Kill the Feral Cats (II)

This is Smitty. He’s a very cute cat who adopted my wife. He was a wild cat who decided he would like to be around people. Nonetheless, here are more reasons to have an official program to kill feral cats.

It’s “goodbye, cats” and “hello, chicks” thanks to a newly completed fence on Hawaii Island that was recently built to protect birds. Feral cats are big pests in Hawaii, where they often feast on the island’s endangered Hawaiian petrel, or u’au.

In Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, the cute but troublesome cats have been preying on the shorebirds that nest once a year on the slopes of Mauna Loa, the world’s largest volcano.

It took three years to build the five-mile fence in a remote part of the park. Working at elevations of up to 10,000 feet, crews drilled posts into the hardened lava on the slopes of the volcano before attaching a 6-foot-high fence. Its curved top is designed to keep cats from crawling over and leaping into the birds’ nesting grounds.

Only 75 pairs of Hawaiian petrels nest on Hawaii Island. The seafaring birds return to land briefly each April to prepare their nests and return in June to lay a single egg.

I guess a fence is an answer? But it’s not a very good one except that it serves the purpose of not making weird people who prioritize cats over every single other species on Earth, a position cats themsleves would scoff at before they ate your face off if they could.