Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2013 18:23:03 GMT 10
Some thing really are worth shooting:
Hatred of feral cats hides a sinister truth
Date
January 8, 2013
Category
Opinion
Adrian Franklin
Australia's fear of the rogue animal reflects our migrant paranoia.
Email article
Print
Reprints & permissions
Ads by Google
Shipping to New Zealand
www.sydneytonewzealandfreight.com
Car, motorhome caravan shipping, full & partial container shipments
On Australia Day 1996, my family attended our citizenship ceremony in Hobart. Later that day Bob Burgess, a National Party electoral candidate, referred to this joyful occasion as ''de-wogging''. Ever since, after John Howard's Tampa, and after Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard made asylum seeking here another election issue, it seems intolerance of outsiders is entrenched as a common value in Australia.
This intolerance is categorical and extends to non-native animals too, but particularly the feral cat. It's a creature so detested in Australia that it has made it into the uncharmed circles of the ''un-Australian''.
Why are we so against the feral cat when other countries are not? Does it relate to our apparent fear of outsider humans? I think it does. Ostensibly the reason given by scientists is that the feral cat endangers native animals; that it is an introduced feral predator that did not evolve in Australian environments and therefore does not belong. If it were allowed to live unchecked, it would soon destabilise Australian ecologies. It all sounds extremely believable and to help you believe it, they are typically shown in photos with pretty native birds in their maws. But how robust is this assumption?
In reviewing the scientific research three things baffled me: first, the scientists' agreement that there is no evidence linking feral cats to any native extinctions (apart from a few very exceptional island sites). Second, the absence of any statement reinstating feral cats as harmless animals and removing them from their current status as a ''serious pest''; third, the absence of any statement suggesting they be naturalised since eradication is not possible anyway.
Advertisement
I have studied attitudes in Britain, which has a far denser population of feral cats than Australia and where people are just as concerned about native animals. In the British case the feral cat is a cause for concern prompting almost universal action for their welfare and care! It is as protected as domestic cats, and is more or less naturalised.
Why is it embraced in Britain? And if it is not a danger to Australian wildlife, why is it still feared and loathed here? In my opinion it relates to differences between Australia and Britain as nations and how the feral cat has come to embody very different core values in each place.
Britain is an old, strong, and independent nation with a significant and sustained belief in its own security. A sense of England as a nation first formed in the 10th century from an impulse to create alliances between warring ethnic divisions of the region, a project with the deeper purpose of recovering the former cultural unity and prosperity that had reigned during a comparatively civilised Romano-British period.
Since then, the impulse to create other alliances and ''add to'' this assemblage has been characteristic, as has the development of institutions that fostered tolerance, through justice, freedom of expression and civil liberties. Over this very long period of time various peoples, conquerors, traders, migrants, asylum seekers, alongside many of the animals they brought with them, have been naturalised. They are all British.
The cat arrived in England ahead of the Romans, just. Feral cats trigger a sense of pity and charity. They embody the figure of the destitute and deserving poor, someone who must be looked after.
By comparison, since European settlement, Australia is a new country with a tiny population of white settlers occupying an island continent close to a heavily populated Asia. Since 1901, an intensely proud white majority feared being culturally annihilated through migration and the social fragmentation it imagined would ensue, especially from Asia. Ironically, for a migrant nation Australia has developed a sense of itself as under threat and in need of protection from the outside.
I think the feral cat has become a useful natural anomaly for those who want to uphold a state of anxiety about belonging and not belonging in Australia.
The feral cat looks perilously like a metaphor for the universal unwanted asylum seeker and migrant - they are creatures that cross boundaries of their own volition; independent, outsider figures accused of threatening a properly Australian ''natural'' order. They threaten to fragment that fragile and threatened reality: ''Australia''.
This is a social fear being played out in a powerful way, through a discredited ecological myth. That the scientific evidence has exonerated feral cats is not the point. It is not about what they do but what they have come to represent that matters here. Hating the cat and performing acts of control and eradication maintains the idea of an Australia threatened from outside and creates a form of solidarity among insiders and on-siders who must remain vigilant.
The performance of these rituals establishes an important role for insiders. Through supporting ritual purification they become exclusive custodians, and the protection of nature offers an important, irresistible source of power. It upholds the dark promise of intolerance and exclusion; it worries much more than a term like de-wogging.
Adrian Franklin is a professor of sociology at the University of Tasmania.
Follow the National Times on Twitter
Ads by Google
Read more: www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/hatred-of-feral-cats-hides-a-sinister-truth-20130107-2ccqu.html#ixzz2HN0qGIUu
----------------------------------
No, not the Author, but Feral Cats.
The Author might believe that hatred towards Feral Cats is systemic of a greater xenophobia, but he is wrong.
Hatred of Feral Cats is due to the fact that they destroy our wildlife.
Our wildlife is far too valuable to allow cats to wonder the bush unchecked.
If you live in a Rural environment, and want to keep Moggsie as a pet, fine, then keep it locked up at nite.
