Get rid of all cats? Don’t tempt me

Idon’t like cats and they don’t like me. Cats don’t really like anyone, I suspect. They are charming little sociopaths.

Dogs are so much more amiable. That’s why we can safely develop really big breeds of dogs. A Great Dane, for instance, can weigh up to 200 pounds. A dog this size is physically capable of tearing apart a grown man. Even so, an unattended baby has nothing to fear from any typical representative of this huge and famously gentle breed.

Cats are a different story. Imagine if we bred cats that weighed 200 pounds. We could do it, too, as we have seen with dogs, but cats we have never selectively bred for extreme size. That’s because a 200-pound cat would immediately catch us, kill us and line up our mangled bodies on the back step. Before the killing and the lining up they would torture us, too.

“Look, he’s getting away. Oh, I guess not ... ”

The only reason cats don’t do this to us now is because they’re too small. Centuries of careful, selective breeding have kept them that way. No one wants mangled human bodies lined up on the back step, except maybe Mr. Skimbleshanks, but he’s only 20 pounds, thank goodness.

Small as they are, cats cannot openly attack us. They rely instead on lowlevel guerrilla tactics, the painful scratch, the shredded sofa, the turd buried in the sandbox. One of them used to pee every night on our front door. Like King Lear impotently railing at his departed enemies, I could not dream up a revenge fantasy dreadful enough to be worthy of this outrage.

“I will do such things — what they are, yet I know not — but they shall be the terrors of the Earth.”

It has been a while now since our door was last besmirched, so maybe the offending cat finally got run over by a car. I only hope the driver was not too bummed out. There should be a support group for drivers who unavoidably run over marauding cats. I’d like to join, just to hear the stories.

In spite of my antipathy toward cats, I do appreciate that others, for some inexplicable reason, are fond of them. I thus felt badly the other day for a friend who was sad because her cat had died. This was an elderly cat, so its death was not unexpected. Still, it had come as a blow, as the death of a beloved pet always does.

So genuine and profound was my friend’s grief that I bit my lip instead of saying, “Well, at least it wasn’t a dog.”

It was with mixed feelings, then, that I learned of the New Zealand environmentalist campaigning to have cats eradicated in that country. I’m not sure I would support someone who advocates such extreme measures, but how can I not love the guy?

Others hate Gareth Morgan for condemning their pets as “natural born killers” that are threatening New Zealand’s native species. Abandoned cats should be rounded up and exterminated, he says, and pet cats neutered and not replaced when they die. If you think that’s cruel, you don’t want to know what New Zealand’s cat enthusiasts would like to do to Morgan.

His proposal is not without foundation. An American study released this week by the Smithsonian Institution’s conservation agency estimated that cats in that country annually kill 3.7 billion birds, among other things. This out of a total bird population estimated at 10 billion or 20 billion.

Nothing, including habitat loss, kills more birds than cats, the study found. The authors stopped short of calling for a national cat roundup while all but inviting others to do so.

This was an American study, but there is no reason to believe that Canadian cats have a more enlightened policy toward birds. When they’re not yowling under my window or peeing on my door, they’re hunting.

I just wonder what cat people would say if it was the Alberta oilsands killing birds at the rate of 3.7 billion a year.