If you're a cat, you have to love it when evening rolls around. I say "love it" because if you are like most urban cats, you know that sundown is followed by bedtime for humans. Time, in other words, to let the cat out for the night.
Humans, you see, are funny animals. Bestowed -- cursed perhaps -- with a sense of morality, they feel a certain responsibility for their pets. Many, therefore, would never think of letting their beloved pets out during daylight hours. Too many cars. Too many dogs. Too many dangers for a defenseless pet to face alone.
Nighttime, though, is a different story. Locked safely inside our warm suburban dens, the night looks harmless to humans peering through three panes of energy efficient glass. No cars. No movement. No obvious dangers lurking about the lamp lit streets.
So down goes the sun and out goes the cat. It is a thoughtless act, a habit re-enacted with ritualistic precision in millions of homes across North America every night. Turn off the television. Let the cat out. Lock the door and go to bed.
We do this, you see, because we think that we are being kind. For whatever reason, most people think that it is cruel to keep an animal locked up in a house.
Never mind that the Federation of Humane Societies warns that letting our cats out shortens their lives by half. Never mind that the American SPCA advises against us not to let cats out at night. Never mind that the Jesuits see vet bills as a pit stop on the road to hell.
In the backs of our minds, we humans sense that domestic cats have a primeval wild side yearning to roam free. So down goes the sun and out goes the cat.
Cats, of course, are not merely innocent victims here. They are not simply bystanders. They are in fact complicit in this conspiracy of ignorance. Let your cat roam once overnight and you will know exactly what I mean.
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Let your cat out one night and it wants out every night. Let it out once and there it will be -- the moment the sun goes down -- winding itself around your ankles, back up, tail held high, shouting "Let me out, Mom. Please, let me out." What kind of cruel, heartless soul can say no to begging as sweet as this? So down goes the sun and out goes the cat.
This is the moment that cats must love most. As the door of quiet domesticity closes behind them, a new world of savage darkness opens before them. It is a place of danger and exhilaration. The cat plunges into the night with all of the excitement and anticipation of a boy sent out to play with a loaded gun.
Mice, voles, shrews, rats. Rabbits, raccoons, birds and bats. Hunting, creeping, pouncing, killing. The nighttime world is crack for cats -- and it's not long before they are completely and hopelessly addicted.
In 1996, John Coleman, a wildlife ecologist and his partner, Dr. Stanley A. Temple, estimated that cats in Wisconsin -- an American state with an urban/rural ratio similar to Alberta's -- kill 39 million birds and animals every year in that state alone.
In other parts of the article (published in the Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine) they cited still other studies that concluded that 65% of all urban cats are allowed to roam and that the average urban cat makes 28 kills per year.
Put these estimates together with Calgary's 1998 census numbers and the picture of what is happening on our streets after dark begins to look a lot Sylvester and Tweety meets Quentin Tarantino. In fact, pet cats in Calgary are killing an estimated 1.5 million small animals every year.
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But wait a minute. Before you get too riled up about domestic cats preying on sleeping birds, keep in mind that cats are not the only predators in this complicated little ecosystem we call home. Alter the time and place a bit, give the food chain a little tug and the perspective changes completely.
For every few thousand times we see a cat prowling through the bushes, for every few thousand times we see his measured step, his eyes narrowed to murderous slits, his muscles coiled and ready to pounce, for every few thousand times this story plays out in Calgary backyards it has a slightly different ending.
Moving softly on padded feet across a leaf littered lawn, eyes narrowed and welded on the silhouette of a sleeping sparrow, his muscles tremble as he coils to pounce. Suddenly, pain explodes across his back. Razor sharp talons cut through the fleshy gaps between his ribs. His lungs begin to fill with his own warm blood.
You never see it. You never see the light fade from his eyes as the Great Horned Owl lifts his limp body silently skyward. Nor do you see the terror in a cat"s eyes as it is circled by a pack of growling coyotes in the darkness of your alley. You don"t hear its last pathetic meow before powerful jaws snap shut and shake your cat to death.
All you hear as you reach for the door handle in a fog of habit is "please, Mom, please let me out", because the city streets look so safe through three panes of tempered glass.
© Brent Johner. Originally published in the Calgary Herald, October 2003. Reprint rights available.
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