I absolutely AM in favour of chipping, actually I'm in favour of all kinds of chips, but you will still be left with a residual feral population which as Wild Edges says will need some difficult decisions to be made. I was just asking for some understanding of the role of animal welfare charities in this.
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
Yep. If it was easy it would have been done already. We shouldn't just ignore an issue because it's hard to deal with though.
My local council have brought in independant contractors to deal with dog fouling in parks as it was getting worse despite the warnings. As we've seen with doing this with parking violations, once a company needs fines to make a profit then reason and tolerance starts to go out the window. Bringing in a fining system for cat roaming would have similar consequences no doubt. Any action is going to involve a huge amount of investment, public education, legislation changes and all this will take a long long time.
George Monbiot suggested giving a value to nature to inspire protection. I like the idea that you can say the blue tit in your garden is worth £x as a pest control unit or whatever and weight that off against subsidising chipping cats and neutering/culling feral populations. It's a shame to look at it this way but it does at least give a useful reference to start something like this going. You can say cats eat 55 million birds/year but even if one bird was worth £1 that's a lot of money to invest in protecting them.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
oh yep as Ive said earlier, Im well aware that legislation regarding control and restriction of cat movement is pie in the sky stuff, especially in the current climate, for me changing attitudes is the single most effective thing we could do. Easier said than done of course, but as has been demonstrated on this discussion, some people were simply unaware there was an issue (whether that be gardens or wildlife), and others are stridently opposed to any form of responsibility for their cats movements (pardon the pun) outside their property.
If there was more awareness, and importantly a general expectation of being responsible for your cat, as there is with other pets, that would lead to many people cat proofing their garden, restricting their movements at certain times, using collars with bells, microchipping and many other things. It wouldn't solve all the problems by any means, but Im in no doubt it would have a very positive impact.
On this one discussion alone a couple of cat owners have said they were unaware of they issue, and now they are it will impact how they look after their cats. That is pretty impressive for what is basically on online argument on a gardening forum! Changing attitudes is always preferable to enforcing laws, it's worked on many other issues, it could just as easily work with cats.
You can say cats eat 55 million birds/year but even if one bird was worth £1 that's a lot of money to invest in protecting them.
But do counter this with the known benefits of pet ownership in mental health, loneliness, etc. There are lots of studies of the benefits of pet ownership for children (again a generalisation of course). You could therefore argue a pet cat has a net positive value while a
feral cat has negative value (depending on your valuation of rats). This is why on the other thread I railed against the conflation of predation and the annoyance cat mess in the garden. It's complex and I think trying to mix them is wrong, its like discussing litter louts and blaming everyone for their disposable lifestyles and poor recycling.
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
I really think that if the issue was just cat mess in gardens then very little would ever be done about it. The predation issue is a massive problem for the whole country though and can be quantified. They are both part of a larger picture though and shouldn't be kept entirely separate in my opinion. Otherwise you still get the problem that people just put a bell on thier cat and think they've done their duty as a responsible owner. All gardeners actually get is a cat that plays a tune while it fertilises their vegetables.
I'd be really interested to see more in depth studies of what cats actually kill. My sister has 2 cats that are efficient hunters but don't seem to have any impact of the rats in the area. House mice are also real pests but it seems to be the more harmless wood mice and voles that get the brunt of their hunting forays.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
I think pet cats will generally try to avoid things that are likely to fight back. Next door's cat spends ages stalking the squirrels but if they make any kind of stand it's through the cat flap before you can say Dick Whittington.
I think the ferals are more likely ratters, and therefore would be a positive Monbiot value for them, unless you're the man in a park in Ealing who thought he had discovered a new breed of narrow tailed squirrels and fed them for months until someone told him they were rats.
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
unless you're the man in a park in Ealing who thought he had discovered a new breed of narrow tailed squirrels and fed them for months until someone told him they were rats.
The trouble with these arguments is that they just go round and around without resolving anything, everyone sticks to their own point of view. From my original post in Problem Solving, (and it was in the correct part of the forum because troublesome unwanted cats fouling and digging up plants as well as stalking and killing birds IS a problem) which was intended to illicit harmless suggestions to keep cats out of the garden, has spawned very detailed political arguments and some very frayed tempers.
If this new thread is to discuss something different then it should have been titled differently.
By the way, I refer you back to "Troublesome Cats" in Problem Solving for a positive list of mine as a way to control cats by first controlling their owners.
Your original thread was in the correct part of the forum, but the conversation had diverged, people were complaining that it was in the wrong section because of that, so I simply started a new thread so people stopped discussing the pros and cons of cat ownership on there. I simply used the same title with the intention of that conversation continuing over here instead, as many people were making interesting and valid points, lots of people were enjoying the debate. Any who were not always have the option of not reading it
Posts
My local council have brought in independant contractors to deal with dog fouling in parks as it was getting worse despite the warnings. As we've seen with doing this with parking violations, once a company needs fines to make a profit then reason and tolerance starts to go out the window. Bringing in a fining system for cat roaming would have similar consequences no doubt. Any action is going to involve a huge amount of investment, public education, legislation changes and all this will take a long long time.
George Monbiot suggested giving a value to nature to inspire protection. I like the idea that you can say the blue tit in your garden is worth £x as a pest control unit or whatever and weight that off against subsidising chipping cats and neutering/culling feral populations. It's a shame to look at it this way but it does at least give a useful reference to start something like this going. You can say cats eat 55 million birds/year but even if one bird was worth £1 that's a lot of money to invest in protecting them.
If there was more awareness, and importantly a general expectation of being responsible for your cat, as there is with other pets, that would lead to many people cat proofing their garden, restricting their movements at certain times, using collars with bells, microchipping and many other things. It wouldn't solve all the problems by any means, but Im in no doubt it would have a very positive impact.
On this one discussion alone a couple of cat owners have said they were unaware of they issue, and now they are it will impact how they look after their cats. That is pretty impressive for what is basically on online argument on a gardening forum! Changing attitudes is always preferable to enforcing laws, it's worked on many other issues, it could just as easily work with cats.
I'd be really interested to see more in depth studies of what cats actually kill. My sister has 2 cats that are efficient hunters but don't seem to have any impact of the rats in the area. House mice are also real pests but it seems to be the more harmless wood mice and voles that get the brunt of their hunting forays.