Various Veins
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Cats, house cats, barn cats, neighborhood cats have been an enjoyable and active part of my life for as long as I can remember.
My sister Gretta dressed up in doll's clothes a patient old Tom, we called him Jiggs. Jiggs would tolerate, I might even venture to say enjoy being mauled and tucked into a doll buggy and pushed around for hours. Occasionally I took a fatherly roll in the games.
At Roy Stewart's house half a mile up the Maple Grove Road I spent hours lying on the floor behind the wood cook stove where Roy often had a cardboard box cut into a model house with a door and two or three windows. We'd tie a rag on a string and dangle it outside one or other of the openings and watch the paws shoot out to grasp the lure.
Sometimes we risked lacerations by tapping at a window with bare fingers.
At milking time we watched with great glee as Mom or Dad would send a stream of milk from a cow's teet toward a cat. The cat would dab at the stream with one foot to give itself time to lap and swallow the hot liquid.
In our own house Martha and I had a series of cats. When one or another of the family was taken ill and in bed, the cat of the time would lie beside the patient, a warm nurse.
Birds, domesticated or wild have played as rich a role in my life as have cats. Domestic birds were appreciated for the eggs they surrendered to our groping hands, and for the delicious entrees they provided. Chicken boiled, turkey roasted, pressed duck. Hear Tiny Tim exclaim to his sister, "It's such a goose!"
Wild birds with cheerful songs and all colours entertained Martha and me all our married life. We lured them in winter with feeders, and in later years we did the same in summer as we grew less able to go out to find them in their natural habitat. I often felt we were causing hummingbirds to lose their instinct to get nectar from living flowers, but it was such fun to watch the fiesty little creatures defend their turf in aerobatics!
Birds and cats came together in a headline in Saturday's newspaper.
"Canadian cats kill 100m birds a year."
Clearly this message was meant to raise indignation in the reader. It did so in this reader. So what? I thought. I have, as I noted above, enjoyed many a bird for dinner. Why shouldn't a cat have the same pleasure, especially as it is a natural hunter.
Yes, I've watched a cat toy with a mouse or a bird before eating it. The game Roy and I enjoyed played on that instinct of cats.
The article covers death by crashing into tall buildings, blades of wind generators, although at the leisurely sweep of those giant arms a bird with any intelligence should be able to deke around them. Low buildings, says the writer, contribute as many deaths as skyscrapers. This does not surprise me. I've witnessed the result of failing to recognise the reflected greenery for the real thing. I've hung warning streamers, but they are ignored. The same attitude that humans display when they walk into the path of traffic with their electronic devices.
I have enjoyed the occasional game bird that broke its neck against a window pane. They dress out very well if collected at the time of the incident.
The numbers reported in the Canada-wide survey are at first something to give us pause. But then I think about pairs of birds raising two and three broods a season. They wear their lovely feathers to tatters as they rush about collecting insects, seeds, crows eating other birds, ospreys snatching a fish in a plume of water, in the case of seagulls maybe such disgusting fodder as is provided by a discarded baby diaper.
Check the ingredients in a can of cat food. Is it better to kill creatures to feed cats than to let them catch their own?
Consider the environment if nothing hunted birds or they learned to avoid solid objects. Have you seen Alfred Hitchcock's movie, The Birds? Have you observed the guano that sea birds deposit along the coast of Peru, gathered by the shovelful for fertilizer? Have you tried to shine your your car's hood or roof after the lime of bird droppings eats into the finish? And there's bird flu!