Monday, July 25, 2016

Another idea to save south Florida's birds from predation by feral and roaming cats

In order to get anything done in any significant way will probably be a grassroots effort of some sort. Here is an idea from our neighbors to the north, Canada:
Stumbled on this yesterday on Twitter, do you remember Lisa Vaughn when she was at NBC5/WPTV? Well, she's back in Texas again and no, she hasn't "lost it." Cats can indeed be trained to walk on a leash:
This is a complicated political problem and the County's Animal Care and Control (ACC) won't do anything much different from what's happening now: encourage more trapping, neutering, vaccination, and release (TNVR) of cats back into communities and neighborhoods. The program is a complete failure and that will be acknowledged in a decade or so after many more millions of birds have been slaughtered by cats.

The 'elephant in the room', so to speak, is that TNVR cats DO NOT lose their hunting instinct and no one wants to address that. If neutering was effective city's like Lake Worth wouldn't be dealing with this problem that only gets worse all the time, would they? And vaccination will keep cats cats healthy and hunting for a long time.

The natural world may offer some help in the form of coyotes (look in the right-hand column for "Can coyote save native birds from extinction?"), monitor lizards, or maybe a virus will come along that will cull the population. But as far as intervention by County government, environmentalists, and ACC that's not going to happen any time in the foreseeable future.