The trouble (and the beauty, I suppose) with opinions is that everyone has one.
This rambling post sort of got started yesterday while I was visiting some blogs I love, and following links afterwards. After reading a short comment on Intelligent Design that some anonymous surfer left behind on a friends post, I fired off a quick rebuttal. Now I realized, far too late, that my friends post was not the place to get into the Intelligent Design debate. Hers is a great blog, about her observations of her world, I'm sure if she had wanted to wade into the debate she would have done it herself, far more eloquently than me. Like her, I (for the most part anyway, this post not withstanding) leave the opinion and controversy of hot button topics for others. I've much to say and, after 24 years of officially not having one, lots of opinions to dole out. Just not here. This weblog was mostly just to chronicle the building of the house, and let people know what life in the High Arctic is like.
The threat to education caused by Intelligent Design is very real, especially south of the border. ID is just creationism that evolved. It is the same old fundamentalism disguised as science. Want to believe it, that's your business, just keep it out of our schools. There is little enough time and resources to pass on a decent science education to youth as it is. Follow the link to Intelligent Design and it takes you to an excellent article that explains exactly what ID is and is not. At the same time you can participate in a Google Bomb and help steer the curious to the same article, rather than the usual smoke and mirrors. Do Google Bombs work? Query miserable failure some time on Google, and see what is the first site to pop up.
Afterwards I continued on and followed some links through various peoples blog and ended up at the blog of a woman whose cat had just been killed. While I'm sorry for her loss, losing a pet is often like losing a member of the family, her story spoke of the hunting prowess of her late pet, and the varied wild creatures that it brought home. So it raised an old pet peeve of mine, the toll on birds and other wildlife that our cats have wrought. I'm not even talking about the effects of cats on Island Ecologies, where their (and other species, rats, pigs, goats, mongooses (mongeese?), etc.) introduction has devastated, extirpated and caused the extinction of many island species. I'm talking about our letting Tabby, an instinctual hunting machine, roam free in our neighborhoods.
A couple of different studies have shown the staggering amount of songbirds, game birds, and mammals killed by pet and feral cats each year. One of the first studies, by Peter Churcher and John
Lawton in Britain had the owners of some 78 cats collect the remains of their cats victims, which averaged some 5 birds and 10 small mammals each (bear in mind that these numbers didn't include any animals killed whose bodies the owners didn't find - those consumed or left in the countryside). When extrapolated to include the estimated cat population of Britain, these numbers amounted to an incredible 70 million animals killed by cats in Britain alone, 20 million of which were birds.
A study in Wisconsin produced similar results. Some 30 cats were radio collared by by Coleman and Temple and followed, their victims tallied. The results led them to conclude that some 19 million song birds and 140,000 game birds were killed by cats each year in Wisconsin alone. Similar studies, such as one in Virginia where the researchers (Mitchell and Beck) followed their own cats produced similar results. The numbers are numbing.
One of the things that struck me, while I was looking for details on the studies, was the number of websites of cat advocates that advanced the same arguement while defending cats. Basically the arguement is that the threat to birds is far greater from humans, through habitat destruction, tower construction etc. than from cats. The inference is that we should ignore the threat to birds from cats because there are greater threats out there. Pretty much all of those sites I visited missed the point that cat predation of birds is part of the human threat. We are responsible for cats domestication, for their introduction into island ecologies, and for letting our pets roam free. All of these threats need to be addressed, especially habitat destruction. But why ignore one threat because there are bigger ones out there? Part of the solution is relatively simple, those people owned by cats need to keep them indoors. Bells on collars do not work, cats are too smart, and well fed cats still hunt (some suggest they are even more efficient at it as they are in better shape than say, Feral cats).
There are very few cats up here in Arctic Bay. Leah at one point had two, which she gave up in exchange for me (allergies and pet birds, you know), a decision I'm sure she regrets some days. The threat here is minimal and thrown rocks do much more damage here to song birds. But the world is a big place, and we need to leave room in it for birds, even if it inconveniences our pets.
So there are some opinions. I won't let it happen again. As another friend says "'nuff guff". Back to the old non-confrontational, apologetic, self-depreciating weblog. How very Canadian.
Recent Comments