Do For Your Pets What They Won't Do For You

I once picked up a Ruth Rendell novel for the cover. Someone I trust derided the writing with “all her books are like ‘this’”. They weren’t wrong, but I’m glad I read that book because *plot twist spoiler time* halfway through a main character is murdered. The suspects are glaringly obvious, yet their involvement cannot be proven and they get away with it, seemingly forever. At the end of the book, the murder victim’s secret admirer finds the murder weapon in her boyfriend’s possessions. AND THAT HIT LIKE A SACK OF BRICKS BECAUSE Rendell had flatly informed the reader that the boyfriend was jealous of this crush on the other character, and later showed that the bf was a crude, abusive person. But the buildup and the intrigue and the way the boyfriend was portrayed as a background character all made you just FORGET that he was an equally viable suspect. It was an extremely believable plot twist and made you feel so silly for missing the plainly stated clues.

Example - Mephisto sits down to a meeting with the Grigori with a grunt. Amaimon loudly asks:

"Are the hemorrhoids bad again, big brother?"

There are lots of reasons why I don’t support Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) programs in Australia, and neither does our RSPCA.

TNR programs aim to stop a cat population from growing, in the hopes that it will shrink over time as the cats die a ‘natural’ death. Firstly, a ‘stable feral cat population’ isn’t an appropriate goal for most of Australia’s ecosystems, eradication of feral and roaming cats is, as much as that’s harsh to say. Secondly, a ‘natural’ death is without human intervention, and that’s not as pleasant as it sounds, especially in a country full of venomous things and very large birds of prey.

TNR programs can only work, to the degree that they do in the first place, if you couple it with public education about responsible pet ownership and low cost desexing of owned pets. It can never work on its own because the cat population will be continuously topped up from the owned cat population.

Given we have limited resources, we generally put most of those resources towards public education, desexing vouchers for those on low income, and trap and euthanise or shoot feral cats.

Sounds harsh. But our feral cats are often outright dangerous to humans, and if released they continue to eat wildlife. A desexed cat needs to eat less and will occupy territory that a younger, non-desexed cat now can’t have, potentially reducing their reproductive ability which is why some places still do it. But these animals are generally not just housecats that are ‘lost’. They’ve been adapted to our environment for multiple generations and we shouldn’t have any of them, especially with their ability to spread toxoplasma through our wildlife.

In suburban scenarios, for example where we have lots of factories, there are local council incentives for factories and businesses to take ownership of local cats they’d been feeding, whether for company or rodent control. These cats get desexed and microchipped, with the understanding that the business is responsible if it’s sick or injured and needs vet care. They often don’t get much care, but coming in for euthanasia beats dying slowly in a corner somewhere.

For the amount of time, money, professional services and effort we would need to apply to run TNRs successfully, we could better allocate that to targeting the owned cat population and removing the feral cats as much as possible. It’s tempting to think ‘all cats must be saved because they’re cats’ but the scale of the problem is just too big for that sort of one on one solution.

People also like to feed ‘stray’ cats because it makes them feel good inside, even though they never take responsibility for the rest of the cat’s health and welfare. Just giving an animal food is not enough to be caring for it, in my opinion. I find it really quite foreign that TNR seems to be such a big thing in the USA, but I guess you already have native feline predators. We don’t.

‘Feral’ cats in my experience are either semi-adapted wild things which will continue wreaking damage on the environment, or they’re really housecats out of their depth that desperately need a human custodian. It’s not fair in either situation to just release them back to the ‘wild’ to fend for themselves. Either they will do badly and suffer, or they will do well and cause our wildlife to suffer.

Can’t tag you because you’ve blocked me over this post. Thanks for doing that any trying to prevent me seeing the atrocious language in your reply. I had hoped you mistakenly thought you were being funny with that, but I guess not.

I have not done the research, I have read the research. Seen it presented at conferences. You’d probably be interested in them.

Sure, Australia has large predators that can eat cats, but not terribly many do.

Our birds of prey are geared towards herbivores, and will go for a rabbit before a cat. Cats prefer forested areas where the larger raptor species have a harder time hunting anyway.

Dingos are not everywhere or ubiquitous. They will hunt cats, but interestingly the cat population changes its behavior to only hunt when the dingoes are less active. There are still cats there hunting, it’s just at different times of the day and subsequently different things.

