Bloody cats!

[Mich the Tester]

You're talking to someone else, not me. I do treat all animals with humanity.

It is a false trap to demand that I point out something called "nature" somewhere. It is sensible to describe a population of cats as "natural" when they support themselves by predation on local animals; and meaningful to describe a population of cats as "unnatural" when they are supported by people buying them tins of Kit-e-Kat and maintaining them in numbers a million times what the prey population could support. That makes sense and does not require me to point to some utopian bucolic paradise.

Furthermore, these people are not doing it in order to achieve some considered aim on their own land, so it is specious to remind me that cats keep down rats and so save grain. As I said, I know that, I have done so myself: admittedly not in "nature" because the grain I was concerned about was the stuff I bought for my hens....

I'm OK with people keeping cats because they want to pet them, that's none of my business. They could keep them in their house, as many urban flat-dwellers do. But why do they assume that it is up to me to allow that their pets will lurk in my garden, and do things there that I would not allow the neighbours themselves to do? What gets me about it is the deliberate abandonment of responsibility: the consequence of them keeping cats and allowing them to roam free is, apparently, not their concern. But I strongly suspect that if I took an active hand myself in keeping their animals out of my land, they would regard that as their concern.

Speaking of unwelcome animals on my land, if you want to speak of farming I would ask you how much patience most farmers would have with that? Generally they just shoot anything they don't like. I even knew one farmer who shot his own son's new pedigree sheepdog as soon as he saw it on his land (his son, who farmed next door, was coming to visit him: something he didn't do again for a long time). Compared to that, a water pistol to deter seems pretty mild.

I know very few farmers who hate cats; most of them around our way have a few cats, because they want to keep mice from their grain stores. Those farmers who do hate cats generally hate people too, and often treat their own animals as objects of industrial production.

[scaryfast]

I don't mind cats, but I can't do with them tulipting in my veg patch.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Toxoplasmosis yet... Cat tulip's full of it and you don't want that in your pregnant wife or your kids (or you).

I stuck one of those motion sensing water guns in my garden - it's fairly effective if you move it around occasionally (neighbours don't seem to mind being soaked every time they go out). It's the noise that scares the cats as much as the water.

A low powered electric fence 6 inch off the ground is probably cheaper than keeping your garden covered in lion tulip...