Audubon Society Official Encourages Poisoning Stray Cats With Tylenol. Sign This Petition:

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Please sign the petition at the link below and pass it on:

http://www.alleycat.org/page.aspx?pid=376

From an email I received:

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It’s beyond unconscionable.

A high-ranking representative of the National Audubon Society just published a major newspaper editorial calling on the public to kill millions of cats by poisoning them with Tylenol.

In the Orlando Sentinel, Ted Williams, editor-at-large for Audubon Magazine, advised readers that Tylenol is “a completely selective feral-cat poison.”

This isn’t just cruel and irresponsible, but also illegal and sickening. Poisoning is a slow and cruel death for cats. It’s just disgusting to think that anyone from a national animal advocacy organization could advocate poisoning cats. Reckless doesn’t even cover it. It’s a dangerous new low.

We have to respond immediately.

Please join Alley Cat Allies and send an email directly to the National Audubon Society CEO David Yarnold and Chairman B. Holt Thrasher calling on them to denounce this shameful, hateful article. Mr. Williams must be removed from his office immediately.
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Another site's take:

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...All of which pales in comparison to the rhetoric unleashed by Audubon magazine’s editor-at-large, Ted Williams, in his own op-ed, published in today’s Orlando Sentinel.

...While it may be true that “toxic effects are rapid,” I have to question just how humane it is. But here’s a better question: Why in the world was such a recommendation* published in a mainstream newspaper?

I don’t imagine Williams (whose 2009 article for Audubon was only slightly less bombastic than his latest rant) is bothered by such things, though, just as he’s apparently unperturbed by the numerous holes in the Smithsonian/USFWS paper—which, like Temple and Fenwick, he likes to call a “study.” Indeed, it’s difficult to tell what Williams finds out-of-bounds in fueling the ongoing witch-hunt against free-roaming cats. Witness, for example, his bizarre reference to FIV as “AIDS-like.”

Who exactly is Williams trying to appeal to here?

On the other hand, and as I suggested in my comment to his op-ed, I suppose Williams and his colleagues need all the help they can get, struggling for relevance in a society increasingly disdainful of their culture of (publicly funded, scientifically indefensible) killing.

http://www.voxfelina.com/2013/03/audubon-editor-suggests-poisoning-feral-cats/
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The opinion piece by the Audubon Society guy who suggests killing stray cats with Tylenol:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/os-ed-feral-cats-031413-20130313,0,7201829.story

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Petition link doesn't work.

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3. Edited with new link.

For some reason the direct link to the petition would come up as an error page, so I'm just linking to the site's page with the link to the petition.

[Feline_Aficianado]

13. Tylenol Kills Birds too?

Raccoons, Possums, Dogs, Birds all help themselves to some of the food I give out local ferals. Including eating with them like dinner partners. How many other critters could be poisoned or permanently harmed by ingestion of such a thing?

[Lionessa]

2. That's got to be a joke remark. How in the hell does one catch a feral cat in order to

get the tylenol in them. It's not like cats feral or not, will eat them freely, and if one uses in an outdoor food trap type thing, any animal could get the "poison". Or conversely, a cat might eat around even ground up tylenol or not eat enough to be poisoned. Just seems really a bizarre idea.
I see that folks are responding as though the guy was serious, but seriously it's a ridiculous recommendation if he was indeed serious.

[cyberswede]

14. It doesn't take much...

The feline toxic dosage is 50-100 mg/kg. One regular-strength tablet (325 mg) may be toxic to cats, and a second could be lethal. One "extra strength" (500 mg) tablet can result in toxicosis.

https://www.addl.purdue.edu/newsletters/1998/spring/acet.shtml

I can't believe anyone would suggest such a thing, let alone in a newspaper.

[Arugula Latte]

4. I signed that earlier today...Big mistake Audubon. Big, big mistake.

This guy is going to catch hell. He sounds completely unhinged.

This is not doing his organization nor his beloved birds any favors, either.

[KoKo]

5. Is it out on Twitter yet? That's faster than a Petition...

If anyone has a Twitter account...please post it there. I don't or I would do it myself.

This is awful....

[Liberalynn]

27. I signed the petition put it on my Twitter page and Facebook

but I don't have a lot of followers on either.

