Bird Lovers in South Africa Break Out the Champagne to Celebrate the Merciless Gunning Down of the Last of Robben Island's Cats

"There will be no justice as long as men will stand with a knife or a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is."
-- Issac Bashevis Singer

These are certainly heady days for cat killers in South Africa. Thanks to the marksmanship of feline assassin par excellence John Kieser, the feral cat population on Nelson Mandela's old hangout, Robben Island, has been reduced to two and they are not long for this world.

With the champagne, not to mention the blood, flowing as freely as the water off of the Cape of Good Hope, both bird lovers and the moneygrubbing administrators at the Robben Island Museum have been unable to contain their glee.

As the undisputed number one cat hater in all of South Africa, University of Cape Town professor Les Underhill (See photo on the left) is overjoyed at the cats' brutal murders. "The bottom line is that the feral cat removal operation can be declared a mega-success," he crowed for the Cape Argus on March 2nd. (See "Robben Island Birds on Road to Recovery.")

Denmark Tungwana of the Museum called the slaughter of the cats "extremely good news for the island." Francesco Bandarin of UNESCO's World Heritage Center (WHC) in Paris also sent a congratulatory letter.

After all, it was his organization that had threatened to revoke the island's World Heritage Site designation if the cats were not exterminated. Of course, Underhill and his fellow neo-Nazis have been killing and abusing them for ages and scarcely needed to be goaded into action by the WHC.

Johnny-on-the-spot as always to applaud the cat killers' every word and deed was the loathsome John Yeld (See photo below on the right) of the Cape Argus. This unprincipled scoundrel and champion of one-sided reporting is everything that a good journalist should not be.

Hunting by night with the aid of powerful flashlights, Kieser admits to having shotgunned to death fifty-eight cats in 2005. During the past year he has gunned down about a hundred more. Although the authorities do not want to admit it, he probably poisoned countless more and may have used dogs to track down and kill some felines.

Kieser is an old hand when it comes to killing cats. In the early 1980s, he killed in excess of twenty-eight-hundred of them on South Africa's Marion Island by deliberately injecting them with the feline panleucopenia virus (distemper). He and his fellow assassins returned to the sub-Antarctic island between 1986 and 1988 and shotgunned to death another eight-hundred-three cats. (See Cat Defender post of March 23, 2006 entitled "South Africans, Supported by Ailurophobic PETA, Are Slaughtering More Cats on Robben Island.")

Although he has no doubt sold his services to other ailurophobes, just based on the carnage that he has inflicted on Robben and Marion islands Kieser arguably has murdered more cats than any man who has ever tramped the face of the earth. Killing would be almost too kind of an ending for this devil; he instead should have his lights put out and every bone in his body broken before being dumped in a remote place to die a slow and agonizing death. Preferably, there would be vultures nearby to pick his bones clean while he was still alive.

The murders of these cats would not have been possible without the complicity and incompetence of the Cape of Good Hope SPCA. Although it is not known what role, if any, it played in the Marion Island slaughter, its feckless behavior on Robben has been a disgrace to animal rights groups everywhere.

Initially, the group's Allan Perrins said he would allow the cats to be shot under his supervision. He then reversed himself and instead asked for time to trap and remove them. Whether he intended to trap and kill or to trap and relocate them elsewhere is unclear. (See Cat Defender post of April 27, 2006 entitled "Cat-Hating Monster Les Underhill and Moneygrubbing Robben Island Museum Resume Slaughtering Cats in South Africa.")

According to the Cape Argus article cited supra, the SPCA's trapping effort on Robben was a miserable failure. As per usual, Yeld tells readers only what he wants them to know so it is difficult to know for sure why this effort failed.

The fact that some of the felines had been trapped, sterilized, and released previously was without question a contributing factor. Notwithstanding that impediment, the failure of the enterprise can most likely be attributed to a general lack of interest and competence on the part of the SPCA.

Elsewhere around the world volunteers are able to trap most feral cats with ease. With perseverance, even the wariest of feral cats can be eventually trapped.

