chirp! chirp! meow! meow!

Ted Williams, no, not the late, great Boston Red Sox star, after whom the tunnel to Logan airport is named, but the writer for the Audubon Society, was mentioned in yesterday's Times where he was described as having gone rogue in writing for another publication an article in which he recommended Tylenol as a method of killing feral cats. Killing feral cats!  As one could have guessed, and I can't imagine what happened to his thinking, cat lovers of America went crazy.  Talk about Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents!   I wish him well, but I am not sure the retraction of his initial position will calm the fury.
I have to watch where and with whom I confess it, but I'm with him. Twelve years ago when we moved to our seaside home and began our garden, I was disappointed to discover that there were no song birds, and as we turned over more of the soil, and established beds,  I discovered the pungent and obvious traces of the neighborhood cats.  I had never even heard of feral cats before  There were feral cats everywhere in those days, in part because a neighbor, whose religious affiliation prohibited her practicing birth control, extended that interdiction to the cats spawned on her property.  All I could think of was Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats or whatever that children's book was called, from which I read to my own offspring more times than I want to think.  And with kitty shit came bottle flies, and they were a constant menace whenever we set out our lunch in the shade under the wisteria covered gazebo Richard had built out behind the house.  But then--oh, glorious!--in the fullness of time our little town got coyotes.  Of course, there were the horrified complaints when some one's little pooch was picked up and carried off as its owner walked with it on the beach (I self righteously noted that said dog had been on the beach where dogs are prohibited, and off his leash), but we saw the benefits within six months: the feral cats were gone from our garden. Alas, there are the neighbors' cats.  Until one has encountered the mountains of fecal matter produced by over-fed, fat, sluggish American house cats--nutritious protein products that also feed our nation's impoverished elderly and whose ingredients were once the staples of diet in the southern American hemisphere--one does not understand.   The smell of the refuse can overwhelm the roses, the mess makes garden work unappealing.  Suggesting kitty litter boxes to your neighbors and an in-house life for their pets is like asking them to mutilate the animal physically.
Okay, let's forget about the fecal matter, let's be positive.  The coyotes have given us back the song birds in our garden.  Oh, to sit on the porch in my rocking chair and watch the birds flitting up with straw in their beaks to the nests they are building, swoop down into the fountains and flutter their wings at their bath, to hear them warble and sing, watch them among the beautiful butterflies!  Oh, the Lord is in his heaven and all's right with the world!  Give me coyotes, give my Tylenol, I am happy.
How strange it is to think back to another me; in the early years of our parenthood my wife and I had pets, like any other self respecting mom and dad.  We had two giant golden retrievers, and five black cats.  I cannot conceive of this now, nor remember these creatures as physical realities, but I know this from photographs.  Our children loved it all.  We lived in the real country, the world was our kitty litter box.  The house was a mass of animal hair.  Animals seemed forever to be bounding about the living room, the dogs' tails upsetting martini glasses, or yowling, if they were the cats, when some guest tipsily sat down without looking on the sofa.  Is that really how I lived once upon a time a half century ago? These days I seem to recoil from any household pet I encounter.  Some I have to say are truly overwhelming; my older daughter's dog in New Hampshire when last we met was so excited that he bounded from the house, threw himself at "grandpa" with all the love and affection a giant canine can muster and knocked me flat on the ground.  Better to sit quietly by my fountain and watch the birds.