In fact, research suggests and basically proves that for improving biodiversity in Australian ecosystems and protecting our endangered mammals, removing the cats is the single best thing you can do, followed by introducing real dingoes. (Dingoes affect the larger grazers which eat the habitat of the smaller herbivores)

Most ‘dingoes’ running around Australia are really feral dog hybrids, which is a whole other problem. While they can kill a cat, cats are not their preferred prey.

Our crocodiles are only in a tiny portion of our continent. Also ambush predators, they hunt whatever comes to the water edge and given the choice, a larger thing is easier to grab and hold.

Areas of Australia, Tasmania for example, don’t have any predator bigger than a Tasmanian Devil, and their population is struggling enough as it is, so cats have a completely free reign there.

Just because a predator is capable of killing a cat, doesn’t mean they do so at a significant rate to suppress the population. If they did, maybe we wouldn’t have such a massive problem in the first place.

The spread of Toxoplasma is also a significant issue because Australian native animals have not co-evolved alongside that parasite. Cats can have impacts on our mammal populations beyond just predation.

In a perfect world we wouldn’t have feral cats roaming wild. I don’t think anyone disagrees with this, but we are affording these animals extra rights just because they’re cats and we like them. Nobody wants to kill them as a first choice, but when it comes down to feral, introduced cats versus their native or endangered prey, something has to give. And as much as I found euthanising all those ferals in Tasmania unpleasant, it was the better solution at the time. It’s not the cats’ faults, I have no malice against them, it’s human society’s systemic failures that put them there, and we’re just trying to clean up.

There is an alternative to both TNR programs and culling. It’s just extremely labor intensive.

As an example, the Big Ears Animal Sanctuary has cat enclosures for feral cats. Some cats are just unwanted, but many are feral, and are contained within a series of enclosures that have both an ‘inside’ house replica and an ‘outside’ area. They cannot hunt wildlife. They have food and shelter. The occasional one becomes more tolerant of people over time. They get care for the duration of their lives to a certain extent (anything that requires twice daily medication for life is a significant challenge in an untouchable cat).

So the cats aren’t hunting wildlife or spreading disease but still get to live out their lives. So what’s the problem?

Money.

The way he’s holding the dove is a very common dove hold though, and the bird is not showing any signs of stress. He likely hand-reared it for this purpose, and it is used to being manhandled that way. I do not know how much the average pigeon cares really.

Look at the way their head moves, actively interested in their surroundings.

An uncomfortable pigeon’s head would be firmly between its shoulders, staring blankly ahead at nothing.

Show hold, in and of itself, even while gesturing with a pigeon used to it, is harmless.

It is the safest, most comfortable way to restrain a pigeon, against which it is the least likely to struggle, with the least possibility of injury if it does.

Pigeons are not hand raised (by which I mean removed from the parents and given formula) for much or anything, outside an emergency or rearing the breeds with too short a beak to be physically capable of peep feeding.

(Y’all don’t even want to know how many breeds there are with no beak…)

Being domesticated birds, all it takes to get them to be human social is handling them from hatching like a breeder would socialize nursing puppies or kittens.

But even this much handling is extremely rare among breeders for meat, performance, or exhibition birds.

Homers experience with human hands is exclusively;

1. Banding on day 7

2. Basket; literally, grab bird in show hold and plonk into wicker basket or metal crate.

3. Vaccines. (if the racer bothers with them. It’s generally considered bad practice not to, though, because a racing loft, by definition, can’t operate as a closed loft.)

Training the homing instinct in racers starts when the peeps are 5-6 weeks old by what’s called Trap training.

This is a performance loft trap door.

Returning pigeons can easily push in, but the wires being longer than the frame prevent them from pushing out.

Fledgelings are encouraged to walk through the trap door into the loft to teach them that this is how they return to their familiar, safe environment.

Weanlings are let out in a group, generally with one or two veteran adults to learn the lay of the land immediately surrounding the loft and trap in reliably.

After a week or so of this, the training tosses start.

The young birds are grabbed, basketed with a veteran or two, driven about a mile away, and released.

Every day, the training toss is from a little farther away, with the direction frequently changing.

The mantra of racers and other performance breeders is “Let the toss do your culling for you.”