Hatred of feral cats hides a sinister truth
Date
January 8, 2013
Category
Opinion
Adrian Franklin
Australia's fear of the rogue animal reflects our migrant paranoia.
Email article
Reprints & permissions
Ads by Google
Shipping to New Zealand
www.sydneytonewzealandfreight.com
Car, motorhome caravan shipping, full & partial container shipments
On Australia Day 1996, my family attended our citizenship ceremony in Hobart. Later that day Bob Burgess, a National Party electoral candidate, referred to this joyful occasion as ''de-wogging''. Ever since, after John Howard's Tampa, and after Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard made asylum seeking here another election issue, it seems intolerance of outsiders is entrenched as a common value in Australia.
This intolerance is categorical and extends to non-native animals too, but particularly the feral cat. It's a creature so detested in Australia that it has made it into the uncharmed circles of the ''un-Australian''.
Why are we so against the feral cat when other countries are not? Does it relate to our apparent fear of outsider humans? I think it does. Ostensibly the reason given by scientists is that the feral cat endangers native animals; that it is an introduced feral predator that did not evolve in Australian environments and therefore does not belong. If it were allowed to live unchecked, it would soon destabilise Australian ecologies. It all sounds extremely believable and to help you believe it, they are typically shown in photos with pretty native birds in their maws. But how robust is this assumption?
In reviewing the scientific research three things baffled me: first, the scientists' agreement that there is no evidence linking feral cats to any native extinctions (apart from a few very exceptional island sites). Second, the absence of any statement reinstating feral cats as harmless animals and removing them from their current status as a ''serious pest''; third, the absence of any statement suggesting they be naturalised since eradication is not possible anyway.
Advertisement
I have studied attitudes in Britain, which has a far denser population of feral cats than Australia and where people are just as concerned about native animals. In the British case the feral cat is a cause for concern prompting almost universal action for their welfare and care! It is as protected as domestic cats, and is more or less naturalised.
Why is it embraced in Britain? And if it is not a danger to Australian wildlife, why is it still feared and loathed here? In my opinion it relates to differences between Australia and Britain as nations and how the feral cat has come to embody very different core values in each place.
Britain is an old, strong, and independent nation with a significant and sustained belief in its own security. A sense of England as a nation first formed in the 10th century from an impulse to create alliances between warring ethnic divisions of the region, a project with the deeper purpose of recovering the former cultural unity and prosperity that had reigned during a comparatively civilised Romano-British period.
Since then, the impulse to create other alliances and ''add to'' this assemblage has been characteristic, as has the development of institutions that fostered tolerance, through justice, freedom of expression and civil liberties. Over this very long period of time various peoples, conquerors, traders, migrants, asylum seekers, alongside many of the animals they brought with them, have been naturalised. They are all British.
The cat arrived in England ahead of the Romans, just. Feral cats trigger a sense of pity and charity. They embody the figure of the destitute and deserving poor, someone who must be looked after.
By comparison, since European settlement, Australia is a new country with a tiny population of white settlers occupying an island continent close to a heavily populated Asia. Since 1901, an intensely proud white majority feared being culturally annihilated through migration and the social fragmentation it imagined would ensue, especially from Asia. Ironically, for a migrant nation Australia has developed a sense of itself as under threat and in need of protection from the outside.
I think the feral cat has become a useful natural anomaly for those who want to uphold a state of anxiety about belonging and not belonging in Australia.
The feral cat looks perilously like a metaphor for the universal unwanted asylum seeker and migrant - they are creatures that cross boundaries of their own volition; independent, outsider figures accused of threatening a properly Australian ''natural'' order. They threaten to fragment that fragile and threatened reality: ''Australia''.
This is a social fear being played out in a powerful way, through a discredited ecological myth. That the scientific evidence has exonerated feral cats is not the point. It is not about what they do but what they have come to represent that matters here. Hating the cat and performing acts of control and eradication maintains the idea of an Australia threatened from outside and creates a form of solidarity among insiders and on-siders who must remain vigilant.
The performance of these rituals establishes an important role for insiders. Through supporting ritual purification they become exclusive custodians, and the protection of nature offers an important, irresistible source of power. It upholds the dark promise of intolerance and exclusion; it worries much more than a term like de-wogging.
Adrian Franklin is a professor of sociology at the University of Tasmania.
Follow the National Times on Twitter
Ads by Google
Read more: www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/hatred-of-feral-cats-hides-a-sinister-truth-20130107-2ccqu.html#ixzz2HN0qGIUu
----------------------------------
No, not the Author, but Feral Cats.
The Author might believe that hatred towards Feral Cats is systemic of a greater xenophobia, but he is wrong.
Hatred of Feral Cats is due to the fact that they destroy our wildlife.
Our wildlife is far too valuable to allow cats to wonder the bush unchecked.
If you live in a Rural environment, and want to keep Moggsie as a pet, fine, then keep it locked up at nite.
