The United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the Humane Society of the United States Hoist a Glass in Celebration of Their Extermination of the Cats on San Nicolas Island

"This (the mass slaughter of cats, lies, and a cover-up) will be a model of how to run other projects in the future."
-- David K. Garcelon of the Institute for Wildlife Studies

It often is said that criminals always return to the scene of their crimes and that certainly was the case on February 15th when the diabolical United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the Institute for Wildlife Studies in Arcata, the United States Navy, and their other unidentified mass murderers gathered to celebrate the successful extirpation of the cats on San Nicolas Island. Presumably, the festive occasion was held on the island itself, located off the coast of Los Angeles, but even that is shrouded in secrecy thanks to the cloak of protection afforded the killers by their collaborateurs within the detestable capitalist media.

The sordid details of this exercise in the macabre have not been disclosed but it certainly would not have been anything out of the ordinary if these inveterate cat-haters had toasted themselves with feline blood that they chug-a-lugged from goblets fashioned out of their victims' skulls. Just as miscreants who abuse cats and homeless men seldom pass up an opportunity to make a record of their crimes so that they can relive their devilry over and over again, the pièce-de-résistance of the gathering likely included graphic videos and photographs of the killers torturing, slaughtering, and dissecting cats.

Such exercises are de rigueur with cat-hating ornithologists, wildlife biologists, and the United States Government. For example, in early 2007 Les Underhill of the University of Cape Town, dishonest journalist John Yeld of the Cape Argus, and their fellow like-minded cretins staged a party to celebrate the extermination of the cats on Robben Island. (See Cat Defender posts of March 23, 2007, April 27, 2006, and March 23, 2006 entitled, respectively, "Bird Lovers in South Africa Break Out the Champagne to Celebrate the Merciless Gunning Down of the Last of Robben Island's Cats," "Cat-Hating Monster Les Underhill and Moneygrubbing Robben Island Museum Resume Slaughtering Cats in South Africa," and "South Africans, Supported by Ailurophobic PETA, Are Slaughtering More Cats on Robben Island.")

On Marion Island, Professor Marthán Bester and his colleagues at the University of Pretoria liquidated at least thirty-four-hundred cats between 1977 and 1991 by infecting them with the feline panleukopenia virus, poison, and shotgun blasts to the head. Still not satisfied with that horrendous crime, the killers, accompanied as usual by the unscrupulous Yeld, journeyed to the island again last March in order to relive the thrill of killing defenseless cats. (See Cape Argus, March 29, 2011, "Marion's Slow Recovery from Feral Felines.")

Aristotle once observed that the worst criminals are those who derive infinite pleasure from the despicable crimes that they commit and that description certainly is à propos to all ornithologists and wildlife biologists. No one therefore ever should make the fatal mistake of underestimating these supremely evil monsters because they truly are capable of almost any crime. In fact, the only thing that trumps their lust for feline blood and their overbearing insolence is their outrageous mendacity.

When the USFWS and the Navy announced in May of 2008 their plans to exterminate the cats they admitted that there were more than two-hundred of them living on the island. Since the island is closed to the public and all cat advocacy groups were deliberately excluded from both the decision making process and the slaughter, no one outside the circle of killers is able to say with any measure of certainty exactly how many cats were killed. The number very well could have been in the thousands.

For whatever it is worth, the HSUS claims to have rescued fifty-two of the cats which it has imprisoned at its Fund for Animals Wildlife Center in Ramona. Supposedly, fifteen of them have been adopted with a dozen more awaiting homes at $75 apiece.

The remaining twenty-five are said to be undergoing socialization but even that is a dubious claim in that the last cat was reportedly removed from the island way back in 2010. (See photos above and below of some of the cats allegedly rescued from San Nicolas Island.)

In allowing the HSUS to save those cats the USFWS mandated that they had to be imprisoned indoors for the remainder of their lives even though they had been removed from its precious little reincarnation of Doctor Moreau's island. Even those who agree to adopt them must sign a contract agreeing to adhere to the USFWS's diktat.

