WILLY POOLE Column Newcastle Chronicle & Journal

( Cutting from Dale thankyou))

October 7, 1999, :

Someone sent me a newspaper advertisement put out by the RSPCA.

The picture on the advert is of a cage full of cats. The blurb says - "The RSPCA would like you to help the homeless", by which it means the cats in the picture.

The RSPCA boasts that last year it found homes for 46,000 abandoned cats. What a great boost for bio-diversity that must have been. The estimated number of cats in Britain is 7,500,000 and it is reckoned that they kill 210 million small mammals and birds per annum.

It is a safe bet that most of those who witter on about the decrease in numbers of small garden birds are cat keepers. Again it is estimated that cats kill 75 million birds per annum and most of those birds would be protected species and yet, on the face of it, the RSPCA is encouraging this slaughter

. At the same time the society has the gall to be against hunting. A fox killed by hounds dies instantaneously - I have seen enough kills to know this. A deer at bay is also killed instantaneously by a head shot at close range with a shotgun fired by an experienced man.

The bird or small mammal killed by a cat does not die quickly - the time from catch to kill may be 30 minutes, during which time the cat "plays" with its living prey. Sometimes the cat gets bored with the game and leaves the prey to crawl away. But by that time the prey will have been wounded by playful teeth and claws and will die painfully and slowly from its injuries.

We do not find the RSPCA putting pictures of cat injured birds and voles in the paper - that might stop the ting-a-ling of the till as the money rolls in from the cat fanciers. "Ah! But" the Catties will say - "we don't set our moggies on little creatures, and cats are only doing what comes naturally."

By the same token, it is perfectly natural for foxhounds to hunt and to kill foxes. It is certainly true that Catties do not "set" their cats on their prey species - they just let the beggars out to follow their natural instincts. These people know perfectly well what their cats will do on the loose but refuse to face up to the fact that by loosing the cat they are accessories to lingering death. There will be cries of anguish if pussy is so unkind as to come back with a wounded bird or mouse. But it is a guinea to a gooseberry that the suffering animal will not have its suffering ended by the Cattie.

[Oh no! they couldn't actually kill something - only a monster would do that.] What they are likely to do is to pick the suffering creature up with the tongs or the coal shovel and hoy it out of the door. Then it can do the decent thing by dying slowly out of sight and out of mind. Unless, of course, "naughty pussy" is let out again to continue the suffering process. A vexed question you may say, and with no simple answer.

The answer is quite a simple equation - if you remove the 7.5 million cats from it then you will have another 210 million small animals and birds to add to the local bio-diversity. I have certainly done my bit - I won't have a cat on the place. Coping with the weather is one of the things that shapes the English Character.

Many years ago I lived on Dartmoor where the weather is very fickle. There is an old Devon dialect rhyme about the weather

"Vust er rained,

Then er blowed,

Then er hailed,

Then er snowed,

Then er com'd a shower of rain,

Then er vruz and blowed again." Just like Northumberland really.

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