THE CAT QUESTION 301 



valued and not properly cared for by their 

 owners. The harvest of stray cats would pro- 

 bably not be less than sixty or seventy thousand 

 for the first year. 



To return to the parks. The question is 

 how to exclude the hunting cats that frequent 

 them at night. I have conversed Avith perhaps 

 a hundred superintendents, inspectors, and 

 keepers on the subject, and invariably they say 

 that it is impossible to exclude the cats, or that 

 they do not see how it is to be done. And yet 

 in many parks they are always trying to do it ; 

 they hunt them at night with dogs, they shoot 

 them with rook rifles, and they poison them : 

 but all these measures produce no efiect, and 

 are, moreover, employed with secrecy and with 

 fear lest the paragraph writer and public should 

 find out, and an outcry be made. It is plain 

 that the cats can only be kept out by means 

 of a suitable fence, or net, or screen of wire. 

 Eabbit wire netting is hardly suitable, as it is 

 unsightly and is not an eflicient protection. 

 The most efiectual form would be a plain wire 

 fence in squares, the cross wires tied to the 

 uprights with wire thread, the top of the fence 

 made to curve outwards to prevent the 



