German’s Final Solution to Feline infections

A French mayor banning chicken from school
canteens, Germans abandoning cats by the hundreds, Greeks and Italians
virtually axing poultry from their diets are all signs that a worried
Europe is inching toward what some have called a bird flu psychosis.

In Austria, a provincial hospital in Burgenland has even reserved 20 percent
of its beds for possible bird flu patients, even though no human infections
have been reported anywhere in Europe.

Indeed, despite assurances from officials that health risks are negligible,
an edgy public is taking its own, not always rational, precautions against
the deadly virus.

In Greece, consumption has plummeted by 75 percent in three weeks, according
to the country’s largest poultry farmers’ association. "If sales
continue falling at this rate, poultry farms may have to close," association
head Spyros Nonikas told AFP on Friday.

In Italy, where poultry meat sales have dropped off by 70 percent since
an H5N1 outbreak among wild, migratory birds, many butchers have simply
stopped selling chicken and duck altogether.

In Germany itself, hundreds of cat owners have abandoned their pets,
and some have sought to have them put down, the German animal welfare
society said.

"Nationwide, several hundred cats have been left with us. People
are scared their cats have bird flu," a spokesman for the group
told AFP.

from AFP

Now wait one cotton-picking minute! One cat gets
sick from killing a bird and people are putting down their pet cats?
What is it about some
people? We can sympathize with mass executions of fowl, having worked
on a chicken farm in our misspent youth. Chickens are the closest
things to vegetables we have encountered in the animal kingdom.

But putting down or turning in a single cat because of some ridiculous
and unfounded fears should be severely punished. Interestingly, as our son Gabe reminded us, the devestating scourge of the Black Plague, the last super-pandemic in Europe, was primarily caused by wholesale slaughter of domestic cats, which were suspected of being witches familiars. In fact, without the cat the rats ran wild, and with them the fleas which carried the plague.