Birds that don’t come home, be they lost, hit by cars, blown off course in inclement weather, or fall prey to raptors are “worthless wastes of feed.”

Spirit, one of our 2014 rescues, was a wedding release homer who was found in Augusta, but her breeder and handler was in Atlanta, 3 hours away.

As is the norm, did not want the bird back, just complained about the clients insisting on releasing them just before a severe thunderstorm.

It sounds like wedding “doves*” are especially skilled at hawk avoidance when people talk about how many more survive a wedding release than a race,

But races cover 100-500 miles.

Wedding release handlers usually only operate with in about 20-30 miles of their loft.

50 is about the farthest away they’ll go.

That shortened distance doesn’t make a white bird any harder for a hawk to see.

There is a reason almost no racer flies a white bird.

And there is a reason wedding releases usually involve five or more released from a basket as the initial two are tossed by the happy couple:

To minimize the chance of a hawk taking the specific ones tossed by the couple, in their immediate line of sight.

Hawks are expected to take at least one bird from each toss, particularly in spring when there are hungry peeps to feed and fall when those peeps have fledged and are hunting on their own now.

That’s why racers, rollers, tumblers, tipplers, and sky cutters are mass-bred; To account for those expected losses and still have birds to race and breed from next year.

Law of averages states The hawks can’t get all of them.

This extra food source isn’t even good for the hawks, as racers either don’t bother to waste medicine on sick birds or over use treatments monthly as a preventative with absolutely 0 in between.

This is how common pathogens like Trichomoniasis (which raptors usually catch from eating infected pigeons) develop resistance to anti protozoan meds.

*White Ringneck Doves  (Streptopelia risoria)

Are often DIY released at weddings as a cheap alternative to trained white homers, or by people who want “the real thing” instead of a white pigeon.

Ringneck doves have no homing sense what so ever. That homing sense is unique to Columba livia.

So is the retention of survival instinct.

Pigeons have free flown through most of their thousands of years of domestication.

Because of their lack of homing sense, Ringneck Doves have been cage birds for about as long.

Intelligent, agile individuals escaped, leaving duller, less agile individuals to breed in captivity for thousands of years.

Ringneck doves only have one survival instinct left; When startled, FLY VERY FAST!!!!

Usually in a straight line…

Until they hit something or wear out…

To make matters worse, Albino doves like the one above (most commonly used for weddings because they are the “purest” white) are almost completely blinded by exposure to full sunlight.

This is also part of what makes them easy for magicians to manipulate.

They can’t see far enough to make a break for anything other than the Magician.

I talk a lot about why feral pigeons should be treated like stray dogs in other posts, from the perspective of them being being a species as purely domesticated as Dogs, which can’t survive away from humans.

They should not be clogging up wildlife rehabs, whose resources should be reserved exclusively for the native wildlife for which they were set up.

(Not one sane person would advocate releasing stray dogs among rehabbed wolves or coyotes, no matter how many generations of them had been born in that alley.)

There is no benefit to releasing feral pigeons “back into the wild”.

Certainly not for the pigeons… who are exclusively dependent on human hand outs or garbage for food and building to roost and nest.

Not for the people, who are generally disgusted by the byproduct of sick, hungry ferals, which does serious structural damage because of the high uric acid content of feces from birds who have not been able to get enough to eat.

Not even for their predators.

Because of the way their medical care is traditionally handled, lost pigeons and their feral decedents are unsafe for predatory birds to eat.

As stated in the previous post, Performing breed breeders and fliers go one of two ways regarding birds with any symptoms of illness:

Either

1. They don’t waste money on treating a sick a sick bird. If it’s sick enough to affect its performance, that specific one is just killed.

Or

2. They use a fraction of the dose of the meds designed to treat an actively symptomatic bird as a monthly “preventive” for the entire flock.

Killing off a bird that’s symptomatic doesn’t mean the other birds in that loft and flying from it don’t have that pathogen.

It just means that they aren’t showing symptoms.

Aaaand using small doses of a treatment as a monthly “preventive” would have any one anywhere near the fields of pathology and epedimiology tearing their hair out in horrified frustration…

Because that is praaactically step by step instructions in how to build up a pathogen’s immunity to a treatment.

Whish brings us to this heinous little bastard;

which causes Trichomoniasis; Trich/canker/frounce.

