Defence of cats

Sir, Regarding last week’s anti-cat tirade in The Banner by Arran’s bird expert, Jim Cassels, I would like to put forward another way of looking at his statistics.

In his first example, 986 cats brought in 14,370 prey items of which 24 per cent were birds. What, I wonder, comprised the large majority of 76 per cent? I suggest that 10,921 would have been primarily rats, mice and other vermin, the control of which was the initial reason for the domestication of cats as protectors of harvested grain crops, probably in ancient Egypt.

The second example which projected the deaths of some 27 million birds throughout the UK would, by the roughly the same ratios, also have dealt with some 855 million vermin!

I wonder which the general public would really con- sider to be the more important. It is worth pointing out that, back in Medieval times when cats were seriously persecuted as demons or familiars of witches at the behest of the Catholic Church, Europeans paid a gruesome price when the Black Death arrived via the fleas on the backs of rats. Estimates run from 25 to 30 per cent of the entire population died horribly. Had there been a healthy population of cats to keep rats away from human dwellings, presumably that dreadful toll would have been considerably reduced.

And now Mr. Cassels talks of ‘determining appropriate action’, a phrase which sounds to me rather like ‘finding a final solution’. I wonder where I’ve heard that before?

Yours, Alan McBain Lamlash