Feral cat problem is of our making

Gareth Morgan draws the line at turning the slaughter of feral cats into a blood sport. Why so squeamish, when he set the madness in motion in the first place?

Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater must have thought Morgan would leap at his offer to grab a gun, join other cat haters, and hunt the furry villains down, but no, says Slater, Morgan’s ‘‘too much of a coward’’.

Or pussy, perhaps. Unlike cats, which are very brave.

Slater has launched a new site dedicated to hunting, fishing and butchery.

‘‘The Morgan Score’’ will feature there as a trophy-scoring system for killing cats, he tells us.

Hunters will have to measure their dimensions just as they would a trout, say, and presumably weigh them. Or will they?

I suspect Slater is taking the mickey. I hope he is, because such violent sports can attract the sort of people who think it’s OK to kill other people’s pets for the fun of it.

My cats would be easy pickings. They’re elderly in cat years, and spend their days napping in the shade or alternately lying on the hot concrete in the yard, gazing up at birds who taunt them from a high wall, eating and sleeping, nibbling catmint, their day’s high point the odd nocturnal dust-up with cats who try to sneak in through their cat flap and find their food.

It’s a busy life. Nobody dies. The kill rate of birds is roughly one per annum, though their fantasy life, revealed by their twitching when asleep, is rich. They are, of course, neutered and tagged.

And here’s my thought: why don’t we apply the same precautions to the nuisance males of the world?

Day after day – it’s getting monotonous – new scandals emerge of men in public life who’ve made mostly crude and definitely unwanted passes at women who are in public life as well.

They’re an unattractive-looking crew, by and large, who have this compulsion to exercise power over women and young males whose careers could founder if they make a fuss.

This is a form of hunting – or kills.

I wonder if they keep souvenirs like some serial killers do; lipsticks and underpants maybe, to nail to the shed door, dated and named.

We have only ourselves to blame for the feral cat problem. Come the Christmas holidays it was a tradition in some families to drive to the country and liberate the cat they gave the kids for Christmas last year, when it was a cute kitten.

A good many made their way to my father’s family’s farm, where they devastated wildlife. Meanwhile the same families brought new kittens home for the new year, their fate sealed for next Christmas.

My own family could be equally thoughtless, believing that they could leave the cat behind when they went on holiday to fend for itself.

Since they had made the animal dependent, it either starved or left home, joining the army of stray cats that Morgan counts, rather than sheep, in bed at night.

I guess his eyes would light up at the thought of the many kittens that were once thrown into a sack, weighed down with a brick, and flung into a creek. My mother, who had a merciless streak, was up for such work.

Rather than hunting deer and wild goats, it seems some men would rather stalk any female within arm’s length, which requires only a minimal level of fitness, and you don’t need a gun, just attitude.

I’ve worked with men like that, muttering grubby fantasies like an old radio stuck on a forgotten station in one case, or in the case of a woman I worked with, submitted to verbal rape daily by a creepy boss on a dawn shift we shared. She had no faith in reporting him further up the food chain, and she was probably right.

It causes all sorts of problems, especially as you may like the person apart from this behaviour, or feel that you wouldn’t want to upset their wives and kids by bringing it out into the open. Does that make you complicit, and part of the problem? It’s an uncomfortable thought.

When it comes to cats, the relationship is much more straightforward and pleasurable.

You feed them, they love you. When they deign to sit on your knee and purr, you’re flattered, and they’re also nice to look at.

If they’re only after one thing, as mothers used to put it, at least it’s easily provided in sachets emptied into bowls on the floor.

You don’t even have to cook.