[forestpath]

6. I belong to the Audubon Society and let them know I'll be canceling my membership unless

they publicly disavow this jerks' remarks.

[Aerows]

7. Awful!

My cat was originally an abandoned stray. I started feeding her, and she has become the sweetest cat I've ever had. Sure, she ate birds before, but that was because she was starving to death. I doubt she would have made it through the winter had I not started to care for her.

This tactic would have deprived me of a beautiful, loving pet (who stays indoors now far more often than not and is too lazy to hunt anymore).

And what about people whose pets accidentally get out and are poisoned? Some people will use ANY excuse to be cruel, and this just adds fuel to the flames by making them think they are doing the right thing.

What a horrible, horrible suggestion from an apparently heartless and empty-headed individual.

EDIT: I signed the petition and gave them a piece of my mind alright, and not just the form letter. This is absolutely sickening. Fuck the Audobon Institute if they keep this idiotic, cruel lunatic in any way associated with them.

[Aerows]

8. Oh, and ...

kickity kick and recommend.

[KoKo]

9. Keep Kicked...Get on Twitter...

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10. Somebody needs to Tweet it.

I don't do Twitter myself.

[Rhiannon12866]

22. I did!

[REP]

11. Audobon killed so many birds for his paintings, the .410 is nicknamed 'the Audobon'

[Arugula Latte]

12. Kick

[XemaSab]

15. K&R

Keep your cats indoors!

[LadyHawkAZ]

16. Signed and kicked.

[pnwmom]

17. So Williams is wrong -- granted. But what is the solution to feral cats

and their decimating of wild bird populations?

[eShirl]

19. generally it's capturing and spaying or neutering

[pnwmom]

20. But the problem with that is that one male un-neutered cat can still produce

hundreds of kittens over its life.


http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/os-ed-feral-cats-031413-20130313,0,7201829.story


Feral cats are maintained in the wild by a dangerous, cruel, and illegal practice called trap, neuter and return. After these unfortunate animals are re-abandoned, they are regularly fed, which draws more feral cats and encourages more re-abandonment.

One intact male can impregnate dozens of females, so trying to reduce cat populations by TNR is like, well, herding cats.
It's dangerous — because feral cats are reservoirs for disease. Three studies reveal that 62 percent to 80 percent carry toxoplasmosis. Feral cats are now the most common domestic rabies vector. In Florida, where rabid cats attack people, the state Department of Health warns that TNR "is not tenable on public health grounds because of the persistent threat posed to communities from injury and disease." A TNR colony at Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., was removed because rabid cats were biting children.

SNIP

An otherwise literate professor who helped maintain the colony at the University of Hawaii bragged to me that TNR had worked because over the past decade, 80 percent of the feral cats on campus had been sterilized. In the same breath he estimated the current population at 400.

[FarCenter]

23. Feral tom cats keep the kitten population down. They should not be neutered.

[pnwmom]

24. Except there are feral tom cats and they're not keeping the population down. n/t

[FarCenter]

38. Where I grew up, most farms had barn cats - there were very few house cats

There were never a whole lot of barn cats because roving tom cats would often kill the litters of kittens.

They are predators, and if not fed and left to themselves will balance their population with available resources.

Stop feeding and sheltering them; stop neutering them; they will reach a low equilibrium population.

[alarimer]

30. But it doesn't stop them killing birds and other animals while they live.

And pet cats are nearly as bad, because their thoughtless owners insist that they need to go outside. They do not.

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26. ASPCA says Trap-Neuter-Return works.

It, among other sites I've read, claim that cats prefer rodents, and that pesticides are bigger killers of birds.

http://www.aspca.org/adoption/feral-cats-faq.aspx#tnr

[pnwmom]

29. This is all I can see that they say:

"Don't Feral Cats Kill Birds?
"While feral cats do kill some birds, they prefer to kill rodents. Other issues, such as the decline of natural habitat and use of pesticides, have a greater negative impact on bird populations."


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They may prefer to kill rodents, but that doesn't mean they don't kill a significant number of wild birds. I'd like to see some actual research on this, though, if the ASPCA could point to it.

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33. On TNR, they also say:

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What Is Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR)?

