The God-Fearing Baptists at Eastern University Kill Off Their Feral Cats on the Sly while Their Students Are Away on Christmas Break

Heritage Hall at Eastern University

"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right."
-- Issac Bashevis Singer

The administrators at Eastern University in St. Davids, thirty kilometers northwest of Philadelphia, are a devious and deadly bunch of thoroughgoing scoundrels. While their thirty-seven-hundred students were away on Christmas break, they swooped down like hawks on the campus's defenseless feral cats and had every last one of them killed.

Despite the Baptist school's claim on its website that it "integrates faith, reason, and justice" into its curriculum, there was never any debate about the immorality of this barbaric act nor any discussion of the multitude of humane alternatives at its disposal. More astonishingly, there is not any evidence that school administrators either consulted their Bibles or prayed to God before they committed their heinous crimes. Returning students were simply presented with a fait accompli of dead cats.

Like the overwhelming majority of the phonies, fraudsters, intellectual midgets, and moral bankrupts who make up the administrative and professorial ranks on college campuses, Eastern's leaders were far too cowardly to do the foul deed themselves. Instead they passed the buck to the phony-baloney Delaware County SPCA in Media which was more than happy to oblige them. After all, the "P" in SPCA really stands for "Promotion" rather than "Prevention."

Now that the students have returned and questions are being raised concerning the cats' absence, Eastern's public relations machine has gone into overdrive. As one would expect from such skilled exploiters and corrupters of the youth, a tapestry of outright lies, self-serving platitudes, and crocodile tears has been hurriedly stitched together in order that those responsible can cover their bloodstained tracks.

Chief architect of the slaughter Bettie Ann Brigham, vice president of Student Development, told the student newspaper, The Waltonian, on February 7th, "Keeping the cats on campus would be irresponsible and inhumane. Our primary concern is student safety." (See "Eastern Cats Will Meow No More.")

Based on Brigham's warped logic, the only responsible and humane way to deal with feral cats is to remove and kill them. In other words, the only good feral cat is a dead one. It would be interesting to know however if she, a good Baptist, would extend her thinking to include homeless men and women, the elderly, and the sickly?

More importantly, the notion that all feral cats are sickly and thus a danger to the public is a complete fabrication that is trotted out time and time again as a handy excuse in order to justify extermination. The only disease of concern is rabies and it is found so rarely in cats as to be of almost no consequence.

As far as Feline Leukemia (FeLV) and the Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) are concerned, cats can live for years with both diseases. The only danger is to other cats, particularly domestic ones, but since it is unlikely that there are any pet cats running loose on campus that threat is minimal.

Being extremely wary of people, feral cats rarely get close enough to humans in order to scratch them. On those rare occasions when attacks do occur it is almost always because the cat was either cornered or being abused in some fashion. For Brigham to claim otherwise proves that she is not only a cat murderer but an inveterate liar as well.

Donna MacIntosh of Plant Operations is an even bigger prevaricator and con artist. "I feel that Plant Operations did the best we could and gave the cats the best chance for survival by taking them to the SPCA," she proclaimed to The Waltonian. "They told me they would accept the cats and they would be evaluated and put up for adoption depending on their adoptability and health."

One of Eastern's Forever Nameless and Long-Dead Campus Cats

Brigham and MacIntosh are evil but they are certainly not stupid. They know as well as everyone else that one-hundred per cent of all feral cats trapped and taken to shelters are killed upon arrival -- if not indeed en route; none of them are ever put up for adoption. For Brigham and MacIntosh to claim anything to the contrary is just one more example of their tendency to dissemble.

Actually, feral cats can be socialized to varying degrees but this requires time and effort and it is always easier and cheaper for shelters just to kill them. Besides, to claim otherwise provides another ready-made excuse to kill them.

In order to further camouflage her crimes, MacIntosh felt compelled to shed a few crocodile tears for the benefit of The Waltonian. "It is unfortunate that the cats were euthanized," she told the paper. "We had hoped for a much better outcome."

Even student Chelsea Zimmerman, who raised money for the cats, has been so bamboozled by Brigham's and MacIntosh's public relations snow job that she is now drinking the Kool-Aid. "I will miss these cats but as my heart is aching, I know that I did what was best for them," she averred to The Waltonian.

She is dead wrong, of course. It was her faux pas in bringing this matter to Brigham's attention that sealed the cats' fate. Since they had been living at Eastern for years, the administrators might have allowed them to remain there if she had not asked them to intervene.

