I have been reading all the chat on this particular forum with special interest, since I have been trapped by the wonderful, beautiful, and dignified stray and ferel cats of the northern Negev Desert to take up this crazy business of rescuing cats. We live in a place where there is almost no possibility of finding open water, and where, in many seasons of the year, wild food (rats, mice, small snakes, etc.) is extremely scarce. Cats are normally born in the hundreds around my village, and died by an estimated 80% before they are 6 months old -- many of dehydration and starvation as kittens, or by disease, dogs or cars when they are a little older.
When I first came here, the various regional councils solved their overpopulation of unowned dogs and cats by putting out poison. Several years ago, a strong law was passed against the use of poison except under exception circumstances (a rabies epiidemic, for example). The hitch was that you had to go to the police and get them to investigate and then charge the persons responsible. Of course, in our particular area, our governance is determined by the size of large extended families, and the police jobs are often given to members of whichever family is running the regional council. The people working for the regional council are also related in some what to the ruling families, so no policeman is going to investigate a cousin, however distant, for poisoning cats.
In January, I brought the human society veterinarian truck to my village to trap and spay ferel and stray cats -- all my 18 cats at that time had all been fixed or were too young. I helped, and we did only a dozen or so cats -- not at all what I expected from the numbers I had seen just a few weeks before, but it was winter and raining and cold, so we figured the truck could come back when the weather was better and the cats weren't hiding.
Two weeks later, suddenly most of the spayed and neutered cats disappeared, and several bodies of cats unknown to me showed up in the vacant area next to my house. One of my neighbors told me that the Moatza had had the cats poisoned. When I foolishly said that it was now very much against the law, they backed down and said cats were always disappearing. Other neighbors, now alerted to my unorthodox views on poisoning, mentioned that there had been too many cats anyway... You have all heard this kind of story.
About a two months ago, it seemed like even the new cats that had wandered into the village had somehow disappeared. I asked people again if they knew what had happened, and again I got this sort of giggly answer about how there had been too many cats, and they were glad they were gone. You must understand that my neighbors speak Hebrew but very little English, and I speak very, very poor Hebrew and am basically an English-speaker. So communication is possible, but difficult.
A few weeks ago the rat and mouse population, not to mention snakes, suddenly exploded. Warm weather, lots of grain-grasses left over from a good rainy winter, and NO CATS caused hoards of mice and rats to invade the houses and yards of many of my neighbors. Then I heard that all of the villages in this part of our regional area were having the same problem -- and that their cats also had disappeared. My own cats gifted me with no fewer than 21 dead mice (one under the covers of my bed!) in the space of a week. There were so many kills that they didn't even bother to try to eat them. I found 8 dead mice and one rat in the road in front of my house on one morning alone. We were also getting a plague of the big water-type cockroaches -- something I have almost never seen in my house since the cats came to live with me.
I have told my neighbors about the black plague -- how the Christian Church of the Dark Ages decided that cats were familiars of the Devil and Witches, and torturned, burned, and killed all the cats they could lay their hands on throughout Europe for a number of years. And how the rats multiplied and carried fleas and the plague killed over a third of the entire population of Europe and England in its first wave. Because there were no cats. I told my neighbors that they had interfered with nature's balance and that they had permitted the murder of one of God's special guardians of public health.
As bitter as I was, I really laid into them, and I hope they repeat it to their neighbors and think of what they have done when the mice invade their clothes closets and the rats hiss at their toddlers..
But really, I laughed a lot, too. If ever there was a true and immediate punishment for cruelty and stupidity, this is a case in point. In all of this new year, I have lost two of my 3-year-old cats who just failed to come home. I suppose they were caught in the poisoning. My youngest ones are still very stay-at-home types, and so far they have not been touched by it all. But I foresee that in order to control the mice and rats, the poisoners will get to work again. And a poisoned rat will poison anything that tries to eat it. So I suppose we will lose most of the few cats still remaining.