TNR is the method of humanely trapping feral cats, having them spayed or neutered and vaccinated against rabies, and then returning them to their colony to live out their lives. TNR also involves a colony caretaker who provides food and adequate shelter and monitors the cats' health. TNR has been shown to be the least costly, as well as the most efficient and humane way of stabilizing feral cat populations.

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I'd also like to see some studies done on the effect of feral cats on bird populations, but I have read elsewhere that it is minimal compared to some claims to the contrary.

If all the cats in a colony were TNR'd, the colony, over a few years, would vansih.

The alternative is removing them, via poison or other means, and doesn't work, according the ASPCA:

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Does Eradication Work?

Eradication, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a feral cat colony, by whatever method, almost always leads to the “vacuum effect”—either new cats flock to the vacated area to exploit whatever food source attracted the original inhabitants, or survivors breed and their descendants are more cautious around threats. Simply put, eradication is only a temporary fix that sacrifices animals' lives unnecessarily, yet yields no positive or beneficial return.
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[pnwmom]

35. Here's a summary of some research:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/magazine/02cats-v--birds-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

In the past decade, at least a dozen studies published in top scientific journals like Biological Conservation, Journal of Zoology and Mammal Review have chronicled the problem of cat predation of small mammals and birds. The takeaway is clear: cats are a growing environmental concern because they are driving down some native bird populations — on islands, to be sure, but also in ecologically sensitive continental areas. At hot spots along the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf Coast, cat predation is a growing threat to shorebirds and long-distance migrants. And as wild habitat becomes more fragmented by human development, even some inland species are under increasing pressure from both house cats and their feral cousins.

In southern New Jersey, feral cats are killing migrating shorebirds, including a number of endangered species. In the scrubland canyons of Southern California, researchers have found that where coyote populations decline, the nonbird-eating carnivores are often replaced by domestic cats. Cat predation then leads to a decline in the abundance of native birds like the California quail, the greater roadrunner and the cactus wren.

On the big island of Hawaii, the problem approaches crisis proportions. The feral cats of Mauna Loa, the island’s active volcano, are decimating Hawaiian petrels, a seabird that nests in the volcano’s lava crevices and takes off on foraging runs to the Aleutian Islands — a round trip of more than 4,500 miles.

Several years ago, Fern Duvall, a wildlife biologist with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, compared two Hawaiian islands: one with a high feral-cat population, the other without any cats at all. He looked at fledging rates of seabirds, which measures the percentage of chicks that successfully leave the nest. On the cat island, only 13 percent of the chicks made it out alive. On the cat-free island, 83 percent survived.

SNIP

[FarCenter]

18. Interesting -- apparently ibuprofen and some other NSAIDs would also work.

[Rhiannon12866]

21. K&R! This is horrible! Signed and passing this on!

I feed feral cats on a regular basis and brought in my last pet cat from outdoors with the advice of Alley Cat Allies, wonderful organization!!!

[hack89]

25. A "cat" fight between bird lovers and cat lovers.

great

[MuseRider]

28. And why are there stray cats?

Irresponsible people but I don't see anyone suggesting we poison them.

[NaturalHigh]

31. Idiots (and mean people) abound.

They tend to breed too. There's a reason I like cats better than a lot of people.

[arely staircase]

32. radical pro-bird extremists must be stopped

[MadrasT]

34. Thanks for the link. Happy to sign.

These idiots are disgusting and this was inexcusable.

[Warpy]

36. If it's true, it's beyond stupid because Tylenol poisons

all sorts of small animals including the raptors I'm sure Mr. Audubon wants to proliferate.

Yes, feral cats do quite a bit of damage. However, programs to trap, neuter, and then release do a lot of good. Feral cats also keep rodent populations in check. Remove them completely and you have a big problem.

[shanti]

37. thanks for posting this

i'm passing it on to my feral cat (and bird loving) mother. she is a big supporter of TNR and feeds several ferals. i'm sure she'll sign this petition and pass it on.

sounds like this "idea" comes from intense cat haters, and there are a lot of them. here's the thing: how the hell do you tell if a cat is a pet just wandering or is a feral anyway?? i had to bring my indoor/outdoor cat inside after he became sick, from what i don't know. he's ok now, but he's strictly indoors now (and he hates it!)

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39. Well, I'm gonna kick this one more time, good cause and all...