Three items today, just so I don’t miss a Caturday. But I’m in a rush, as I’m speaking at the Ratio conference this afternoon. So let us hasten to the felids:
I’ve seen two live street cats in Sofia, but they were moving too fast to either pet or photograph. Fortunately, the Bulgarians love cats, and the lion is also a national symbol of sorts, so you see the big cats frequently, if only in effigy. Here are a few moggies, large and small, I encountered on my ramblings yesterday:
A lion guarding a government building:
Cats on display in a jewelry store:
Wooden cats AND a self-portrait!:
This is Vassi (short for Vassilena), one of my amiable hosts. She and her partner Lubo are the staff of an 18-year old Siamese male named Tancho, who will eat every item of food except citrus fruits. And I mean everthing, including onions, melon, and cucumbers. I hope to get a photograph of Tancho nomming a cucumber before I leave.
Here, while showing me around Sofia, Vassi posed with a famous old Bulgarian cat image emblazoned on a government building.
This bronze lion guards Bulgaria’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier:
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Matthew Cobb loves fighting cats. He previously sent me the “boxing cat,” and now he provided this: “Cat fights washing machine”:
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Finally, the Swiss run their independent country as finely as one of their watches, but in this case they’ve simply gone too far. According to The Local (an English-language Swiss news site), a Zurich group, Zürcher Tierschutz, is trying to get the country to limit cats to only one per household. This is, of course, because of the depredation cats inflict on wildlife.
Zürcher Tierschutz estimates there 1.4 million cats in the country, whose human population is just over 8.1 million.
Claudia Kistler, co-author of a study on cats for the group, said measures are needed to stabilize or reduce the cat population to protect wildlife, including small mammals, birds and reptiles.
“We have calculated that the density of cats in Zurich is 430 cats per square kilometre,” Kistler told Le Matin Dimanche newspaper earlier this year.
. . . “By comparison there are 10 to 15 fox for the same area.”
François Turrian, director of ASPO/Bird Life Suisse in French-speaking Switzerland, said the Zurich animal protection group’s proposal at least merits debate.
. . . “But let’s stop putting our heads in the sand: the cat is a great predator,” he said.
“It kills birds, small mammals, lizards, amphibians, dragonflies.”
Turrian said the green lizard had disappeared from certain areas of the canton of Valais and was rapidly declining in Geneva because of cats.
I am sensible of the infliction of cat damage on wildlife, but I think there are better ways to do this than limiting the number of cats per household. For one thing, many cats (including my last one) are strictly indoor cats; animals kept indoors and prevented from hunting do live much longer. And some cats aren’t happy without a companion around. Why restrict those to one per household?
Of course the cat lovers are fighting back:
Dennis C. Turner, a British professor at the University of Zurich and a specialist in cats and dogs, is among those opposed to the one-cat, one household proposal.
Turner, a research associate at the institute of evolutionary biology and environmental studies, told Le Matin Dimanche that the idea there were too many cats in Switzerland was “completely unfounded”.
Switzerland may have more cats on a per capita basis than other countries because dogs are not permitted in many apartment buildings, he said.
“But Rome has 2,000 cats per square kilometre and there are 2,350 in a Japanese fishing village — don’t tell me that Switzerland suffers from an overpopulation of cats.” [JAC: The abundance of cats in other places, including a fishing village where presumably they are piscivores, does not mean that Swiss cats aren’t overly abundant.]
Turner, who is director of the Institute for applied Ethology and Animal Psychology, said the proposal to limit cats may even be illegal.
Swiss animal protection law, for example, requires that guinea pigs must be owned in pairs so why should cats be forced into a solitary condition?
Now that is cute: Swiss law mandates that guinea pigs be kept in pairs. (Only Switzerland could make such a law, and I approve of it.) But cats suffer from loneliness too, especially if they’re kept inside. Bell the cats, require them to be on a lead or stay inside, keep them in a fenced yars, but do not limit them to one per household.
h/t: Steve
That first lion has strangely human eyebrows.
Looks like Bert Lahr ( Cowardly Lion) 🐯
Yes, I thought the lion had a very human face as well. It’s like a human got creepily merged with a lion somehow.
That was what I was going to say, but you beat me to it. I wonder if there’s a king from the time Poland had them with a connection to lions in looks or behaviour?
It reminds me of the Victorian habit of painting children as little adults. I find this creepy as well.
Yes, it’s a bit jarring!
One of the problems in our “finely runned” country is that it is relatively easy – for everybody – to launch a new law. Remember we earned a peace’s Ig Nobel prize in 2008 for a (totaly inapplicable) law about plant dignity…
As for the number of kills of our predatory cats, I would say that they mostly catch preys “born to be eaten” – R strategists. And the green lezards disappear from Genf mostly because of biotope fragmentation and destruction, use of pesticides in agriculture and general pollution.
