ALL CATS MUST DIE

I hate cats. Not in an "I love dogs" way or a "women are from Venus, men are from Mars" way. I hate cats because they perfectly sum up why everything humans do is wrong. That is why anytime I see one I coax it over, pretending I have food, and then CRACK! Ikick it back across the road. Believe me, my heart is in the right place.

Cats are the most barbaric, sadistic animals in the world.

Sure, it's nice when they say "MeowHieverybodybrrrr" when they come into a room. And it's sort of beguiling when their paws go big when asking for something they love, like milk or tuna, but if you look at it from an environmentalist's perspective, cats are the most dangerous parasite on earth since man.

The way a cat kills a mouse or a bird is nature at its most savage and cruel (bloodcurdling meows one second, entrails in your slippers the next), but it's how often they do it that is really fucking things up. Recently, the musty-smelling profs at the British Mammal Society estimated that cats kill more than 250,000,000 creatures a year. Their primal urges are singlehandedly devastating the robin population, for example. While cat food may satiate their hunger, it doesn't kill their hunting instinct, and that is precisely the problem. Every cat you let outside equals a dozen dead birds before it gets let back in, and these birds are killed for no reason whatsoever. Isn't that why we hate hunters so much? At least hunters actually digest their prey and don't touch endangered species like dormice. (Though mice and birds are the main victims, cats are also destroying entire populations of voles, shrews, bats, and even baby rabbits.)

As with most environmental catastrophes, this new threat to the bird population can be traced back to man. We brought cats to Britain to control the plague-carrying rats that were threatening our potatoes. Now we pamper them all day and send them out to kill twice their weight in biomass every night, no matter what.It's not like cats need or even want to go outside. They are surprisingly content with shitting in a box and restricting their domain to your apartment, so there is no reason to let them out. "Most cats are opportunists who catch whatever they come across," says the spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. "The most abundant or vulnerable are their targets, and if people don't start keeping their cats indoors the bird population may never recover."

JOHN MOORE