It’s not cats that should be culled – it’s ignorant men

I REALLY wonder at the people who bemoan the killing of songbirds by cats. Take an American ornithologist called Peter Marra, the author of a new book, Cat Wars. He concludes that as cats allegedly kill about 2.4billion birds, 22billion mammals and hundreds of millions of reptiles and amphibians each year, they should be kept under house arrest; if they are feral, they should be poisoned.

I’d have more respect for his views if his previous tomes had been entitled Chickens: The Most Maligned Animal On The Planet. No, not penned that one yet? Or what about Crows: Don’t Shoot Them Because They Dig Up Your Lawn – They Are More Intelligent Than Most Five-Year-Old Children.

To pick on cats for killing birds is species-ism and elitism – a very dangerous cocktail indeed.

Dr Marra sounds about as intelligent as the designer Michael Kors who, when I asked how he could countenance using fur in his designs, told me he had just been on safari and seen big cats killing prey. He couldn’t differentiate between humans causing immense suffering in the name of vanity and a wild animal feeding her family, usually on the weakest prey she can get her claws into.

I suggest Dr Marra take a road trip across South America, where for hundreds of miles all you can see is huge barns housing battery hens to supply cheap meat for North America. It’s a terrible sight, with a terrible smell, far outstripping the upset I feel when one of my five house cats deposits a songbird in my bedroom – which, by the way, is a rare occurrence, given my cats are well fed, wear bells, are kept indoors during fledgling season, and that the birds are not afraid to fight back. Swallows regularly dive-bomb my cats if they dare to cross the lawn.

I feel guilty feeding my cats organic fish from M&S – I won’t give them commercial cat food – but telling a cat not to catch a bird is the same as asking the bird not to eat a worm.

I always rehome worms when I dig my garden, but I do not condemn the blackbird for not thinking in the same way.

And as for poisoning feral cats. I am the human companion – I eschew the word ‘owner’– of several ferals (Mummy, Boy, Dark Face, Fluffy, Smudge) who live in my outbuildings. They were rescued from the site of the London Olympics, which was home to several hundred feral cats.

My feral cats’ job is to keep the rat population at bay. Rats are a very big threat to songbirds, and to human health (another reason Dr Marra wants cats eradicated: he says they give us all manner of pestilences).

The answer, of course, to the decimation of songbirds is not violence, but spaying and neutering. Not just of cats, but of humans, and in particular of men with binoculars who fetishise the rare over the common.

HUMANS don’t just destroy the habitat of wild birds, we kill birds of prey because they might kill grouse, pheasant and lambs. I’m reminded of a particularly ignorant piece in The Spectator last week by Melissa Kite, who is opposed to the reintroduction of the lynx because ‘when a lynx escaped from Dartmoor Zoo in July, it killed four lambs’. I can never understand the bemoaning of the premature death of a lamb when its fate may be to be driven hundreds of miles to Turkey to be ritually slaughtered.

And not all cats are killers. My late 21-year-old black cat Squeaky was so fat, she frequently dislodged the catflap, which meant she wore it like a tutu until rescued and disrobed, and was so unthreatening that field mice, brought in by my semi-feral cat Susie, would hide in the folds of her tummy.

I think cats are routinely maligned because they’re seen as the child substitute of the barren old witch with mad hair: no one talks of banning fast cars, which squish a great many millions of mammals and amphibians.

I’ll give the last word to former Vogue cover star turned cat champion Celia Hammond, who founded an eponymous cat rescue clinic in Barking, East London: ‘Go away, Dr Marra. Cats bring great pleasure to the majority of people in this country. We are not interested in your ailurophobic views.’

It was Celia who introduced me to Sweetie, a tabby who is the love of my life. She has two chipped teeth and a wonky jaw from when she was beaten up by her previous ‘owners’ when just a kitten. She frequently falls off tables and chairs, as her brain was damaged in the beatings. She once fell into my goldfish pond, emerging damp and embarrassed.

It’s humans who should be culled. Not cats.