Why are there so many feral cats in Israel?

The simple answer to the question in the title is that the people of Israel in general accept and don't mind the presence of community cats in their country. They are part of the fabric of life in the country I think it is fair to say. They are there because of the usual reasons which is some cat owners not spaying or neutering their cats and some of these cats become stray and feral cats and they procreate and so on. Unless steps are taken the numbers continue to grow. I have been to Jerusalem. There are lots of feral cats. The crucial point is to prevent the creation of stray cats in the first instance. There comes a time when it is harder and more expensive to resolve a 'feral cat problem'.

Jerusalem. Woman feeds community cats. Photo: EPA/ABIR SULTAN

There are apparently 2 million of them in Israel and the numbers are of course increasing because not enough of them are spayed and neutered under TNR programs. Despite the fact that there is no real commitment to deal with them in a humane way at present there may come a time when things change due to sheer numbers.

Someone predicted that there will be 8 million feral cats in the country in several years which would match the number of citizens in Israel.

The agricultural Minister apparently believes that the country should not neuter or spay cats because it would go against God's wish to be fruitful and multiply! That sounds rather far-fetched to me but I am open to an alternative viewpoint.

This Minister wants to ship out either all the male cats or all the female cats to another country which agrees to accept them. This would of course mean the feral cats of Israel could not multiply and it would solve at a stroke the feral cat problem. In fact they would all die out in about 15 years in theory.

Israel have a good relationship with their feral cats. They have banned declawing. They are good at animal welfare in my opinion. They won't want to deal with the cats inhumanely. There will probably start funding TNR programs more efficiently and also funding veterinarians to spay and neuter community cats free of charge. They should rely upon volunteers to help. Volunteers very often want to help and be involved. They keep the costs down.

My First Cousin Is Billy Idol and He Brutally Killed a Kitten

My first cousin is Billy Idol. He was having an argument with his then girlfriend and this is back in the 1980s as I understand it, and I suppose in order to get at his girlfriend he allegedly threw his girlfriend's kitten against the wall of the room and killed the kitten. That's about it. It's in complete contrast to me because I am an animal advocate.






I hate animal cruelty. It is obviously entirely unnecessary. It is objectionable. It is horrible. It is criminal behaviour but there is little chance that he will be prosecuted because it happened such a long time ago.

The information comes from a memoir by a guy called Adam Bomb. He refers to Billy Idol's then girlfriend Claire O'Connor. It was Claire O'Connor who owned the kitten as I understand it. She disclosed the information to Adam Bomb. She said that Billy could be nasty sometimes. This was an example of that behaviour. But this is an allegation let's not forget.

We don't know whether Billy Idol was drunk or drugged at the time but what he did was unforgivable quite obviously. I am ashamed of him. I am connected to him because Billy Idol is the son of my late father's brother (also now deceased). He is therefore my first cousin. My name is Michael Broad. Billy Idol's name is William Broad.

As I recall, I played with William many years ago when he was a teenager or even before that. I can't recall. I could have met him at a party that he attended which was a party to celebrate Billy Idol's father's life because at that time he was dying. He did not come down from a bedroom in his father's house so I was unable to meet him.

Do cats have a collarbone?

Cats do not have a collarbone. This anatomical peculiarity allows a cat to fit through any opening which is the size of his/her head. A cat's forelimbs are attached to the shoulder by free-floating clavicle bones.

What was the penalty for killing a cat in ancient Egypt?

In ancient Egypt's the penalty for killing a cat was death. However, I have decided that the ancient Egyptians were not really cat lovers because they killed hundreds of thousands of cats, perhaps kittens, in sacrifices to their gods. This seems to have been a trade, a business involved in breeding cats and then killing them to appease the gods. Any nation who loves cats and who worships them would not do that.

Although the penalty was death for killing a cat, I wonder how efficient enforcement was! You can imagine how bad it was. There was no police force in ancient Egypt as far as I'm aware. You can kill cats surreptitiously without anybody seeing. And there would have been no animal welfare laws. So saying that the penalty was death is missing the point somewhat.

Can a cat see in pitch black?

The answer to the question, "can a cat see in pitch black?" must be NO because you need some light to impinge upon the retina for the retina to then send a signal to the brain. Pitch black means absolutely no light. Despite the fact that the cat's eyes are more sensitive to ours and their vision at night is excellent, they cannot see in total darkness. No animal can.






Light reflected from the cat's retina. A typical nighttime scene. Hence the phrase "cat's eyes" to mean the center line road markings by reflective glass marbles invented in Yorkshire, UK.