That still leaves at least one-hundred-fifty cats unaccounted for although all of them surely are long dead by this time. According to the USFWS's announced plans, they were to have been either shotgunned to death, killed off by veterinarians, ripped to shreds by dogs brought to the island to hunt them down, or killed in leghold traps. The USFWS claims that it did not use poison but it least considered not only using it but the panleukopenia virus as well.

"This is a big step toward bringing the island back to a natural system," Jen Boyce of the Montrose Settlement Restoration Program (MSRP) crowed to discredited Zeke Barlow of the Ventura County Star of Camarillo on February 16th. (See "Cats Officially Gone from San Nicolas Island.")

As it might be recalled, between 1945 and 1982 Montrose Chemicals of Torrance dumped tons of DDT and PCBs into the Pacific Ocean which in turn contaminated the entire food chain from microorganisms to fish. Birds and mammals who then ate the fish became contaminated themselves.

In particular, this contamination decimated the population of bald eagles and led to a decline in Brandt's Cormorants. (See Cat Defender post of June 27, 2008 entitled "United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the Navy Hatch a Diabolical Plan to Gun Down Two-Hundred Cats on San Nicolas Island.")

After sitting on their fat duffs and twiddling their thumbs for decades the United States Government and the State of California belatedly took legal action against Montrose and three smaller concerns and at the end of all the legal wrangling they walked away with a cool $140 million in their bulging coffers. A six-headed beast comprised of the USFWS, the National Park Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the California Department of Fish and Game, California State Lands Commission, and the California Department of Parks and Recreation then was welded into the MSRP.

With all that power and public money at its disposal MSRP began searching around for some animal to sock it to and settled on the cats of San Nicolas. C'est-à-dire, even though Montrose was allowed to destroy the ecosystem with the complicity of the USFWS, the cats of San Nicolas were singled out to pay the ultimate price.


The twisted logic and total absence of anything remotely resembling a moral compass that guides the USFWS in its decision making is simply mind-boggling. Quite obviously, it is a rogue and fascist organization that recognizes neither legal nor moral constraints of any sort.

Initially, $1,854,100 was allocated for the eradication but recent reports now put the total expenditure at $3 million. Furthermore, the added expense cannot be attributed to the HSUS's efforts to save fifty-two of the cats because, as far as it is known, the USFWS did not give the HSUS so much as a sou.

That is because although the HSUS did manage to cadge $100,000 from the now defunct search engine, Do Great Good, it otherwise was reduced to begging the public for contributions. As most knowledgeable individuals know only too well, it is totally beyond the pale that the organization ever would spend so much as a lousy penny of its annual budget of $120 million on saving the life of a cat. (See Humane Watch, November 9, 2011, "Responding to HSUS's Dodges and Disinformation.")

No matter how the situation is analyzed the $3 million price tag is a rather princely sum just to murder one-hundred-fifty cats. That fact alone tends to suggest that the feline death toll on San Nicolas was far greater than the public has been led to believe.

Of course, it would not come as any surprise if the USFWS and its accomplices in crime simply stole a lion's share of the money. Either way, there cannot be any denying that slaughtering cats en masse is a highly lucrative profession.

In addition to the cats recently exterminated by the USFWS, the Navy and its subalterns have been trapping and shooting them ever since it was given control of the island in 1933. Bird enthusiast Grace Smith, for example, brags nonstop about killing cats on San Nicolas for more than twenty years. (See her ugly mug below.)

Even more outrageously, it was precisely the sailing boys who brought the cats to the island in the first place in order to serve as mousers. They then almost immediately turned around and stopped feeding, watering, sheltering, and medicating them. Instead of instituting a TNR program, they cruelly abandoned them to their own desserts and later starting extirpating them.

If the anti-cruelty laws in this country counted for anything other than eyewash, the Navy would be charged with multiple counts of neglect and abandonment on top of being held accountable for those cats that it has killed. The same logic is equally applicable to all branches of America's bloated and bloodthirsty military establishment and their mistreatment, abuse, and slaughter of cats and other animals at home as well as abroad. (See Cat Defender posts of November 14, 2006, June 16, 2008, and July 16, 2009 entitled, respectively, "Military Killing Cats and Dogs by the Tens of Thousands as Imperialistic America Attempts to Conquer the World," "Targeted for Elimination by the American War Machine and Cheney's Henchmen, Baghdad's Cats Are Befriended by an English Mercenary," and "Yellow Two Is Shot and Maimed for Life at Fort Hood in the United States Army's Latest Criminal Offense Against Cats.")

