The Vindication of Marc Maron

Regular listeners to Air America's Morning Sedition program have been hearing for nearly a year about the Saga of the Feral Cats. It seems that following the death of his female cat Butch last year, Maron found a cat with kittens in his neighborhood and brought them in. I believe he had the mom cat spayed and released, and one of the kittens proved to be untameable, so he gave that one to a guy across the street who wanted a mouser, and that cat is now living in Brooklyn. But barely a day goes by that Maron doesn't expound on his latest exploits in miniature lion-taming.

I know how nerve-racking that can be. I've done trap/spay/release, and our calico cat, Jenny, spent three months under a chair after having been a stray for over a year. Socializing a feral cat is no easy task, and yet feral cat colonies can be a real problem.

Just off the coast of Negril, Jamaica, is a small island known as Booby Cay. Tour boats take tourists out there for picnics. Unfortunately, much of the trash from said picnics is left out there, and where one year there were about six feral cats prowling the island, by the following year, there were literally hundreds. Once the chicken bones were added to the pile, cats would emerge from every nook and cranny of the pile, every tree, every bush. Now, I love cats, but seeing all those cats gave ME nightmares.

Over 12 years one unspayed female cat with all her unspayed female offspring can reasonably be expected to be responsible for over 3200 kittens if there is no human intervention. Once feral kittens are six months old, they are virtually unsocializable. Not even the most devoted animal lover is going to deny that unchecked feral cat colonies are a good thing. Animal groups nationwide offer trap/spay/release programs, which have proven to be more effective than mass killing at permanently reducing feral cat colonies. However, someone forgot to mention that in Wisconsin, where a proposal to legalize the shooting of feral cats seems, thankfully, to be headed nowhere fast. It isn't so much the killing of cats that's so appalling; I've been known to ponder emulating the guy who wants $50K to not eat his rabbit myself by putting up a web site called Savemaggie.com, especially when the eponymous Maggie comes up on the bed at 5 AM and yowls in my ear. But what's appalling is that "Outdoor enthusiasts approved the proposal 6,830 to 5,201 at Monday's spring hearings of the group."

Is that what so-called "outdoorsmen" have been reduced to? Hunting cats? Have deer and bears and rabbits and squirrels been depleted that much? Is this now what qualifies as sport?