http://www.thestar.com/opinion/edito...ousy-roommates
Mallick: Feral cats make lousy roommates
Published On Wed Feb 23 2011EmailPrint (1)
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By Heather Mallick
Star Columnist
The shaggy coyotes eating the snarling feral cats at Bluffers Park in Scarborough would look at you with bewilderment if you told them they were embodying the neuroses of the cat-crazy humans fighting over them.
Who am I kidding? Of course they wouldn’t. Coyotes don’t look at anyone except to assess their taste and chewiness. The stringy cat lovers shouting at them to leave kitty alone don’t interest them, but our children certainly do, those tiny soft-fleshed two-legged comestibles, yelp, yum. Coyotes attack humans. Coyotes in cities should be exported or given the quiet death by needle that Americans favour for their Death Row citizens. They shouldn’t be in Toronto at all.
Neither should feral cats, which eat songbirds and yowl for a living. These are wild cats, not mild cats, who don’t like living at home being pestered for love by the people you’ll meet on a Facebook site called Scarborough Bluffs Feral Cats. They patrol the cat colony through the coldest of nights, fending off coyotes with “sticks, whistles and flashlights” (the Star’s reporting on this little battlefield has been stellar) while radiating love at frankly hostile wildcats and bringing them little Styrofoam seats.
Nice people named Betty are determined to extract affection from loner felines to whom they have given sexy masculine names like Reberg, Zidane and Cheshire, “the Brad Pitt of cats!!!!” Exclamation marks dot the page, always a bad sign, and there’s a lot of “I LOOOVE Chubba Wubba!!!”
Zidane sneers. He is just not into humans.
A 2009 documentary called Cat Ladies: When cats mean “meow” to you than people, tried to explain the emotional propulsion. Cat rescuers (in fairness, not necessarily the Bluffers) take in cats “later in life, often after a failed marriage, the loss of a job, death of a relative, or the estrangement of children.” I get this. We all need love. When humans fail us, cat rescue makes sense.
But not these cats.
The Bluffers have created a hierarchy of worth, a Rock Paper Scissors game minus the keen intellectual combat: Cat beats people beats coyotes. The problem is that the creatures that matter most — human children — don’t rate. In 2009, when coyotes killed a small dog in the Beach, frantic parents were berated for letting their toddlers play outdoors, and the wily coyote mysteriously managed to elude capture. Sanity died in the face of a hierarchy created by coyote people.
The question of hierarchy arose in a parallel universe Tuesday when some Halton parents complained that the public school board was “assessing” students unfairly for classes, meaning that gifted kids were being tested ahead of special-needs kids. The board, with a limited budget and a small staff, sighed and explained that all testing was moving at the usual rate.
It’s faster and cheaper to assess gifted kids. You test them. Smart is smart, smarter is gifted. Get it done and place the kids in the right classes.
But special-needs kids are not a unit. It takes time and money to assess and place them. Still parents reacted angrily, calling it a “two-tiered system” and coming close to using the dread word “elitism.”
The poisonous need for hierarchy has popped up again, like a buboe. No one’s saying gifted kids are better than special-needs kids. But they need different things.
Equally, no one should say feral cats are better than coyotes. But the cat people are saying that, deaf to reason and to the argument that neither animal mixes well with humans.
Something human there is that loves a hierarchy, even when there isn’t one. It is born of the insecurity that lurks in everyone — I always imagine it as a small bean-shaped gland producing hurt feelings — and it makes people lash out. Today, the gifted kids are braced for extra bullying, and coyotes are prowling the Bluffs with their noses out of joint.
See, I’m anthropomorphizing again. Coyotes are prowling the Bluff sniffing for human child meat. They’re coyotes, not itsy-bitsy little wildcats.