The Navy's mistreatment of San Nicolas's cats is not the least bit surprising in light of the thousands of illegitimate, half-breed children that the military as a whole cruelly and irresponsibly leaves behind to fend for themselves whenever it embarks upon one of its periodic imperialistic misadventures. That is in addition to all the rapes that its enlisted personnel and officers commit and the sexually transmitted diseases that they so indiscriminately spread.

Viewed dispassionately from outside the prism of red, white, and blue patriotism, the military, USFWS, and most federal agencies amount to little more than an amorphous collection of glorified welfare bums, crooks, and murderers who are pursuing agendas that are inimical to the best interests of the animals, Mother Earth, and mankind. Their specialty lies, however, in obliterating anything and anyone that either is no longer of any use to them or poses the slightest threat to their totalitarianism.

The only conceivable way of getting to the bottom of what actually happened on San Nicolas would be through the filing of lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act against both the USFWS and the Navy. It would no doubt take considerable doing but eventually both departments would be compelled by law to disclose how many cats they have murdered, the means used, and the disposition of their corpses.

Complicating matters further, such an undertaking would have to be instigated by private individuals because all of the so-called feline advocacy groups are too preoccupied counting their shekels and sucking up to those in authority in order to be troubled. It is axiomatic that since they refused to act in order to save the cats' lives that they could care even less about establishing the truth and holding the killers accountable.

Despite the enormous money and power that the feds have seized since 1945 the mass slaughter on San Nicolas would not have been possible without the complicity of the HSUS. "The Humane Society of the United States is the nation's largest animal protection agency and considers the Preferred Alternative of padded leghold traps and shooting cats as inhumane regardless of how this EA (Environmental Assessment) labels and defends this strategy," the organization's Nancy Peterson wrote in a letter to the USFWS on June 17, 2008. (See Re: Comments on the Environmental Assessment for the San Nicolas Island Seabird Restoration Project.") "...In absolutely no case should USFWS shoot cats on San Nicolas Island."

For reasons that never have been explained, Peterson and the HSUS shortly thereafter did a quick about-face and decided to wholeheartedly support the eradication. (See Cat Defender post of April 28, 2009 entitled "Quislings at the Humane Society Sell Out San Nicolas's Cats to the Assassins at the Diabolical United States Fish and Wildlife Service.")

Even since that time the HSUS has kept its trap closed tighter than the vault to Fort Knox regarding the hundreds of cats that it delivered on a silver platter to the USFWS's assassins. Instead, it has busied itself staging a series of public relations stunts, such as the ones held in May and August of 2009 and February of this year, where it has congratulated itself for saving a few dozen of them.


"This project is a testament to the commitment of multiple agencies to find common ground and develop solutions for feral cats in areas with threatened or endangered species," Peterson's colleague, Betsy McFarland, thundered in a November 3, 2009 press release. (See "The HSUS and Fund for Animals Dedicate Habitat for San Nicolas Island Cats.") "The cats from San Nicolas Island deserve the opportunity to live a full and happy life, and we're proud to provide that at our sanctuary."

If McFarland is truly sincere, the HSUS should amend the motto of its shelter in Ramona from "We speak for those who can't" to "We speak for a minute few of those who can't if and when the money and politics are conducive for us to do so."

By extension, if the HSUS is extremely proud of saving only a handful of cats it simply must be overjoyed that it allowed the overwhelming majority of them to be mowed down by the USFWS's assassins. Moreover, it is a debatable point just how much of a "full and happy life" that the free-roaming exiles from San Nicolas will be able to enjoy incarcerated indoors, under unspecified conditions, for life. (See Cat Defender post of November 20, 2009 entitled "Memo to the Humane Society: Tell the World Exactly How Many Cats You and Your Honeys at the USFWS Have Murdered on San Nicolas Island.")

