124 THE OREGON SPORTSMAN 
THE UNCONTROLLED CAT 
By CHARLES H. WILSON, in The Conservationist 
Shall we have cats in uncontrolled numbers, domesticated, semi- 
wild, and entirely wild—or shall we have crops? That is a question 
which has taken an important place within the last few months in 
public discussion throughout all of New York State and in other 
states scattered over the entire country. The question has many 
side issues, but in the last analysis it simmers down to this one main 
proposition of cats versus crops. It has its aesthetic side, and bird 
clubs have taken up a war against the cat, in order that we may 
have more of our feathered friends to jewel the landscape and make 
the summer, and winter, too, ring with their song. It must not be for- 
gotten, however, that much of the strength of the movement, perhaps 
its greatest strength, comes from the well recognized fact that the 
birds are chiefly valuable economically. 
The question has its health aspect. Careful investigations, carried 
on by scientific men for many years, have demonstrated beyond all 
dispute that the cat, and particularly the homeless half-starving cat, is 
one of the most dangerous carriers of disease with which our cities and 
towns are infested. The Plattsburg Humane Society reports the killing 
in 1916 of 517 homeless and diseased cats. In the same year the Glens 
Falls Humane Society killed 215 felines that were diseased. In Ogdens- 
burg the Humane Society in four years mercifully destroyed 364 dis- 
eased, injured and homeless cats. Cats have been proved to have 
glanders, a disease that is infectious to man. They carry, besides, 
diphtheria, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, whooping cough, smallpox, and 
ring-worm, tetanus or lock jaw, rabies or hydrophobia, anthrax, mange, 
and, of particularly tragic interest at this time, the germs of infantile 
paralysis. Caroline A. Osborn, M. D., of Worcester, Mass., in her 
bulletin on ‘‘The Cat and the Transmission of Disease,’’ issued after 
an exhaustive study that began in 1904, says that in Massachusetts 
several cases of infantile paralysis were found in which the patient 
had been in intimate contact with a paralyzed cat. Dr. John B. Huber 
asserts that, in the last six months of 1914, 42 persons bitten by eats 
took the Pasteur treatment, and that 33 of the cats which bit them 
were proved in the New York City laboratories to have been rabid. 
But, in spite of the incontestable case that can be built up against 
the cat as a disease carrier, and as a destroyer of the wild life that we 
love and enjoy, it is true that the control of the cat is being brought 
about at last by the pocket book, in answer to the question of ‘‘Cats 
versus Crops.’’ 
One hundred and seventy-six species of insects attack the apple, 
peach and cherry tree, 400 the oak, 100 the maple, and 300 the coniferous 
trees, while a larger number feed upon cereals, grain and garden crops. 
Remember the tent caterpillar in New York State from 1898 to 1900! 
The birds stayed that plague. In 1904 the Hessian fly ravaged wheat- 
growing states to the tune of $50,000,000. The loss to crops in the 
Mississippi Valley by cinch bugs in one year was placed at $100,000,000, 
and the total annual loss attributed to insect life in the United States 
is estimated at $1,200,000,000. Talk about your high cost of living! 
It costs the United States annually more to feed insect life than to 
educate 20,000,000 school children. 
It is now a conceded fact that nowhere in the animal kingdom is 
there a factor so potent as the birds to hold in check inseet multipli- 
‘cation, and we now know that there is no insect so completely protected 
by its habits of life that it is not found and preyed upon by some bird. 
