Cats One Step Closer To Killing Us All

Hmm: “Cats have passed TB to humans for the first time in an outbreak feared to have been caused by badgers. Two people from the same household are being treated for bovine tuberculosis after they caught the disease from their kitten. Two other cat owners have been infected with a dormant form of TB.”

Oh, and recently: “Using deliberately conservative assumptions, federal researchers recently estimated that free-ranging cats killed about 2.4 billion birds annually in the Lower 48 states, a substantial bite out of the total bird population. Outdoor cats also kill about 12.3 billion small mammals a year — not just the proverbial rats and mice but also chipmunks, rabbits and squirrels — and about 650 million reptiles and amphibians. In some cases, they are pushing endangered species toward extinction.”

Now, I am not saying that we need to permanently quarantine both cats and the people who take them into their homes as a preventative measure to keep them from spreading their disease and murder to the rest of us, so I am not sure why that idea is even in your head. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that we keep cats and cat owners on lockdown inside their shitbox-intensive domiciles for the benefit of the birds and also all of the human beings who have chosen not to harbor vectors for tuberculosis and worse, so it seems weird that you would even bring it up. I am simply sharing a couple of things that have been in the news lately, and if the conclusion you draw from it is that we need to keep cats and cat people away from the general population immediately, like before we get to the weekend even, that is surely something you have come up with on your own and I don’t know that I can fully endorse it. Although it is a pretty intriguing idea, the one you have about home confinement for cats and cat owners. Tell me more!