Actually, the HSUS never has been much of a supporter of cats. In fact, up until as recently as 2006 it referred to TNR as "subsidized abandonment." More recently, it has been conspiring with fraudulent groups, such as Neighborhood Cats in Manhattan, in order to undermine the prerogatives of the volunteers who take care of managed colonies.

That is another sinister plot in the HSUS's grand design to sell all cats down the river to wildlife biologists, ornithologists, governmental officials, and other cat-haters. (See Cat Defender post of June 15, 2009 entitled "American Bird Conservancy, The New York Times, and the Humane Society Unite to Form as Achse des Bösen Against Cats.")

The USFWS, Navy, and their allies additionally have benefited enormously from the blatant dishonesty of the capitalist media. They all are guilty of covering up and lying about what has occurred on San Nicolas but Barlow of the Ventura County Star is by far the most mendacious of a bad lot.

He is in fact so prejudiced that his dispatches read like press release that have been scripted by the USFWS. (See Cat Defender post of July 10, 2008 entitled "The Ventura County Star Races to the Defense of the Cat-Killers on San Nicolas Island.")

Novelist Pete Dexter's simply priceless characterization of the Washington Post's literary critic, Jonathan Yardley, as a "worn-out old whore" fits thoroughly unscrupulous journalists like Barlow and Yeld like a glove fits the hand. (See Salon, March 9, 2007, "Street Writing Man.")

There are many individuals, groups, and institutions that share the blame for the precipitate decline that has occurred in the United States since 1970 but none of them are more deserving of censure than the capitalist media. Anyone who reads English, Deutsche, and French newspapers realizes only too well how poorly Americans are served by their counterparts.

The voluminous offerings of Hollywood, radio, television, Madison Avenue, publishing companies, the universities, and professional sports franchises are worth only about one per cent of both the revenue and acclaim that they receive. "The dullest wire services the world has ever seen fill their little monopoly newspapers with self-congratulatory pap. Their radio is unspeakable. Their television is geared to minimal approval of thirty million of them. And anything thirty million people like, aside from their private functions, is bound to be bad," John D. MacDonald opined in his novel, The Quick Red Fox.

"Their schools are group-adjustment centers, fashioned to shame the rebellious. Their churches are weekly votes of confidence in God. Their politicians are enormously likable, never saying a cross word. The goods they buy grow increasingly more shoddy each year, though brighter in color. For those who still read, they make do, for the most part, with the portentous gruntings of Uris, Wouk, Rand and others of that same witless ilk. Their magazine fare is fashioned by nervous committees," he continued. "...there is no one left to ask them a single troublesome question. Such as: where have you been and where are you going and is it worth it. They are the undisturbed. The Sleep-Lovers."

MacDonald penned that critique way back in 1964 and long before the monopolists seized control over what the masses are allowed to read and hear. Despite the advent of the Internet, deciphering the truth has become even more difficult.

Although the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of cats on San Nicolas was horrific enough in its own right, it is merely the apéritif in a laundry list of similar exterminations that wildlife biologists and ornithologists have planned for cats all over the world. "The size and scope of this project set the bar for other similar ones," David K. Garcelon of the Institute of Wildlife Studies, who reportedly bagged his share of cats on San Nicolas, boldly predicted to the Ventura County Star in the article cited supra. "This will be a model to run other projects in the future." (See photo of him on the left below.)

For roughly the past one-hundred years or so, wildlife biologists and ornithologists have been using remote islands scattered around the world as the incubators for their feline eradication schemes. To date, cats have been systematically exterminated on more than one-hundred of them.

The latest such extirpation recently occurred on Tasman Island. (See Australian Broadcasting Company, March 31, 2011, "Island Cull Saves Seabirds.")



In the Channel Islands alone, cats have been liquidated on San Miguel, Santa Cruz, Anacapa, and Santa Barbara. Those living on Santa Catalina and San Clemente are destined for a similar fate unless the USFWS is stopped.

Most of these eradications have taken place far from the maddening crowd on islands that either are closed to the public or virtually inaccessible because of their remoteness. Consequently, the cat-killers are allowed to commit their dastardly crimes pretty much in secret.

