Exploring Kansas Outdoors
By Steve Gilliland
Cats of any description are fierce, efficient hunters, and feral cats, all-the-more. They do untold damage to pheasant and quail populations and kill large numbers of songbirds. By feral cats I mean cats that live totally in the wild and possibly haven’t had a domestic relative for years or even generations; NOT “Fluffy” next door that rolls around at your feet and plays hide and seek with you from a paper sack.
Feral cats have become so overpopulated in some states that hunting seasons have been proposed for them. Heck, when we were kids, we called feral cats RT’s, short for Running Targets. But I think I have some good ideas to actually utilize feral cats in today’s topsy-turvey society. For starters, how about using them for crowd control. Rioting crowds would probably react badly to snarling German Shepherds, which will soon be history anyway since the K-9 police units will probably be washed down the drain with the rest of law enforcement officers. But who’s gonna’ notice a few fluffy cats rubbing against everyone’s legs. Really long-haired ones rolled in some sort of fairy dust and turned loose to spread it through the crowd (since none of the rioters, err, I mean demonstrators will be wearing masks) could have the “demonstrators” simply falling asleep where they stand. All that’s needed is to pile everyone against the curbs and traffic is restored; no buildings burned, no one shot, no historic statues that have stood there for generations torn down, and just look at the money saved on tear gas. Hopefully when the protesters all awake to see how pathetic they look on the evening news, they’ll just slink off into the shadows and be too ashamed to try it again.
Since it appears many 911 calls will soon be answered by only mental health professionals of some description who will undoubtedly be unarmed except for a clipboard and some colored markers, a few of the nastiest old hag feral cats can be trained to go with them when they enter CHAZ, CHOP or whatever the new nations within our cities will call themselves by then. They can be carried in small cat size carriers or with those nifty little harnesses with a handle so they can be carted around like lunch boxes. “A cat against a crowd of demonstrators?” you’re thinking. Remember, these “demonstrators” that want the world to believe they are the toughest things since Dirty Harry are mostly snowflakes and tree huggers; they’ll urge violence against law enforcement officers and burn cities, but they won’t harm a cat. And if one does get out-of-line, that old hag feral cat will lay them open like a fish with a couple lightning quick swipes of a paw; pretty good protection I’d say.
Burned-out and plundered cities will soon be taken over by marauding rodents, so why not train feral cats for rodent control too, using some catchy name like Steve’s Marvelous Mousers. I’d roll into town about dusk and start distributing the Marvelous Mousers along alleys and side streets, then return to my Airstream parked somewhere out in the burbs’ for a good night’s sleep. Just before dawn the next morning little GPS units on each collar would help me find all my Mousers, which by them would probably be so full of fat little city-slicker mice and rats all they’d want to do is sleep anyway, making them a breeze to collect. Thing is, I’d probably have to pull an old pickup-bed trailer full of kitty litter behind the Airstream to use as a giant litter-box.
Well there you have just a few examples of innovative ways to re-purpose feral cats in today’s topsy-turvey world. I see it as a win-win-deal; a few feral cats are taken out of the wild, pet lovers are happy cause’ they weren’t killed and we hunters reap the benefits. Why, I’ll bet the poor mislead folks at PETA would even be proud of me……..hmmm, if that’s my reward maybe I need to rethink this whole thing. Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors!
Steve can be contacted by email at [email protected].
