Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Cats. Wow!

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

Let me put on my  group facilitator hat here: Just to belabor the obvious,
Pets are a major conflict issue in pretty much every community. They rank
right up there in conflict issues with kids, work, food and relationships.

I have seen an interesting pattern in many communities I have visited,
especially cohousing groups. The conversation goes like this:

Pet Owner: We don't have any problems with pets.
Non-Pet Owner: Our biggest undealt with problem is pets.

I have worked with groups dealing with pets and kids and both bring up
similar emotional attachment blocks for many people. They can talk about
lots of things, but as soon as you bring up a subject where they have a
strong emotional attachment (pet/child) they lose the ability to maintain
any sort of subjectivity and rationality. It is common that emotionally
attached people take any general criticism of pets/children personally and
often respond with the defensive methods they characteristically use.

In my experience, when dealing with either kids or pets it might be a good
approach to work on abstract goals first. What do we want to accomplish?
Then, once you have a set of goals, you can work towards specifics of
accomplishing them.

It is pretty common to find cohousing groups that espouse environmental
goals which then do nothing to regulate the carnage on local wildlife done
by the pets. Constraining pets is simply too hard for most groups to work
out.

Now I put on my naturalist  hat:

Cats in natural systems are super predators, their population is not in
anyway linked to the prey populations. In a natural system the population of
the predators is directly linked to the population of the prey. When the
prey drops to a low point, it causes the predators to die or move on,
leaving a small remnant prey population to then rebuild its numbers. Super
predators keep feeding on the prey base until it is locally extinct, because
they do not rely on the prey for survival. There are over 200 studies now of
cat predation effects from all over America, and there is a good abstract of
this research available from the Audubon society. It used to be on their
website.

Rob Sandelin
Ex-facilitation trainer
Natural history teacher

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