Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Open season on cats?

Jonah Goldberg raises the question of whether to permit hunting of feral cats.

His point is that cats kill more birds than pesticides, without doing as much good, and I wished I had access to an article by Chuck Bolsinger, who writers for the East County Gazette out of Boring, Oregon (that's a place, not an adjective).

Anyway, Chuck made a case that cats kill rodents and -- because they're a larger proportion of the bird population -- "weed" birds such as starlings and English sparrows more than native songbirds.

It was done with humor, level-headedness, sharp observation and informative detail, as all of Chuck's nature pieces are.

Let Wisconsin legalize the hunting of feral cats and tell us what the outcome is. In the meantime, Chuck's columns are available on-line, and as much as I like Jonah Goldberg's humorous political commentary, Chuck is a better nature writer.

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