WISCONSIN SETS HUMANITY BACK WITH PROPOSED POLICY ON FERAL CATS
April 20, 2005
By Georgie Anne Geyer
WASHINGTON -- It is not the cat that has been let out of the bag in events in Wisconsin over the last two weeks, but something far more feral -- the increasing unwillingness of many Americans to act humanely toward animals.
It may be, as Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle has said, that the state will not pass proposed legislation making it legal to shoot cats. But that will never hide the degree to which this shameful episode has revealed the cruel underside of too many "humans" in America.
What will happen if such legislation -- now encouraged by votes across the state at county levels -- comes to pass? I'll tell you what will happen:
Cats will be half-killed and left to die or suffer indefinitely. Beloved house cats who happen to get out of their houses will be shot. Undisciplined or cruel children will torture animals and even skin them, assured they are protected by the law. Some ethnic groups will eat them -- after all, cats and dogs are widely eaten all over Asia, and there are many Wisconsinites of Oriental birth.
Perhaps most awful, a generalized attitude will come into the state -- and then perhaps into the nation -- that it is all right to shoot animals that most civilized people consider pets, and to turn back the centuries of humane -- and humanizing -- work of responsible men and women with animals.
All right, let's be fair: What is the other side of the story?
There seem to be roughly three groups in Wisconsin that supported the advisory votes -- and they are still advisory -- to take cats out of the protected species designation. These are: 1) People motivated by the fact that feral or wild cats kill millions of songbirds and other small animals; 2) people who find them a general nuisance or hate cats; and 3) people who just like to kill small animals for sport or the "joy" of it.
State officials estimate that as many as 2 million wild or feral cats roam Wisconsin and that they kill between 47 million and 139 million songbirds a year. But what was shocking to many animal-lovers was that this issue -- over the animal that is the No. 1 favorite pet of Americans -- received such widespread support.
In meetings in 72 Wisconsin counties within the last two weeks, about 57 percent of those who attended supported the advised change, which would still have to go to the state legislature and then get the governor's signature. But there is an entire world of organizations, beginning with The Humane Society of the United States, that has taken steps to solve the problem of feral cats in the most humane manner. Contrary to the thinking in Wisconsin, these groups are not at all against controlling the feral cat population; they just want it done in responsible ways.
There are innovative and successful programs in place all over the country where feral cats are humanely euthanized, where they are captured, spayed and neutered and let out again (no more rise in population), where lost domestic cats are taken back to homes, and where responsible households take in abandoned cats or kittens, nurture them and find them homes. But what was so disturbing about the Wisconsin news is that such a civilized approach apparently never came up in those meetings. The only approach was, "Shoot to kill! Get the cats!"
Indeed, the Wisconsin animal-protection attitude becomes even more distasteful when one realizes that the state's cat-hunting scandal comes on the heels of the mourning dove hunt set for Sept. 1 for 60 days. Each hunter is legally allowed to shoot up to 15 birds a day.
Mourning doves? The most beautiful, harmless, sweet creatures in the world? They are birds that offer no food for humankind, and they bother no one. The hunters, perhaps the same ones who complain about cats killing birds, want to shoot the doves for moving target practice.
Wisconsin was always such a progressive state -- what has happened to it? Has it, too, been taken into the cruel mood of so much of the country? Have our institutions for the humane treatment of animals given way to uneducated, unfeeling slaughter?
The great anthropologist Margaret Mead said she rated the level of civilization of societies by the way their men treated their women. Today we can rate that by the manner in which we treat the vulnerable animals God put in our midst to nurture and protect.
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