I do not believe in death, and I have no doubt that there will be afterlives for our remarkable cats, but I do believe in suffering, and poison causes such terrible pain. You cannot avoid becoming somewhat fatalistic when you have large colonies of cats, since the mortality rate is very high due to endemic illnesses before you can even get them vaccinated, the dogs that are allowed to run free in packs, and the craziness of the local drivers. But there was no need for this massacre. And there was no need for a plague of mice and rats.
Sad and laughing at the same time... Catherine
When I first came here, the various regional councils solved their overpopulation of unowned dogs and cats by putting out poison. Several years ago, a strong law was passed against the use of poison except under exception circumstances (a rabies epiidemic, for example). The hitch was that you had to go to the police and get them to investigate and then charge the persons responsible. Of course, in our particular area, our governance is determined by the size of large extended families, and the police jobs are often given to members of whichever family is running the regional council. The people working for the regional council are also related in some what to the ruling families, so no policeman is going to investigate a cousin, however distant, for poisoning cats.
In January, I brought the human society veterinarian truck to my village to trap and spay ferel and stray cats -- all my 18 cats at that time had all been fixed or were too young. I helped, and we did only a dozen or so cats -- not at all what I expected from the numbers I had seen just a few weeks before, but it was winter and raining and cold, so we figured the truck could come back when the weather was better and the cats weren't hiding.
Two weeks later, suddenly most of the spayed and neutered cats disappeared, and several bodies of cats unknown to me showed up in the vacant area next to my house. One of my neighbors told me that the Moatza had had the cats poisoned. When I foolishly said that it was now very much against the law, they backed down and said cats were always disappearing. Other neighbors, now alerted to my unorthodox views on poisoning, mentioned that there had been too many cats anyway... You have all heard this kind of story.
About a two months ago, it seemed like even the new cats that had wandered into the village had somehow disappeared. I asked people again if they knew what had happened, and again I got this sort of giggly answer about how there had been too many cats, and they were glad they were gone. You must understand that my neighbors speak Hebrew but very little English, and I speak very, very poor Hebrew and am basically an English-speaker. So communication is possible, but difficult.
A few weeks ago the rat and mouse population, not to mention snakes, suddenly exploded. Warm weather, lots of grain-grasses left over from a good rainy winter, and NO CATS caused hoards of mice and rats to invade the houses and yards of many of my neighbors. Then I heard that all of the villages in this part of our regional area were having the same problem -- and that their cats also had disappeared. My own cats gifted me with no fewer than 21 dead mice (one under the covers of my bed!) in the space of a week. There were so many kills that they didn't even bother to try to eat them. I found 8 dead mice and one rat in the road in front of my house on one morning alone. We were also getting a plague of the big water-type cockroaches -- something I have almost never seen in my house since the cats came to live with me.
I have told my neighbors about the black plague -- how the Christian Church of the Dark Ages decided that cats were familiars of the Devil and Witches, and torturned, burned, and killed all the cats they could lay their hands on throughout Europe for a number of years. And how the rats multiplied and carried fleas and the plague killed over a third of the entire population of Europe and England in its first wave. Because there were no cats. I told my neighbors that they had interfered with nature's balance and that they had permitted the murder of one of God's special guardians of public health.
As bitter as I was, I really laid into them, and I hope they repeat it to their neighbors and think of what they have done when the mice invade their clothes closets and the rats hiss at their toddlers..
But really, I laughed a lot, too. If ever there was a true and immediate punishment for cruelty and stupidity, this is a case in point. In all of this new year, I have lost two of my 3-year-old cats who just failed to come home. I suppose they were caught in the poisoning. My youngest ones are still very stay-at-home types, and so far they have not been touched by it all. But I foresee that in order to control the mice and rats, the poisoners will get to work again. And a poisoned rat will poison anything that tries to eat it. So I suppose we will lose most of the few cats still remaining.
I do not believe in death, and I have no doubt that there will be afterlives for our remarkable cats, but I do believe in suffering, and poison causes such terrible pain. You cannot avoid becoming somewhat fatalistic when you have large colonies of cats, since the mortality rate is very high due to endemic illnesses before you can even get them vaccinated, the dogs that are allowed to run free in packs, and the craziness of the local drivers. But there was no need for this massacre. And there was no need for a plague of mice and rats.
Sad and laughing at the same time... Catherine