Unfortunately, the failure of animal rights groups in South Africa to protect the lives of cats is nothing new. (See Cat Defender posts of September 22, 2005 and October 26, 2006 entitled, respectively, "College Students in South Africa Cook a Cat to Death in a Microwave Oven" and "South Africans Evict Cats from Parliament in Cape Town and Imprison Them In Mandela's Old Hellhole.")

Not content with the blood of thousands of murdered cats on their hands, South Africa's bird lovers have now trained their sights on the island's more than three-thousand rabbits. (See photo above.) As was the case with the cats, eagle-eyed Kieser once again has been hired to gun them down in cold blood.

Once he polishes off the bunnies, the birders want him to kill the one-hundred or so fallow deer (See photo below) who also call the island home. (See Cape Argus, March 11, 2007, "Island Bunnies to Bite the Bullet.") Presumably, the rabbits and deer are to be killed because they eat grass and trees.

Farther down the line, the seals who gave the island its German name most likely also will be killed because they allegedly prey upon penguins. As it is painfully obvious, bird lovers all over the world do not brooker any opposition. (See Cat Defender post of March 15, 2007 entitled "Connecticut Audubon Society Shows Its True Colors by Calling for the Slaughter of Feral Cats, Mute Swans, Mallards, Canada Geese, and Deer.")

Cats were uprooted and shipped all around the world because of their uncanny ability to keep rodent populations in check both on board ships and in their new homes. Rabbits were likewise transplanted far and near as a cheap source of meat. The deer were brought to the island to provide sport for hunters.

From womb to tomb, the cats, rabbits, and deer of Robben Island have been pawns of the colonialists and imperialists. By their steadfast unwillingness to show these defenseless animals any respect or compassion, Underhill, Kieser et alius have exposed themselves to be even viler individuals than the Nazis.

Predictably, the South Africans' total disdain for animal life is not confined to Robben Island. In the Cape Town suburbs of Welcome Glen and Scarborough the colonialists are going after baboons. In fact, at least nineteen of them have been either shot, poisoned, killed in traps, or run down by motorists during the past year.

Eighteen trackers have been hired to chase them down busy streets while residents, such as Chris Schulz of Welcome Glen, are attacking them with, inter alia, garden hoses, slingshots, and shovels. (See photos below.)

Greedy as hell as usual, the colonialists are constantly encroaching upon the animals' habitat with new developments and this inevitably leads to conflicts and calls for the animals to be killed. Unwilling to allow the primates even a moment of privacy, the South Africans are also selling guided tours into the hills so that voyeurs can observe the animals having it off. (See Living on Earth, March 16, 2007, "Home Invasion, Baboon-Style.")

Farther east, the South Africans' imperialist cousins, the Aussies, are at it again and this time around they are slaughtering wild camels. (See photo below.) During the 1840s, the jailbirds from Old Blighty's gulags who eventually conquered Australia imported twelve-thousand of these beasts of burden in order to open up the continent to colonization.

With the emergence of automobiles and trains as the preferred modes of transportation, the camels had outlived their usefulness to their colonial masters by the 1920s and they were released into the wild. Today, they have multiplied to the point that there are about one million of them.

Although they were already targeted for elimination, the ongoing drought has prompted some of them to inflict damage upon the imperialists' precious property in their desperate search for water and this has provided the authorities with an added incentive to get rid of them. In fact, several hundred of them already have been killed by property owners while thousands more have died of dehydration.

The government therefore plans to expedite its extermination timetable and will soon commence shooting and poisoning the animals. Plans also call for an increase in the number of live animals that are to be exported to knackers in Southeast Asia. Some of these unfortunate animals are already being turned into pet food. (See London's Independent, March 15, 2007, "Drought Drives Australian Camels to Go on Rampage.")

Culled from the flotsam and jetsam of the English gutter, there never has been anything sentimental, just, or compassionate about the Australians; bloodletting, subjugation, and moneymaking are all that has ever interested them or their South African cousins. Consequently, their mass exterminations of the animals that helped them tame their new homeland does not come as any surprise.

