I would like to respond to the letter from Larry Berger about cats. While I agree that cat owners should spay/neuter and vaccinate their cats, I strongly oppose any attempt to require that all cats be caged.
In the country cats are necessary to control the mice, rabbits, squirrels, prairie dogs, and yes the birds. Uncontrolled any one of these wild animals can spread disease, destroy crops, and damage property. I have lived on my three acres down McElmo Canyon for 22 years, and I have had at least two cats, sometimes four cats all that time. The only time I had only one and she too old to hunt, we were overrun with mice, rabbits, squirrels, and prairie dogs. There are so many birds, mostly sparrows, out here that in the summer my horse can hardly walk through her lot without stepping on one.
And the claim that the cats are killing off the song birds is a myth, which was debunked by a study done by one of the conservation groups — Ido not remember whether it was the National Wildlife Federation, The Nature Conservancy, or Discover Magazine, but the study found that it was people and development that were destroying their habitat and road noise that was driving them away. The PBS series “Earth, the New Wild,” the last segment of which should be re-run on PBS on Sunday morning, stresses the important role that predators play in the health of any ecosystem. Without cats that have the chance to roam free and catch mice, and other small pray, we would be overrun with these species, and that is not good for any of us, human, domestic or wild.
Barbara Lynch
Cortez