This morning, I let the dog out in the backyard to do his business and discovered that one of the neighborhood felines had dug a hole and taken a crap in the middle of my vegetable garden. FOR THE SECOND TIME THIS WEEK. When the first incident occurred earlier this week, I took to Facebook to complain about what happened and suggest that perhaps I was planning on poisoning the neighborhood cats. Of course, I knew I was inviting the ire of that special breed of human who believes that cats are God’s gift to the earth and we should try to save every last one of them, even if that means we turn the planet into one big litter box. (Fair warning: If you happen to be one of these people and are easily offended, you may want to stop reading at this point.)
And I did get a number of feline-friendly, but completely useless, suggestions about what I should do. In fact, when I’ve lamented the cat situation in my neighborhood before, I’ve usually gotten the same battery of useless responses. Let’s take a look at them.
You should talk to the owners. Um, that might work if there actuallywere owners. These cats are strays–some feral–and there are no owners. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, to make matters worse, my neighbor has set up a cat hotel on his front porch. (See picture on right–oddly devoid of cats at the moment I took the picture, but you get the idea.) He feeds the cats, gives them shelter, watches them mate (I wish I were kidding.), and does nothing to control their population.- Try citrus peels. Tried that. It doesn’t work. I’ve also tried hot pepper. It also doesn’t work. I even went to the trouble to spend $40 on an ultrasonic cat repeller device. It worked for a little while, and then it was stolen from my front yard. That’s how it works in West Philly.
- Call animal control. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! In Philly? Are you kidding me? Have you heard about Philly’s animal control? Besides which, I’ve called them on my neighbor in the past, and when I tried to follow up (because of course they don’t bother to let you know if they’ve been out to investigate), I couldn’t get a real person.
- Get a trap and take them to a shelter. Why should I have to waste my time doing this when I haven’t caused the problem? Plus, I don’t even like the damn animals.
As far as I’m concerned, no one would suggest any of these solutions if we just called these stray cats what they actually are–vermin.