Have you smelled the fear of cats trapped in dingy, dirty traps by pest control companies? They cry for fear of their lives and it makes your hair stand and your heart frustrated and anxious.
The Holland-Bukit Panjang Town Council of Singapore has reverted to aggressive cat 'removal' to appease complaints from literally a few aggressively animal-hating (i.e. shouting and insulting animal carers)residents. I do not use 'culling' because it typically refers to selective removal of cats with biologically 'inferior' traits so that the other cats flourish.
Cleaners appointed by the town council to do this dirty job have locked kittens in electrical rooms to starve them to death. A shipyard worker and his daughter rescued one kitty out after they realized the mommy cat kept crying anxiously outside at an electrical room for her baby inside.
Another one was seen being strangled by a worker. Others have just been culled by pest control companies in traps so dirty that didn't matter since the cats wouldn't be in them anymore. One community cat who had an ID/microchip was put down by AVA...so what's the point of the ID if you don't bother checking?
A neighbor contacted the President of the Cat Welfare Society a few days back, and the cleaners in our area has been changing every day ever since. While the cleaner used to say that he was appointed by the town council to do so, now he only said "I don't know! I don't know!"
The trouble with such indiscriminate killing is, the cats that are complained about are not caught. The cats who are disruptive and pee to mark territory are the street-smart ones that avoid people. Instead, the people-friendly ones get caught as they are the easiest targets. In this aspect, cat killers are not different from cat abusers. Still, the complaints keep coming in because the territorial, dominant cat of the colony is still not caught - or even neutered!
Wasn't Singapore encouraged to convert stray cats into community cats just a few months ago? In Bukit Panjang, this has BECOME not true even though it has been for the past 5 years. Here, the only cats that can exist are domestic ones - all community cats MUST be put down.
Moral of the story: how long more can you go on appeasing the few, unrepresentative animal-hating people? And what has happened to us who live in the cities? Have we grown so used to concrete prisons and sterility that any nature that is not domesticated is inconvenient and abhorrent?
"I've been worrying that we all live our lives in the confines of fear" - Ben Howard
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June 11 update:
Great news! Holland Bukit Panjang Town Council decides to stop 'removing' cats from my estate and is now working with Cat Welfare Society and cat carers. It's also amazing to see how fast the person in-charge changed in his disposition towards cats, so fast it seemed unconvincingly...superficial. Anyway, you can read the awesome news here.
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