Trichomonas gallinae eats epithelial cells lining the sinus, crop, and trachea, and forms plaques that make it very difficult for meds to get to as a defense mechanism against the immune system of its host.

Individuals are highly motile, moving with three sets of flagella.

Making it very easy to go septic.

There are three ways this parasite spreads:

1. Mouth to mouth feeding between mates or from parent to nestling.

(By far the most common in columbids)

2. Eating seeds thrown up by a starving late stage bird who physically can’t swallow them

(A common way to transmit it to song birds)

3. Eating an infected prey bird.

Pretty much any bird can catch and transmit the protozoan parasite Trichomonas gallinae, which causes Trichomoniasis; Trich/canker/frounce.

But most wild birds die from it very quickly, leaving it only a brief opportunity to spread to a new host.

What makes the feral descendants of racers and other performance breeds of domestic pigeon in particular especially dangerous carriers to raptors is their high immunity to it.

While a pigeon would have to have an active infection to spread trich to song bird (via vomited seed), an infected pigeon doesn’t have to be symptomatic to spread the parasite to a raptor, who is exposed directly by eating them in bite-sized pieces.

I have purchased birds from grand champion show breeders who looked to be in perfect health on arrival…

But their throats were swarming with Trich when swabbed. (part of my standard quarantine procedure)

Nearly every feral that’s entered our program through rescue has had a crop load of Trich, but were completely asymptomatic on arrival.

A raptor that had eaten one of these birds that was “healthy” by all appearances would still have sickened from it and died with out immediate veterinary intervention.

Our livestock doesn’t exist in a bubble.

What we do (or don’t do) with our domesticated animals has consequences.

And when your biosecurity is nonexistent, and you either half ass treatment of a pathogen or don’t bother to treat at all, outbreaks are inevitable, and devastating to outside populations.

Pigeon fanciers talk about Canker like it’s nothing. Pop one pill and it’s done.

But this parasite is devastating.

And the way it’s treated by fanciers practically guarantees a fast track to developing drug resistance.

Domestic Pigeons left “in the wild” or “returned” to it not only have no beneficial niche to fill and no way to keep themselves fed,

They act as a reservoir for increasingly resistant pathogens practically engineered by the half-assed veterinary care of the fliers who provide a constant stream of new blood as racers and other performance breeds are lost from races or tosses or separated from kits.

Because of this, as much as the moral issue of having abandoned them in the first place, feral pigeons should not be ignored.

It is possible to drastically reduce their numbers with out any inhumane measures.

Taubbenhouses, comfortable shelters where nest boxes, feed, and water are provided, and any eggs laid are swapped for fakes, work wonders for population control.

With out injections, trapping, or poison, the reproductive rates of feral populations where this strategy was employed decreased by 95%.

Imagine combining that with better veterinary care for pigeons who belong to fanciers…

Maybe we could avoid…

This.

(Graphic photos under the cut)

Since I wasn’t sure what was up with this dude, I did what I always do whenever I see something weird going on with a wild animal; I called my local Fish & Wildlife! This might sound like a crazy reaction to seeing a splotchy turtle but I actually learned something extremely important that I would love for my followers (especially those in Florida) to know about too. After calling F&W I spoke with the turtle specialist for quite some time, as it turns out there is an unknown pathogen killing softshell turtles in Florida, and biologists are desperate to find the cause. They need our help to do this! The biologist that I spoke with says they’re relying on civilian reports to find cases for further study, so it’s incredibly important to spread the word and make sure people know how to report any abnormal appearance or behavior in turtles that they see.

Fortunately my splotchy turtle (I call him Uncle Walter) doesn’t seem to be sick based on his presentation or behavior! The turtle experts examined his photos and at this point they agree he is probably just piebald, though they asked me to keep an eye on him and make sure his condition doesn’t change. I’m so happy that I am armed with knowledge I can use to monitor him and his friends in the face of this worrisome unknown illness.

To my friends here in Florida- if you see ANY wild turtle that looks sick, weak, distressed, or abnormal please contact Fish and Wildlife immediately using the information provided below! To my non-Fl friends, if you have any contacts that enjoy herping or just outdoor activity in the state please let them know about this as well. Our turtles are very dear to us and reporting possible illness is the best way we can help find what’s killing these animals.