Camels are far from being the only animals that the Aussies have targeted for elimination. In 2005, officials announced that they also were going to exterminate three-hundred-thousand horses, five-million donkeys, twenty-three-million pigs, and an undetermined number of cats, rabbits, goats, and red foxes. (See Agence France Presse, September 25, 2005, "Millions of Animals Face Death Sentence in Australia" and Cat Defender post of October 20, 2005 entitled "After Ridding Ohio Statehouse of Rats, Cats Now Find Themselves Facing Eviction.")

Most of these defenseless animals will be either gunned down from helicopters by paid killers with assault rifles or they will be done away with by poisoned bait and water. (See Cat Defender post of August 11, 2005 entitled "Barbaric Australians Come Up with an Ingenious New Poison in Order to Exterminate Cats.")

The United States is every bit as barbaric as the Australians and South Africans when it comes to declaring animals to be pests and then killing them. For instance, in 2004 Wildlife Services, a division of the discredited USDA, slaughtered 31,286 beavers, 3,236 opposums, 2,210 prairie dogs, 10,518 raccoons, 1,673 rabbits and hares, 397 black bears (mostly in New Jersey), 359 cougars, 75,674 coyotes, 3,907 foxes, 191 wolves, 72 wild turkeys, 2.3 million starlings, 22,204 crows, ravens, and blackbirds, 76,874 pigeons, 10,806 geese and swans, 15,508 sparrows, and 143 wild chickens.

In most instances, these animals were merely living out their lives as they have always done without doing any harm to anyone or anything. Financial interests, however, wanted their habitats and the authorities were only too happy to oblige their paymasters. (See Cat Defender post of September 15, 2005 entitled "United States Government Exterminates Millions of Wild Animals at the Behest of Capitalists.")

As alarming as these figures are, they do not include the tens of millions of animals that are slaughtered each year by hunters. In addition to such commonly hunted species as deer, rabbits, squirrels, ducks, and birds, tens of thousands of coyotes are shot and killed for sport at so-called coyote callings all across the country. Idaho plans to allow hunters to kill more than five-hundred gray wolves later this year as soon as it receives the final approval from the feds.

Every March, upwards of ten-thousand western diamondback rattlesnakes are gased out of their dens in and around Sweetwater, Texas and then butchered. (See Reuters, March 12, 2007, "Texas Snake Roundup Rattles Ecologists.")

A good case could be made that the English and their cousins in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere are the greediest and most bloodthirsty people who have ever lived. Without a doubt they have killed more men and animals than any other group of people. Much the same thing can be said for their environmental degradation.

As ruthless and as barbaric as they are, the English and their cousins certainly are not alone in their crimes against the animal world. In Deutschland, for example, officials are trying to decide what to do about a surplus of raccoons with the proponents of extermination currently holding sway over animal rights advocates. Imported from the United States in order to be bred and raised for their valuable pelts, these resourceful animals have long since escaped the fur farms and are now found in abundance in and around Berlin and the state of Hesse.

They are under attack from, inter alia, winegrowers in Annenwalde in the state of Brandenburg, cherry farmers in Witzenhausen, Hesse, and wildlife proponents from all over the country for allegedly raiding the nests of ducks.

Unfortunately, the Germans are following the South Africans' lead and gunning down the Waschbaeren with impunity. Last year alone more than thirty-thousand of these beautiful animals were mercilessly shot and killed.

The animals do, however, have a stout defender in Ursula Stoeter who operates a small zoo in the Brandenburg city of Krangen. (See photo above.) More importantly, she also nurtures and rehabilitates raccoons that she rescues.

"When there are problems with bird broods, there are always several reasons," she told Der Spiegel on March 9th. (See "Raccoons Invade Germany.") Humans, however, are the biggest problem, she added.

As the examples from South Africa, Connecticut, Australia, Deutschland, and elsewhere demonstrate, bird lovers are the new Nazis. It is therefore imperative that they be stopped before they can do any more damage.

Photos: University of Cape Town (Les Underhill), Herpetology in Southern Africa (John Yeld), Dave Lyung Madison (rabbit), Wikipedia (fallow deer), Terry FitzPatrick (baboons), MSNBC (camels), and Deutsche Presseagentur (Stoeter and raccoon).