The Good, the Bad and the Ugly!

First, before I tell you what I've learned, I want to tell you something else I learned.  Hmmm.  I'm learning and learning!  Do you remember when I wrote about A Stitch in Time?  Oh wait, I should tell you that this is Smokey!  I'm blogging!  Okay, this is what I learned about A Stitch in Time.  It was started by the lady who started StreetCats.  Her name is Jodi Lorimer and she named the organization and the program!  So this is whom we should say thank you!!!  Thank you, Jodi!

Now on to what else I've learned.  First, the good.  Cats are absolutely awesome!!!  Even more than I realized!!!  Did you know that we're supernatural predators?  Well, I guess we're natural, but we're so good at it we seem supernatural.  We can see in ultraviolet and hear in ultrasound!  We can judge the height of a sound so accurately that we're going to catch any prey that makes even the slightest sound on our first try!  This is good because we're hyper carnivores . . . that means we must have meat!  I am so proud of how amazing we are . . . such wonderful hunters!  Beautiful, sleek, sly, graceful and very successful hunters!

Now here's the bad.  Lots of cats live outside and when they hunt they aren't careful about what they catch.  If it's meat they will catch it and eat it.  And this includes songbirds.  Pretty birds that make such pretty sounds.  There are people who love birds as much as my people love cats!  So when we catch their birds they get very sad.  Or mad.. This is bad!

And the ugly . . . and I do mean really ugly . . . the International Union for Conservation of Nature considers cats one of the 100 worst invasive species.  And no, I'm not kidding!  Invasive!!  And in Australia they blame us for the decline of the majority of their endangered species.  Some people want to irradicate us.  Irradicate!  Look it up!  I shudder just thinking of it!  Here is an example I read about.  In Key Largo, Florida there is a special little mouse called the Eastern Woodrat.  It's a cute little mouse with cute little eyes.  And it's endangered.  Because of, yep, cats!  The people there are trying so hard to save this little mouse!  They even raise them away from there and then turn them loose and then guess what.  We eat them!  And they've tried so hard to keep us kitties away!  But we are so smart (and so prolific!) that they can't control us!  Of course I'm not surprised, but yikes, this makes us a little unpopular.

So I've been thinking.  Could house cats with access to the outdoors be contributing to this bad and ugly?  Could these house cats be contributing to extinctions?  Sort of sad, huh?  Pretty good reason, maybe, to keep house cats in the house?  You can feed us our meat and we can hunt toys!!  I know I'm going to be up at night thinking about this.  People might have more reason to keep us inside than just to protect US, huh?!