Get real, feral cats are pests
Get real, feral cats are pests
Richard Rogers (“Feral cats are God’s creatures, too,” March 22) and all of those who support AdvoCats and choose to feed feral cats are undoubtedly kindhearted people.
However, their argument that feral cats “are all God’s creatures” is at best myopic. Feral cats prey upon avian babies and put pregnant mothers and human babies at risk of contracting Toxoplasmosis. Aren’t birds and people “God’s creatures, too?”
In fact, mosquitoes, centipedes, roof rats, cockroaches, bottle flies and a whole catalogue of vermin are also “God’s creatures.” Does that mean we should be feeding them, too?
On this island, because of human irresponsibility and the lack of predators, feral cats have become pests, and we need to become more realistic about the role they play in our ecosystem. Spaying and neutering the ones we trap simply isn’t putting a large enough dent into their burgeoning population. Instead of allowing them to “suffer and starve to death,” perhaps we should be gently putting them permanently to sleep and taking them out of their misery while protecting our birds and babies.
Kerrill J. Kephart
Kamuela
The other side of banning blowers
Don Nelson’s letter, “Ban leaf (dust) blowers”, March 23, concluded with the statement: “If we banned leaf blowers, everyone except the leaf blower sellers would love us for it.”
I don’t think the retailers are going to be affected much, because the ban he’s addressing is commercial landscape maintenance businesses. Most sales of power tools is to the private citizen. I know who’s going to be affected most, and probably very ticked off — the condo owner who sees his maintenance fees increase because the maintenance service is going to have to increase his fees for the extra time in sweeping and raking.
Picture, for example, the crew at our Lanihau Shopping Center, raking and sweeping all the flowers and leaves from the parking lots each morning. My conservative guess is that it would take them several hours to clean it with brooms and rakes, whereas, with the blower, perhaps an hour. I’ve owned my own landscape maintenance business, before being burnt out and moving onto retail sales in Walmart and Lowes garden centers.
I’m still in touch with the active maintenance businesses around town. I know the hurdles and complaints they deal with daily. Some make a considerable investment in the industrial size vacuum cleaners (such as the “Billygoat”). But they have issues with dust, also.
It seems if someone is intolerant about something, they want to ban it. Can we ban paying taxes? We all talk about how detrimental cigarettes smoke is in public places, and how we’re so intolerant of the rubbish from tossed butts. We can’t ban it, because there’s too much money being garnered from the taxes. Maybe maintenance fees will be so high, the complainers will just tolerate the blowers for the hour or so.
Dennis Lawson
Kalaoa