Subject: Dreaded Cat: The Last Word
Date: Apr 23 21:44:12 1995
From: Michael Price - Michael_Price at mindlink.bc.ca


Hi Tweeters,

Catch-up on mail and apologies to Tweeters for the belated response time:

Theresa, let me congratulate you on your change of mind, and offer my
enthusiastic and unqualified support. Good on ya!


>Michael, I'm sorry you feel that pet owners are so roundly deserving of
>contempt that you would discuss one in the third person as if they were
not >reading the message


Theresa, the reason I spoke in the third person was actually for the
opposite reason: to try to remove any personal reference to you and/or
appearance of contempt for you. Secondarily, when a single person acts, it
is a personal decision, but when millions of people perform the same
action, it is cultural, with social, economic, political, and environmental
implications and effects (and raises the fascinating side-issue of just how
'free' is 'free will' in terms of large populations): I was attempting to
discuss this as an objective cultural phenomenon.

I agree with you that Zero Population Growth has taken a battering over the
last couple of decades; very few people being driven to have kids by the
lash of our DNA (biologically speaking, what the heck else are we here
for?) stop to ask, "Gee, I wonder what the environmental ramifications of
my/our actions shall be?" ;-) and that there's a host of other
equally-baleful human activities. In fact, through overpopulation,
ignorance, and greed, our species is inflicting such a holocaust upon the
world's animals that I find it a constant miracle we have anything left
beside cockroaches, rats, and starlings. There is more joy, therefore, in
heaven....


I will accept responsibility for my tone of anger and frustration in some
of my posting. Please be assured that only a *very* small part of it was
directed at you personally, and for reasons you have decided to mitigate,
and I accept and understand that you were completely innocent of dire
motive when allowing your cats out. My anger and frustration arises from
years of having to accept abuse from the vast majority of dog- and
cat-owners who, regardless of how politely or friendly or humorously I'd
make the request to control their animals when harassing or killing birds
and other wildlife, would respond with insults, threats of bodily violence,
and abusiveness.

What do I mean by a "vast majority"? One winter in the mid-Seventies, I was
doing an informal waterfowl survey in a city park used by a regularly-
wintering flock of American Wigeons. I should mention that the city parks
board had put up several signs along the walk requiring dog-owners to leash
their dogs. At the time, Eurasian Wigeons were still quite rare but I had a
hunch they were beginning to increase and wanted to use this AMWI flock as
a weekly study subject to see if this were true. It was virtually
impossible: every ten minutes a new dog would tear into the flock,
dispersing them. I decided to keep numbers, not of the waterfowl but of the
nature of the dog-owners' responses to requests to leash their dogs;
leashed dogs were rare. Here's the results over an approximately 60-day
time period.


Out of 600 politely non-confrontational requests to leash free-running dogs
at least until I had been able to conduct my count (I would approach
carrying my clipboard and survey sheet I'd made up, and ask, "Excuse me,
I'm conducting a waterfowl survey in this park, and I wonder if you'd be
kind enough to restrain your dog until I'm finished in about fifteen or
twenty minutes."), there were 575 gratuitously abusive responses, 12
instances of total refusal to communicate, 10 threats of violence, and
three (3) instances of compliance. Age and sex didn't seem to matter,
except that it was all males who offered violence (except for a woman who
threatened to turn her husband loose on me) and a majority of the people
who refused to speak were women. I'm definitely not a rocket scientist:
what conclusions about what was a majority of dog owners and their approach
to nature am I to draw from this?


The birds, of course, were over the next few years completely evicted from
this park and most others where dogs roam free and a leash is carried by
the owner simply as a fashion accessory. Virtually every tidal flat in the
Vancouver BC area where migrant seabirds, waterfowl, and shorebirds used to
stage in their migration has become accessible to people running their
dogs, and the result has been, and this is strictly personal observation,
that numbers of staging migrants have tumbled on these flats, in at least
one instance, to near zero from hundreds if not thousands. And if you were
to ask what protection there is against this, and who's doing it, the
answer is, as always, starkly simple: nothing and no one.


In the Greater Vancouver area there are now only three areas I know of
where migrants can rest, preen, and feed undisturbed by unleashed dogs: the
Sturgeon Bank/Roberts Bank/Tsawwassen foreshore complex, the Iona Settling
Ponds, and the Reifel Refuge. Extensive mud and quicksand makes the first
human- and dog-inaccessible, but the last two are poised for industrial and
residential/marina development; the second is safe, so far, because it has
not occurred to any dog-owners to run their pooches in a sewage treatment
plant, though one of the plant workers brings his dog to work and lets it
run there occasionally; Reifel, with its comparatively tiny area of 850
acres is the only place in the *entire Greater Vancouver* area, with its
hundreds of square miles, with a strictly-enforced anti-harassment policy,
including no dogs in the Refuge. The *only* one. Local governments, when
aware of the problem at all, dare not alienate dog-owners who, of course,
are voters in the next election; it is not a glamorous issue for
conservation groups, so they're not interested even if they happen to
notice the issue at all; provincial and federal environment ministries are
still primarily focussed on gamebird 'management' and say it's a local
problem anyway. A merry-go-round of buck-passing. And our birds continue to
suffer. It has become a major conservation problem here and it has simply
snuck up on us.

I don't even know if anyone has ever done a formal study of the long-term
effects of unleashed dogs rousting sometimes large bird populations off
their historical staging and wintering areas, or looked at ways to enforce
leash laws after so many years where dog-owners who refuse to leash their
dogs have been the group who, de facto, have been allowed to set the
*actual* agenda for our tidal flats regardless of government policy
(usually years of studiedly ineffectual hot air signifying nothing) or
impact on tens to hundreds of thousands of migrating birds.

Yeah, you could say I'm a tad on the irritable side about this.

What I blithely hope is the last word on the Dreaded Cat: this is too good
not to pass on. But make *sure* your cat(s) is out of the room, first,
though. The best line I ever heard about cats came from the head animal
psychologist at Nabisco Foods' Pet Food division. He said that after many
years of studying feline intelligence and behavior he had come to the
inexorable conclusion that cats have three things on their minds: food,
sex, and nothing.

Speaking as a cat-lover--but no longer an owner--I'm forced to agree, but
there are some truths better left unsaid, for cats are also creatures of
*large* egos that are as fragile as a Bosnian ceasefire, and if they ever
caught a whiff that others may not completely appreciate their central
importance to the world's daily turning--well, some cats don't want it
known that they've quietly begun attending FA (Felines Anonymous)
support-group meetings, and if you ever see your cat at one, be gracious
enough to accept without question its explanation that it's just there to
do research....


Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
michael_price at mindlink.bc.ca