January 29, 2014

Dear Sir,

The letter to the editor ‘Time for the feral cats to be wiped out once and for all’, published in The Royal Gazette yesterday, prompted me to respond. Why am I writing? I care.

Bermuda is beautiful in so many ways and worth visiting time and again. Therefore, what happens in Bermuda and how I feel about that does matter. Other countries struggle with the same problems.

Despite its heartlessness, that letter to the editor serves a purpose. It has started a dialogue on feral cats and makes it very clear that these cats need help. Judging from the comments, the letter has also prompted at least some people to voice support for BFAB and the SPCA. As well, the letter and some of the comments strongly expose the urgent need to educate people on feral and colony cats.

As the author of the letter points out, those cats are not at all like domestic house cats. The majority are not adoptable. Therefore, even the well-intended notion of trapping, neutering/spaying and then finding a new home for them amounts to a death sentence for the majority, in the form of so-called ‘humane’ euthanasia. Thus, if these feral cats cannot be returned to their home ‘in the wild,’ they are murdered to solve the problem. The cats didn’t choose that life. People did this! Can euthanasia ever be humane, unless done for medical reasons? If the use of euthanasia is not limited to end pain and suffering, it is merely a very cruel management tool.

Instead of wasting time on criticising organisations like BFAB, it would be far more helpful if individuals offered their support, either by volunteering or through donations, to help in positive ways. Opinions such as those offered by the writer of yesterday’s letter are pointing in the wrong direction. That approach will not solve the problem and it will only serve to teach people that cats, domestic or feral, can be treated like any other disposable item our society fancies and then discards.

The writer’s recommendation to “wipe out feral cats once and for all” simply will not work. If anything, such an approach will serve only to make the problem even worse in the long run and potentially cause new problems, such as rats.

A workable solution requires time and patience. Key elements include the practice of Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR), where ‘return’ is the release of the cats to their original home or colony. Treated cats will not produce offspring. In time, feral cat populations will become smaller and disappear. If this doesn’t happen, people are continuing to add cats to those populations. The only way to largely prevent this is through education, mandatory licensing and mandatory spaying/neutering, along with enforcement. BFAB and the SPCA need the help of laws with teeth.

I disagree that BFAB and the rescues are doing things wrong and that killing is a better solution.

Mahatma Ghandi said “You can judge the morality of a nation by the way the society treats its animals.”

RALPH DAEHN

Waterloo, Ontario