EDITOR – I refer to the letter in the Highway Mail from ‘Wildlife Loving Suburban Resident’. It is hard to believe that this ‘wildlife loving’ person is calling for the removal of what is referred to as feral cats that, with the dassies, monkeys, legavaans, geckos, snakes and frogs, are part of the ‘wildlife’ in our gardens.
To blame the decrease in bird life on feral cats is ridiculous. Does your correspondent know that monkeys and snakes also eat birds, and mainly babies? I do not like the idea any more than most people, but this is part of nature.
I have four cats and the birdlife has certainly not dwindled in my garden, plus we have ‘strange’ cats popping into our yard and house every now and again and bird life has not dwindled.
We do not chop down all the trees around us – we allow them to grow for the ‘wildlife’.
We do not have loud music or explode loud frightening fireworks every year, which are a bigger cause of the changing environment and do more harm to the bird and wildlife than feral cats. Your correspondent is obviously not a cat person, so has no idea about cats and their ways.
Cats are able to fend for themselves better than dogs, and most of the time better than the humans who beg on the corners. Cats have cleaner habits than dogs.
Cats keep down the rat population, and, in some cases, the snakes. Cats are wanderers and love to visit the neighbours occasionally. They are intelligent and very loving.
These are the harmless creatures who (and I mean ‘who’) your correspondent has decided need to be taken away. How does this correspondent know a cat is feral? What gives him/her the right to to decide on that cat’s destiny when it might well be somebody’s pet?
My cats are my pets, neutered, inoculated annually, happy and healthy, but they do what cats sometimes do, they wander. Three of them are saved and hand reared from a few weeks old, I would be devastated if somebody took it on himself to decide their destiny because they happen to pass through his property now and again. I sincerely hope that after reading the replies to his correspondence, he will understand cats better and let them be.
I live in Westville, and to save having a cat ‘taken away’ for no reason, I would be happy to take a call and perhaps put you onto the hardworking and caring people who can help.
Shirley Emanuel
Westville
