my karma, so be it.
