Restrict cats’ movement and protect garden birds

WITH the garden bird survey information about fewer birds, the depressing news about birds and plastics, and my own struggle with the neighbourhood cats killing my garden birds, I’d like to ask Otago cat owners to remember our unique Otago fauna and New Zealand’s promise to be predator free.

Pressure is slowly mounting for cat owners to control their cats.

Dog owners have to register, licence and microchip their dogs. Heavy fees encourage dog owners to desex their dogs.

Dogs must be under control when off their owners’ property, owners must clean up after their dogs and, if their dog strays on to a neighbour’s property and digs up the garden, they must pay for the damage.

Cat owners don’t look forward to this kind of monitoring, but some form of control is necessary, as cats have become a serious threat to our seriously threatened wildlife.

If cat owners keep their cats in from dusk until around 10am, provide a litter box in the house, make time each day to play with their cats and feed them inside it would go a long way to saving our birds, skinks and geckos. Cats are one of our greatest predators — they are excellent hunters and, because there are so many, they do a lot of damage.

As New Zealand aims at being predator free by 2050, perhaps we need to start thinking now about our attitude to cats. Cats can be taught just as dogs are, and they do accept collars and can walk on a lead.

In countries like Japan, in heavily populated cities around the world, cats have to be kept inside.

Is it time to think about something similar for our cats?

P.D.R. LindsaySalmon

Oamaru

Leaders lack substance

THE photograph and world reports in the Otago Daily Times (21.6.18) speak quite strongly about the attitudes, atrocities, violence, abuse of human rights and lack of compassion shown by world leaders.

There is plenty of rhetoric from them but unfortunately very little substance.

The photograph ‘‘Down the drain — a car in a sewer’’ is a grim reminder of where a lot of meetings and discussions by these leaders in power ends up.

‘‘By their fruits you shall know them.’’ The Rev Wayne Healey

Oamaru

Worshipping materialism

IT’S frankly terrifying — and a sign of the times that those groups who work to ban Bibles in schools are unable to see the blindingly obvious flaw in their thinking.

Organisations such as the Secular Education Network appear to believe that withholding from pupils of any form of religious/spiritual world view will thereby leave them free of all doctrinal influences.

Nothing is further from the truth. For more than a century now, the bleak doctrine of materialism as a pseudo‘‘philosophy’’ has been the default setting of the once Christian West.

We take it in like the very air we breathe. It insinuates itself, osmosislike into every nook and cranny of our society. It is unseen, unnoticed and inescapable.

It is just this which has inevitably, and largely unconsciously, been instilled into most children for more than enough generations. The awful social consequences are everywhere we look.

Only true, selfwon ethical individualism (after long suffering) can overcome such soulshrivelling atheism. Therefore, some kind of spiritual counterforce must be available to the young.

If the great cosmos and everything in it is nothing but a meaningless and soulless mechanism (even mechanisms must have a designer) how much less can a human life have any meaning and purpose?

Colin Rawle Northeast Valley

[Abridged]