Say ‘No’ to a cat curfew

Patrick is a dedicated hunter and wouldn’t like it one little bit if he was confined to quarters at night.     But this is just what a t.v. wildlife expert has recently proposed.    He says that a ‘cat curfew’ will protect wildlife, birds especially.   It’s proposed that keeping cats indoors will reduce the millions of animals killed at night by 50%.

What doesn’t seem to be taken into account is that a cat curfew wouldn’t make any difference to the safety of birds – they roost at night high up in trees where no cat can get to them.   They fly to roose as soon as it’s getting dark and they don’t move until dawn.   So leaving your cat out won’t give him the chance to catch these birds.

The cat is nocturnal, he can see in the dark but what he will be after are mice and rats.   As we’re already over run with these creatures, who breed at an astounding rate, perhaps we should applaud the good ‘mouser’.   Rats and mice cause diseases that can be fatal to humans.  If cats lose the instinct to hunt then we will be over run by rodents.   Poison and trapping are not a good solution and don’t work in the long term.

The natural order of things is always to be preferred, cats keep rodents at bay and prevent contamination of food for the other animals.   We used to value cats because of their hunting prowess, preventing them from catching birds in the garden is relatively easy – a collar with a bell will do the trick.

But, if you live in town keeping your cats in at night is almost essential – it’s not that they’ll go out killing birds but that they will themselves get knocked down and killed on our busy roads.