Re: Cats should be allowed to be cats, Letters (July 31)
Besides the fact that small birds eat millions of mosquitos and other pests, they are important to our ecosystem and some people actually enjoy them.
Small animals scavenge and keep our world and local areas clean of human garbage (thrown aside rather than into a container) and other natural garbage which occurs every day.
They are also very important to our ecosystem. I can tell you why you need to keep your animals under control.
Your neighbours, of which I may be one, are really tired of getting our gardens and grounds dug up and dumped in constantly.
I have a vegetable garden as well as flower gardens which I have to cover up and constrain with netting to control the cats in my neighbourhood.
For some I really don’t want my vegetable garden pooped in! Now that I have gone to all that work, they get tired of trying to get into the garden and they poop all over my lawn. Obviously I am the one that has to clean it up and you don’t have to.
We also have a deck with some comfortable chairs on it that the cats of neighbourhood (probably including yours) have decided are a haven for rainy days and rainy nights.
They have sprayed all over everything on my deck to the point where we have had to power wash several times during the first months that we moved here. We have now closed the deck in so that we can lock the cats out overnight. Why do we have to go to all this extra trouble and expense to keep your “pets” out of my face.
But you are insistent that your cat must be free. My dog is leashed at all times when it is out of my yard.
I clean up after my dog as it is my duty to do so as an owner of a pet and I am happy to do so as I am a responsible owner.
Even if it was not a bylaw, I would do so anyways as I do not feel my friends and neighbours need to clean up after me or my pet.
I hear all the time, cat owners whine and cry because their animals “disappear” when they are preyed on by coyotes or struck down on the road by vehicles.
You are the problem, not the coyote that continue to come into the area for the easy pickings or the car drivers that cannot crawl around in case your cat runs out in front of them.
Robert Leon,
Hope, B.C.