This blog posting represents the views of the author, David Fosberry. Those opinions may change over time. They do not constitute an expert legal or financial opinion.

If you have comments on this blog posting, please email me .

The Opinion Blog is organised by threads, so each post is identified by a thread number ("Major" index) and a post number ("Minor" index). If you want to view the index of blogs, click here to download it as an Excel spreadsheet.

Click here to see the whole Opinion Blog.

To view, save, share or refer to a particular blog post, use the link in that post (below/right, where it says "Show only this post").

Kids Killing Cats!

Posted on 20th April 2023

Show only this post
Show all posts in this thread (Stupid People).

There are so many issues with this report on the BBC.

New Zealand has a lot of problems with invasive species such as dogs, cats, rats, mice etc. The invaders kill native species such as kiwis.

To combat the problem, each year there is a competition to hunt and kill feral cats. In the latest competition, a new category was introduced for children of 14 years and younger. This resulted in an outcry, and the category has been withdrawn.

The feral cats are killed by shooting them. New Zealand is very much a nation of "hunting, shooting and fishing".

The backlash against children shooting the wild cats was on the grounds of animal cruelty. Also cited by New Zealand's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was the fact that neither children nor adults would be able to distinguish between feral cats and wandering pets.

The issues that I have with this bizarre competition include:

  1. The idea of kids of 14 years and younger going around shooting animals, presumably with a rifle, is terrifying. No matter what the rules of the competition are, and what the law may be, some of this hunting is certainly going to happen unsupervised. My own experience with my kids is that, at 14, they were not mature enough to deal with killing animals without negative psychological impacts (and my kids grew up on a farm, where the death of the farm animals was a normal and planned part of life).
  2. The grounds cited by the animal rights group, that even adults will not be able to distinguish between feral cats and pets is not that strong of an argument. It was true before the children's category of the competition was added. It could be seen as extreme, and cruel, but New Zealand is dealing with an emergency, with many native species under threat of extinction (and some already extinct) due to invasive predators. The shouting should be long over, on this point.
  3. The annual competition runs from mid-April to the end of June. If the "owner" of a pet cat is worried about their fur baby being killed, then keep them in the house for those 2½ months of each year. Such people letting their pets wander is what caused this crisis in the first place.
  4. There is not really any such thing as a domesticated cat. Cats have adapted to have a cushy life, but are in no sense domesticated.