The Waltonian is conspicuously silent concerning not only the number of cats that Eastern's highbrows had exterminated, but also on how the cats came to be living on campus in the first place. Although it is conceivable that a few of them may have wandered in or been dumped there by outsiders, the bulk of them were sans doute abandoned by students. Consequently, the university had a moral and legal obligation to them.

As part of this obligation, the university should have furnished them with shelter, food and milk, veterinary care, and vaccinations. If their numbers had become too unwieldy, the school could have instituted a sterilization program.

Eastern's dereliction of duty cannot be blamed on a lack of resources in that it makes a proverbial fortune each semester fleecing its students out of their parents' hard-earned cash. Moreover, since the campus is situated on ninety-two acres of woodland and wetland that features three lakes it has more than enough space to accommodate a few cats.

Also, since administrators and teachers have a surplus of free time on their hands, they could have been put to work feeding and cleaning up after the cats. Of course, it is pretty difficult to get any work out of the intelligentsia unless money is involved. Nonetheless, charity is supposed to be a Christian virtue.

Unfortunately, not only was the university too stingy to do even that much but it also failed abysmally in its obligation to protect the cats from abusers in that, according to the The Waltonian, several of them were deliberately drowned by ailurophobes.

Since the administration was quite obviously unwilling to care for the cats itself, it should have either found loving homes for them or contacted Alley Cat Allies or some other bona fide feline rescue group instead of the killers at the SPCA. These groups would have humanely removed them to either barns or managed colonies elsewhere.

An Unidentified Cat at Stanford University

Practically every college campus around the world has feral cats. Some of them, such as Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, follow Eastern's horrendous example and kill their cats. (See Cat Defender post of September 11, 2006 entitled "Selfish and Brutal Eggheads at Central Michigan University Target Colony of Feral Cats for Defamation and Eradication.")

Others, such as Cornell, fire employees who feed them. (See Cat Defender post of June 14, 2006 entitled "Kindhearted Dairyman, Sacked for Feeding Feral Cats, Files $20 Million Lawsuit Against Cornell University.")

Fortunately, not all universities are run by moral degenerates and ailurophobes. Most prominently, Kate Hofstra left money in her will for the continued care of the cats who live on the Hempstead, New York, campus that bears her name. (See The Chronicle of Hofstra, February 3, 2005, "Cats Find Refuge.")

It may be a bastion of conservative thinking, but when it comes to humanely dealing with its homeless cats Stanford University set the gold standard way back in 1989 when it implemented a no-kill, TNR program. Since then the Palo Alto campus's feral cat population has been humanely reduced from around five-hundred to about fifty. (See Palo Alto Weekly, September 29, 2006, "A Home for Lewis.")

At the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), a group of current and former students care for around one-hundred cats. In addition to providing food and shelter, they also vaccinate and sterilize the cats. (See El Paso Times, September 22, 2006, "Effort Helps Control Campus Cat Population.")

At California State University in Northridge (CSUN), a coalition of students, faculty members, and cat-lovers from the surrounding community care for seventy-five cats on the sprawling three-hundred-fifty-six-acre campus. (See Los Angeles Daily News, November 23, 2006, "CatPeople (sic) Struggle to Stay Solvent.")

Since students are not supposed to keep pets in their dorm rooms at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, students instead volunteer to socialize cats and to walk dogs at local shelters and pet stores. This may also help in reducing the number of cats that are abandoned on campus. (See The Daily Iowan, October 2, 2006, "Facility Helps Students Make the Pet Connection.")

With there being so many humane ways of dealing with homeless cats, Eastern University's draconian policy of exterminating them en masse is inexcusable. In addition to being morally reprehensible, it also sets a bad example for the school's students.

Actions always speak louder than words and by its behavior Eastern is saying that it is perfectly all right to kill cats if it is expedient to do so. Noted author Issac Bashevis Singer put it rather well when he once said, "As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right."

By killing the cats on the sly and then concocting ridiculous excuses and lies in order to justify its action, Eastern is providing its students with a valuable lesson on how to get away the commission of unspeakable crimes. Instead of killing cats and talking out of both sides of their mouths, administrators at Eastern and other universities should be preaching the sanctity of all life and backing up their rhetoric with food, shelter, veterinary care, and protection for cats and other animals that venture onto their campuses.

The crimes of academia's handsomely paid vivisectors are well documented but its mistreatment of feral cats is arguably its dirtiest secret. In Eastern's case, its Machiavellian administrators may have pulled the wool over the eyes of their gullible students but they have not fooled the god that they claim to worship. He has been watching and he is not amused.

Photos: Eastern University (Heritage Hall), Chelsea Zimmerman of The Waltonian (one of Eastern's former cats), and Stanford Cat Network (an unidentified cat on campus).