(A friend of nature who wished to remain anonymous)
Do you know what a cat has under its tail? Crap. Excuse the crudity, but the elimination of faeces is a natural, physiological process for every living being. And in the animal world, it is set up so that some eat others. It is called the food chain. To find out what a species' menu consists of, scientists analyse its droppings – it is a convenient and standard method for determining which lower links in the food chain are being consumed by the subject under study.
I am no scientist. Not even close. But I do own a cat. My wife calls him a "wretched menace".
Mainly because the beast is quite an individualist, as cats tend to be, and doesn't stress much about the ethical evaluation of where to relieve its natural needs. If that location happens to be a freshly mown lawn, a pathway, or the corner of the terrace for the sake of convenience, my wife begins to voice her disagreement with the cat regarding this choice quite openly. Naturally, I am the one who has to collect the "wretched menace's" faeces. Since this happens quite regularly, I have unintentionally ended up gaining an insight into his menu. I should quickly add that, despite everything, we love our cat; he is a part of the family.
Only more independent. So much so that the "Whiskas" and "Kitekat" we offered quickly ceased to interest him. When he was smaller, he would polish off his kibble while purring, but having reached adolescence, he expanded his self-proclaimed territory far beyond the zone of the safe, soft carpet.
We don't live exactly in the middle of a forest, but the nearest neighbours are not right behind the fence either, so the cat has the rights granted by the land register of his domesticated family to roam quite far. And having discovered the charms of the wild, our Mūdzis no longer hurried home for his daily portion in the bowl still ceremoniously kept for him on the terrace. No, his surroundings awakened dormant genes that force a predator to remember its place in the food chain, and he would drag everything imaginable and unimaginable into the house! I have found bat wings, rat heads, squirrel remains, but obviously, what he enjoys most of all are birds. Their feathers were both regularly found in his droppings and had to be secretly cleared away from my wife in places where Mūdzis had been feasting on the captured flyer in the yard. As filling the aforementioned bowl had started to become a seemingly redundant tradition (although my wife has stubbornly experimented with flavours and various available tinned contents the whole time. So to speak, trying to deter the cat from his natural instinct, but quite unsuccessfully), and Mūdzis's shiny coat and body shape did not indicate starvation, my conclusions that the local bird community had reason to worry were quite well-founded. I am not an ornithologist, but I certainly consider myself a friend of nature. Well – the kind who believes that everything must be in balance, who cares about the massive floating plastic "islands" in the world's oceans, who diligently sorts waste in the family, recycles paper, and takes care not to leave the terrace lighting on unnecessarily in the evening.
Energy must be saved! The views of my small circle of friends, who have been inseparable since school, are similar. We each do our own thing in our profession; family duties and work do not allow us to meet as often as back in our high school days, but if a good football match on "Viasat" falls on a Friday night or Saturday, we watch it together a few times a year. Later, while delving into the enjoyment of substances created by the barley fermentation process, we often "philosophise" about deeply global themes. Including how much we love nature and all living things. And so, one day, one of the mates – named Viesturs – suddenly starts "pestering" us to sign a petition on "manabalss.lv". Birds must be saved because, you see, 50,000 of them perish every year due to logging! Holy cow, 50,000! At first glance, it seems like a huge amount, those villains who don't think about animals at all for the sake of their mercantile interests!
We reached the point of using rude epithets, which I will not reasonably quote. But then, the touch of Mūdzis's tail, brushing against my leg, brought me back to reality (the animal, although wild by nature, still craves the affection of his family in the evenings, which is never denied to him, even by my otherwise stern-faced wife). I began to tell the company about my beast's appetite, and one of my friends, being a numbers guy and an accountant, says – give me the paper, let's calculate.
Well, how long do birds stay in Latvia? Not counting owls, pigeons, and other overwintering birds, it comes to about 200 days a year. May the experts who know better forgive me, but that was our assumption that evening as we loosely browsed through a few entries found on Google. By the way, we also found a short summary of a study conducted in the USA, stating that cats eat about 30 per cent of their victims, bring only a quarter of their catch home, and leave the rest where they caught it.
The bloodlust of Mūdzis, sleeping in a cute little ball at my feet, began to seem quite frightening! The discussion turned to how many birds he ultimately kills in a year. Recalling all the faeces collected amidst my wife's grumbling, the regurgitated balls of fur, and the feathers secretly removed in the mornings, I allowed that it was at least one a day, if not more. My friends (who don't have to live in the same house as Mūdzis) forced me to tone down the estimates. Therefore, we assumed 100.
Surprising! It may be that my Mūdzis is some kind of extraordinary cat Chikatilo, but I assume I am not the only owner of such a specimen – there are countless cats running around quite freely in the countryside and cities. And it turns out that 500 such cats are enough to cause as much damage to the bird population as the logging mentioned in the petition. As we later read, intrigued by the numbers, during the course of the evening in some marginal domestic bird-related blog, some foreign studies indicate that cats are the main human-caused reason for bird mortality. It may be that the evening was late, it may be that our judgement had become too superficial, but even the petition's ardent defender Viesturs became deeply thoughtful.
I also remembered my recent epithets and felt sincerely ashamed myself. Are the offences, for which we were just ready to dump crap on the industry that supports the Latvian economy, really equivalent to the appetite of 500 cats and the evidence found in their faeces? Some time has passed, and with the help of Google, I have looked into the situation more broadly. What can I really do for the birds, acting proportionately, instead of signing stupid appeals about banning something (why is there no petition for the mass liquidation of all cats???)? Mūdzis's life is ruined now, but my wife is happy and complains less (that only increases her beauty) – I have hung a small bell on the beast's collar. And what do you know, he has started eating my dry kibble! Chicken flavour, the old glutton!