The Republican journal., 1917-04-05
The Cat as a Sanitary Adjunct.

To the Editor of the Boston Transcript:
In the many articles | have read in the
papers on getting rid of rats l have
failed to see anything about the help
that cats have been in city and country.
in houses, stores, factories, barns, chick
en- yards, in lessening the number of
rats as we'll as mice. This seems to me
to SAVIOR of ingratitude. The omission
may be partly due to the determined at
tempt which has been made by few
prejudiced persons to make the public
believe that cats are of no use, and par
ticularly that they do not catch rats.
have been sending out circular in
curing at stores, factories and at pri
vate houses as to whether the cats they
kept catch rats, and l have had a great
number of replies saying that the cat or
cats the writers own are good ratters,
and their services are indispensable.
A prominent Boston merchant had
cat which he said in so many words was
worth her weight in gold. She had saved
him thousands of dollars worth of prop
erty year. He had known her to catch
fourteen large rats in one night.
In a house and barn near Boston,
where rats and mice ran riot, in spite of
traps, and two dogs that occasionally
caught rat, a cat was introduced last
summer. This cat first cleared the house
of mice, then going to the barn he has
caught rats SO large that he had to drag
them down the driveway to the house
when he wished to exhibit them to his
mistress. After he has received the
praise he feels is his due, he leaves the
rat in the yard and one of the dogs buries
it.
could multiply these instances by the
hundreds. If the men and women who
value cats highly for their usefulness in
catching rats and mice should begin
writing to your paper, your columns
might be filled with letters in praise of
the cat.
In tenement and lodging houses cats
are of such great value that some lodg-
ing house or boarding house owners de-
clare they would have to give up their
business without their aid. Farmers,
almost without exception, declare cats
to be Indispensable, and one woman
wrote me that her chicken house was
protected from rats by her cat. Before
she had the cat the rats devoured her
chickens.
With the threat of the bubon1c plague
always before US, can we afford to ig-
more an agency that has proved of SO
much value? When the japanese under
took to eliminate the plague from their
country one of their first measures was
to import cargo of cats from the Unit
ed States.
1t is an interesting fact that every
week we are having complaints because
We have not more cats that we are will
ling to place in homes where they are
wanted for the purpose of catching rats
ard mice. If the Audubon Society and
Humane Societies would circulate wide
ly simple leafet instructing people
who own female cats not to let all the
kittens live and give them away indis-
crminately; to keep their cats in the
house nights and in the early morning
hours when birds are getting breakfasts
for their young; never to desert their
cats and so force them TO seek their liv
ing in woods and fields; also to begin
with the kittens and train them, as they
would dogs, to let the birGs alone they
would do much more for the interests of
the birds and of humane education than
to harp on the question of getting law
on our statute books which could not be
carried out, or even be attempted, with
out cruelty, and which would before
year was OUT pe ueeply regretted even
by those who advocated it.
1t is very serious matter to encour-
age this attempt to bring the cat into
such bad repute. Some boys, not all,
are only too ready to seize on any ex-
cuse for chasing and killing cats, or any
thing else, and already in some places
where lecturers on birds have been de-
nouncing cats, a crusade against them
has been started, which caused much
suffering to human beings and cruelty to
eats. 1t is direct set back to humane
education.
MRS. HUNTINGTON SMITH.
President Animal Rescue League.