Don't Often Agree With This Bell End , But I Do Today ........
Come quietly, Tiddles, or it’s jail for your owner
*the numbers quoted seem a bit high to me
One day, at dusk, a truly gigantic swarm of starlings arrived and spent a few moments painting extraordinary kaleidoscopic shapes in a sky that had been dyed a fabulous mix of purple and orange by the setting sun and the emissions from the mines and the power stations. You can forget herds of wildebeest and the Grand Canyon. That was, and remains, one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen.
At school I drew pictures of terns in my exercise books and I wrote projects on ospreys and peregrine falcons. I loved birds and I still do, even though I can’t remember the last time I actually saw one.
Make no mistake, if you were six inches tall, your cat would amuse itself by tearing you to pieces
These days I have a farm in the high, rolling hills of the Cotswolds. And sometimes I take a bottle of wine with me and sit at the highest point, on the still sharply defined earth banks of a Neolithic fort, thinking about, oh, just stuff.
It always makes me sad, though, because the only birds I see are the pheasants and partridges I reared and then failed to shoot last winter. Once, I saw a small flock of yellowhammers darting around in a hedgerow, and sometimes a gang of fieldfares will arrive in a tree to ravage it. But mostly the skies are as empty as they are on Mars.
I’ve planted acre upon acre of game crop and I’ve erected owl boxes and I’ve created wild, untended motorways for the insects and the voles to use. Because if you get the insects and the voles, you get the birds. Except you don’t. Not any more. The fact is that in 1966 there were 210m birds in the UK and now there are fewer than 166m. That’s a fall, in just 50 years, of 44m. And that’s huge.
Sometimes the RSPB raises this point, but then, because it has been hijacked by lunatics and communists, it always comes to a shoulder-saggingly political conclusion, blaming the empty skies on the motorcar, and people who eat meat, and fertiliser, and Margaret Thatcher.
Last week, however, we learnt the awful truth. The extinction-level event that has reduced the dawn chorus to nothing more than a moment of quiet reflection is actually the domestic cat. Yup, your precious moggy has wreaked more havoc on the world’s wildlife than the Exxon Valdez and the Torrey Canyon put together.
Let me give you some numbers. In America the number of birds killed by cats every year is — sit down for this — 3.7bn. In the UK it’s 55m. And that’s just birds. They also murder — and there’s no other word for it — 220m small creatures such as shrews and voles. Ever wondered why you never see hedgehogs any more? Well, for an answer, stare into the slitty, unblinking puddles of evil that masquerade as a cat’s eyes.
I appreciate there are people who like their cats but I have no idea why. They spend 80% of the day asleep and the other 20% ignoring you. Occasionally one will leap onto the kitchen table and raise its tail so you can see its anus, and then, after you’ve given it some extremely expensive food, it will go outside to kill whatever it can get its claws on. For fun. Tom and Jerry wasn’t a cartoon. It was a documentary.
Make absolutely no mistake about this. If you were 6in tall, your cat would amuse itself by tearing you to pieces, instead of doing what it does now; which is sit around, waiting for you to die of loneliness.
This is what cat owners must understand. That they are feeding and housing an animal that kills for a laugh. Which means they are giving house room to a psychopath. “Oh, but he’s so clean and he always disposes of his poos so thoughtfully,” says Marjorie in her moggy’s defence. Yes, Marjorie, but Fred West also disposed of his poos thoughtfully, and you wouldn’t want him living in a basket in the kitchen, would you?
Cats also ruin furniture, give me asthma, wake me up in the night by fighting and clog up Instagram. And what do their owners get in return? Nothing. That’s what. I asked my colleague James May last week why he has cats and he actually said: “Because they don’t care about me.” So what’s the point, then? He might as well have an ant. Or a stick.
If I were in charge of everything, I’d announce the immediate introduction of a cat amnesty. Owners would be told they had 24 hours to hand their cat in to a police station, and anyone who failed to comply would have to go to prison.
Because we face a simple choice. Cats or birds. And I’m sorry but that’s like saying, “Would you like to spend a fortnight in St Tropez this summer or would you rather fall into some farm machinery?”
However, it seems there is a third option. According to John Bradshaw, who somehow makes a living by being a cat behaviour expert at Bristol University, it may be possible to breed the murderer traits out of a cat.
He says there are only a dozen or so genes that differ between a domestic cat and the bigger, more jungly and more effective hunter variety, and if these could be studied more carefully, then boffins could get to work with their erasers and rub them out.
Yes, and after they’ve removed its killer instinct, maybe they could give it paws without vicious claws, and doe eyes, and perhaps a gene that makes it want to put its head out of the window when it’s in a car, and fetch sticks and retrieve downed pheasants from the middle of a lake, and bark at burglars and love its owner to death. Because that, surely, would be the perfect pet.
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