THEY SHOOT CATS, DON'T THEY?

The State of Wisconsin is holding public hearings in April on a bill to allow hunters to shoot stray cats. It all started when a birdlover in LaCross noticed cat tracks in the snow under his birdfeeder every morning, and went ballistic about what was happening to his songbirds. So he has came up with this proposal that would make free-ranging cats an "unprotected species" that can be shot on sight by any licensed hunter.

The whole thing is put forward as a way to protect disappearing songbirds. A few years ago a Wisconsin biologist published a paper claiming that 1.4 million feral cats in the state are killing anywhere from 7.8 million to 219 millions birds every year. The birdlovers are seizing on this as ammunition for their cause. Bad kitty. They want to hand Granny a gun and let her take sides between Sylvester and Tweety.

I am a little dubious about this. Anytime I hear numbers like this--1.4 million, 7.8 to 219 million--I want to ask, "Where the heck do you get this?" How did that biologist count these cats, not to mention the birds they killed? I bet he counted the cats in his alley and guessed how many birds they killed in a day and multiplied all that by the number of square feet in Wisconsin.

The proponents of this bill act as if all these birds that are being killed are wonderful little songbirds. I'm sure some are, but the odds are that most of them are sparrows, grackles, pigeons, and other nuisance birds.

I remember once Brandon was visiting us before we had air conditioning, and there was a mockingbird making a racket outside his open bedroom window all night. He got up and went outside and threw a dinner roll at it. I'm not sure what this says about his opinion of my cooking, that he would consider one of my rolls a lethal weapon, but it did put the mockingbird to flight for the rest of the night. If we had had a cat, he wouldn't have had to bother.

But I digress. Nobody has proved any cause and effect between feral cats and the diminishing numbers of songbirds. Everybody has seen a cat kill a bird at some time or another, and they are jumping to the conclusion that is what is happening. Now, that may be part of it, but we're probably missing a far bigger cause.

I remember reading not long ago about how the exploding deer population is changing the face of our forests. In their search for food, they are eating all the undergrowth in the forest--the bushes, small trees, vines, and so forth.

Where do the songbirds hide and build their nests? Not in the tops of big trees, but in this very underbrush.

So, who is killing our songbirds? How about Bambi?

(Source: rense.com, citing Star Tribune, March 8, 2005)