No wilderness = no wildlife
Our garden sustains lizards, squirrels, bees, butterflies, birds and mice. So there is plenty for our cats to hunt.
Most people have completeley lifeless gardens nowadays. A lawn, some neatly trimmed shrubs. Nothing for critters to feed on, nowhere to hide and no unplaned vegetation.
Pollution is at record lows.
I read ‘felinely runned’ at first glance 🙂
Oups, Geneva, not Genf (german name for Genève).
Matthew Cobb loves fighting cats.
You’d better buy a stock of bandaids then, Matthew.
It’s refreshing to see a cat-lover with a rational take on the problem of cat depredation. Too many cat-lovers deny or rationalize the cat’s enormous impact. And yes, there are other things that have sizable impacts—brightly-externally-lit tall buildings during bird migration season, sterile manicured lawns, etc. It would be nice if all of these could be slowly dealt with…..but it is good to get started with at least one of the major factors.
Yes, I have decided that I’ll have no more outside cats. Back in the day, everyone just assumed that cats had to go outside, and mine always have. They’ve never come to harm, but now the environment needs help. After my current ones, twelve and fourteen years old, are gone, I’ll have only indoors.
And, the best thing I ever did was once sow my lawn with wild meadow seeds and let it grow. I had all kinds of wildlife, insects and butterflies and birds and beetles and toads, etc., beautiful, and my old cats just sat in the sun in the long wild grass, appreciating it and smelling the flowers, like Ferdinand the bull. No watering, no mowing.
I had to go back to a conventional lawn after some new houses were built nearby, but miss the meadow! And plan to get back to it as closely as I can.
I have clover in my lawn which makes it quite healthy and I too have toads and snakes. Those perfectly green lawns are really just deserts.
Yes, I plan to get back to a mixture of plants like that: clover, various native groundcovers, more native wild species, and, for the obligatory “lawn” portion, no-water, no-mow grass that was specially bred for this area.
I am gradually letting my lawn go to clover. I really like the look and feel of it and just hope my kind of anal neighbors don’t object too much.
If the problem is too many cats for the wildlife population, then clearly the answer is to increase the amount of wildlife.
So I propose a law that every household must distribute a certain poundage of rodent/bird/lizard food per granted cat license.
If people replaced their lawns with brushpiles that would help too.
Awww I like the law that guinea pigs must be kept in pairs. Unfortunately, people don’t know how to care for guinea pigs properly & stick them in little cages and feed them only pellets. GP’s need large cages so they can run around and you need to supply fresh greens. Also, like us, they need vitamin C. My guinea pigs refused to eat oranges or kiwi fruit & I don’t think they got enough kale so I had to grind up supplements and give them their vitamin C in syringes (no needle) in their little mouths. They tolerated it but just. 🙂
Not just guinea pigs, the same law mandates the minimum number of other social animals, such as rats or rabbits, one is supposed to keep. Same goes for cage sizes and so on, which is often a problem as you point out.
My daughter’s former housemate arrived with two supposedly male rats. Eventually there were 16, and eventually he moved out…
That’s awesome as those little animals often suffer terribly.
Vassi is beautiful.
(Sorry, but someone had to say it, :-))
Agreed. That cat on the panel is one weird-looking kitty though.
And possibly a Nosferatu fan?
Bell the cats?
Seriously?
Bells do not stop cats decimating wildlife.
Everyone knows they’re too smart for that trick… Or, at least I thought everyone knew…
Think again:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/40700872_Bells_reduce_predation_of_wildlife_by_domestic_cats_%28Felis_catus%29
Also look at this:
http://catgoods.com/field-trial-results/
Bells (I think two small bells works better than one) and other devices are not perfect but they help a lot, and are easy solutions that every cat owner should adapt.
When they were younger, my cats used to love being taken out for walks on leashes. Opening the leash drawer brought them running faster than anything else (including the can opener). They certainly did not consider it torture.
Keeping cats indoors is the recommendation of most veterinarians and cat breeders. It’s better for the cats as well as for the wildlife. Indoor cats enjoy longer, healthier lives than outdoor cats. Again, the cats of my acquaintance do not regard their homes as prisons, but appreciate familiar surroundings, comfortable places to sleep, regular meals, and daily play sessions. People who love their cats supply these things. People who turn cats out to fend for themselves do not count as cat lovers in my book.
Also note that cats are social animals that benefit from living in pairs or groups. So if you really care about cat welfare you should oppose the one-cat limit.