Subject: Re: cats
Date: Sep 11 17:20:39 1997
From: Allyn Weaks - allyn at cornetto.chem.washington.edu


Michael Price wrote:
>And the only useful solution? Keep cats indoors and dogs on leashes.

Yes. And is it rude and unkind of me to think that most kids should be
kept leashed as well? :-)

>And not just birds. A lot of people spend a lot of time and sometimes money
>trying to rid their gardens of pests such as those huge slugs that
>occasionally make walking barefoot in Cascadia so interesting. Time was,
>garter snakes, once much more plentiful before it became fashionable to have
>two cats to every livingroom and two dogs for every walk in the park, kept
>slug numbers down. Cats and dogs between them, but mostly cats, killed off
>the garter snakes, really the only control on slugs, and the result was an
>enormous increase in their presence, with a corresponding increase in
>pesticide use all over Cascadia.

Well, the common garden slugs that eat cultivated plants are european
imports. Banana slugs don't do very well without a good cover of native
plants, which they prefer to our exotics. My (still limited) experience,
and that of some other gardeners I've talked to, has been that although I
have plenty of garden slugs, they don't seem to touch the native shrubs
I've been planting, or even the native perennials I've started; they
restrict themselves to detritus and the few veggies I put in. If I ever
get my yard to the point that I can make a native banana slug happy I'll be
overjoyed, and they will be quite welcome to graze away.

As for snakes, judging from the ever-recurring 'how can I get rid of the
snake in my garden' thread on rec.gardens, I think people are at least as
much to blame as cats. Our society makes it all too easy for people to
become phobic about snakes, and many simply don't care whether the snake in
their garden is hazardous or beneficial--they just want it gone. The now
traditional landscaping of lawn with specimen tree and foundation shrubs
doesn't help any either...

Oh yes, if you have any of those big black ground beetles, treasure them.
They eat slug eggs. As does the Gibb's Shrew-Mole, but I've never seen one
of them. Maybe the cats got 'em :-(


Allyn Weaks
allyn at cornetto.chem.washington.edu aka allyn at u.washington.edu
Pacific Northwest Native Wildlife Gardening:
http://chemwww.chem.washington.edu/natives/