Subject: Re: I shot a cat!
Date: Dec 30 09:49:32 1996
From: John & Anne Winskie - winskie at cmc.net
Kelly:
While you're waiting for your birch or alder to grow to be 30 feet, you could try:
1. A dog -- our dog (a black lab) is big and scary (looking) enough that one sight of him bounding out after a
cat is usually enough to permanently cure the cat from coming around.
2. A slingshot, using raw peanuts as bullets - this works for House Sparrows and Starlings as well, and has the
advantage of scaring all of the above off without having to hit them: the peanuts shatter when they hit
anything solid and that is usually enough to spook them (if you do accidentally hit anything, the peanuts are
pretty soft). Plus they are biodegradable and tasty to non-targets.What's interesting is that the House
Finches, Dees, and Siskins seem to know that they are not the targets, and will continue to feed if I fire at a
cat.
3. I tried a super-soaker, but it has a rather short range, and is ineffective unless you score a hit.
I personally am an advocate of both feeding urban birds and scaring off the cats that prey on them out of
boredom. The only way your neighbors would be able to stop their cat from hunting would be to make it an indoor
cat exclusively, which many cat owners are hesitant to do (not to mention doing anything so drastic as having
the cat de-clawed, which also basically dictates that it has to be kept indoors). All of the cats that have
gotten birds in our yard did it in the cover that surrounds our feeder 10-15 feet away, not at the feeder
itself. Due to the limited cover in an urban environment, the birds would most likely be hanging out there
anyway, whether or not I had a feeder (in any case, all of my neighbors have feeders, too!).
P.S. Re interesting yard birds: This morning our back yard was so boggy from the melt-water that we had a Snipe
feeding in the mud! The last time we saw one in our neighborhood was in our neigbor's yard in 1988.
--
John Winskie
Winskie Services
winskie at cmc.net
Edmonds, Washington, USA