Who says there’s no good news these days?
On Thursday, the Australian Federal Government announced a very new kind of war – one against cats. Gregory Andrews, the country’s Threatened Species Commissioner, claims that feral cats are the “single biggest threat” to Australia’s mammals. “Of the 29 mammals that we’ve lost to extinction, feral cats are implicated in 28 out of those 29 extinctions,” Andrews told an Australian radio program of the new initiative. “It has been a problem that’s been neglected. So feral cats have spread across our country over the last 200 years.”
At the Melbourne Zoo on Thursday, Australian Environment Minister Greg Hunt unveiled the five-year plan, which is aimed at protecting the country’s native bird and mammal populations, many faced with imminent extinction.
According to People, at least two million of the beasts are marked for death by 2020. Cat lovers are. predictably, outraged, but it’s about time somebody did something about the disgusting invasive species, which is responsible for the mass destruction of native birds and other wildlife in Australia (and everywhere else, for that matter), as well carrying a brain parasite that infects humans and makes them nuts.
“Cat ownership in childhood has now been reported in three studies to be significantly more common in families in which the child is later diagnosed with schizophrenia or another serious mental illness,” E. Fuller Torrey, of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, and Dr. Robert Yolken, of Stanley Laboratory of Developmental Neurovirology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a news release.
Like this?
Okay, that viral video is apparently a parody, but you get the idea. As a piece in Vox recently put it:
Compared to dogs, scientists have found, cats don’t seem to have the same sort of emotional attachment to their owners, and show genuine affection far less often than you might think. Further, they’re an environmental disaster, killing literally billions of birds in the US every year — many of them from endangered species.Most alarmingly (and as explained in this 2012 Atlantic article), there’s compelling evidence that a parasite often found in cat feces can subtly change people’s personalities over time, increasing rates of neuroticism, schizophrenia, and perhaps even suicide.In other words, research is telling us that cats are selfish, unfeeling, environmentally devastating creatures.
Plus, should you die suddenly at home, your cat will eat you in a heartbeat.
Friends don’t let friends get cats.
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