Those conditions, coupled with the mendacity of the capitalist media and politicians, also ensures that the big, fat lies uttered by wildlife biologists and ornithologists are accepted not only as gospel but, more importantly, as the first and last word on the subject. The islands' remoteness additionally allows the cat-haters to experiment with various extermination methodologies, whether it be deadly diseases, new poisons, kill traps, or guns, and to thus hone their killing expertise to a fine razor's edge.

Having perfected their lies and extermination methodologies, wildlife biologists and ornithologists now are ready to practice their craft on the mainland. The USFWS's stipulation that those few cats saved from San Nicolas be confined indoors until the day that they die is the most poignant example of what it has in store for the species.

Just as it co-opted the HSUS into stooging for it on San Nicolas, the USFWS worked the same deal last year with phony-baloney feline protection groups in the Florida Keys. (See Cat Defender post of June 23, 2011 entitled "Wallowing in Welfare Dollars, Lies, and Prejudice, the Bloodthirsty United States Fish and Wildlife Service Is Again Killing Cats in the Florida Keys.")

Even when it is not actually killing cats, the USFWS is gallivanting around the world maligning TNR. For example, last November it and The Wildlife Society staged an anti-TNR hatefest in Waikoloa, Hawaii. (See Care2.com, November 3, 2011, "USFWS to Hold Anti-TNR Workshop.")

The scope of the extirpations planned by wildlife biologists and ornithologists is by no means limited to cats. In the Channel Islands, for example, pigs, dogs, and golden eagles also have been eradicated.

The South Africans also have gone after rabbits, deer, and other species on Robben. On Macquarie, the Australians' extirpation of cats was followed by offensives directed against rabbits and rats. (See Cat Defender post of September 21, 2006 entitled "Aussies' Mass Extermination of Cats Opens the Door for Mice and Rabbits to Wreak Havoc on Macquarie.")

In Connecticut, for instance, the local chapter of the National Audubon Society wants to liquidate practically all animals from the landscape except for a few species of songbirds. (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.")

If Michael Hutchins of The Wildlife Society is allowed to have his way the wild horses of Currituck National Wildlife Refuge on the Outer Banks of North Carolina also will be extirpated. (See The Wildlife Society's press release of April 7, 2011, "The Wildlife Society Testifies Before Congress on Feral Horse Management. Recommends Keeping Numbers Low to Minimize Impacts on Wildlife.")

In that light it is illustrative to point out that the cowardly and mendacious Hutchins is very adept at picking his targets. Although he glories in killing defenseless cats and horses, he never seemingly has a cross word to say about the detrimental impact that cattlemen, sheepherders, developers, oil and natural gas extraction concerns, the military, nuclear power plants, hunters, and polluters have on wildlife and the environment.

Perhaps the most ambitious and barbaric en masse extermination ever planned was announced in 2005 by Australia. In particular, it is now in the process of poisoning and shooting, inter alia, 500,000 camels, 300,000 horses, five million donkeys, twenty-three million pigs, and innumerable cane toads, red foxes, goats, rabbits and, of course, cats. (See Agence France Presse, September 25, 2005, "Millions of Animals Face Death Sentence in Australia.")

All of those doomed animals were cruelly uprooted from their homelands and imported by the colonialists in order to assist them in subjugating the Aborigines. They then were abandoned and left to fend for themselves once their cold-blooded exploiters and killers no longer needed them.

One way or another, the elites always seem to come out on top. They commit every despicable crime underneath the sun and yet they seldom are held accountable for any of their offenses.

Maybe it is passé to any longer care about animals, Mother Earth, humanity, democracy, and even the truth. Nevertheless, all those who have remained silent in the face of the USFWS's diabolical crimes on San Nicolas, the Florida Keys, and elsewhere are destined to rue the day once once a team of its trained assassins comes goose-stepping down Main Street in search of cats to gun down.

Even those who do not care about cats have reason for concern in that individuals who would so mistreat animals are highly unlikely to think even twice about doing likewise to people should they ever be presented with the right opportunity.

Photos: Hayne Palmour IV of the North County Times (cats), Jason Redmond of the Ventura County Star (Smith), and Institute for Wildlife Studies (Garcelon).