There is an old saying in the newspaper business: don’t upset the cat lovers.

What this means is that anyone writing a remotely negative story about cats will be bombarded with cards and letters, all written on precious little stationary featuring pictures of kittens and string, expressing displeasure at your opinion regardless of how profound or correct it might be.

A typical letter goes something like this:
“Dear Mr. Know-it-all writer;

Your recent article suggesting that cats sometimes kill mice is dead wrong!

My own cats, all 58 of them, are precious little bundles of love that have never killed anything in their lives!  I just don’t understand why you dog-loving, degenerate, arrogant, morally-bankrupt and stupid writers are always being so mean to cats.

I’m not the kind of person to wish evil upon another, but if I were, I’d hope that you suffered a painful, horribly disfiguring disease that made all your skin fall off suddenly.

Signed; Your Grandmother.”

So, with that lengthy caveat in place, let me say that my commentary on the following news item was done after a note from an editor friend who sent along the news item with the taunt, “I dare you.”

HERE KITTY, KITTY- A possible move to legalize the hunting of feral house cats will die a sudden and decidedly political death in Wisconsin.

According to the Associated Press, Governor Jim Doyle told reporters that he would not sign any proposed law that would change the status of free-roaming domestic cats into an unprotected species. Such a change would allow the cats to be hunted without restriction.

The problem of free-ranging cats preying on wildlife is significant. The advisory group Wisconsin Conservation Congress attempted to address the issue through a resolution calling for action at their annual meeting last week

However, the governor caved in to “calls from around the country” from animal rights groups who claimed such a law would be inhumane and dangerous. He also said “What it does is sort of hold us up as a state that everybody is kind of laughing at right now.”

For those of us with functional brains, the problem isn’t funny. According to various sources, free-ranging cats kill anywhere from 47 to 139 million songbirds a year. Imagine if all those finches and cardinals were piled up around your backyard feeder. That number also doesn’t include the take of mice, voles, rabbits and other small prey animals that otherwise feed things like owls, hawks and other wildlife.

Before you whip out the Precious Kitty stationary, let me say once again say that I don’t hate cats or cat owners. I even owned one several years ago. And yes, dogs do hunt and kill critters on occasion, sometimes even deer.

However, it has been proven that the average common house cat, well fed and otherwise pampered, still has an instinctive urge to go outside and rip the little heads off Tweety Bird and other small fauna simply because of the urge to hunt rather than feed. They are also quite skilled in this business, making little Tabby one of most effective small animal predators on the planet.

While this corner is not necessarily pushing a law such as Wisconsin was considering and South Dakota and Minnesota already have on the books, we would like to remind both regular readers of this column that you should consider the potential damage being done when letting your cat outdoors to roam free.

You wouldn’t wake up one day with the goal of killing a dozen downy woodpeckers or a handful of yellow finches but every time you open up that patio door to let the cat wander, you might be doing just that.

If you have a cat, consider a small bell collar or have it declawed. You can be a friend to both your cat AND wildlife.

Photo: catfacts.org

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