The Slimy, Underhanded, and Utterly Despicable New York Times Fabricates Another One-Sided, Scurrilous Screed Against Cats and This Time Around the Target of Its Libels Is a TNR Colony at the Googleplex in Mountain View

David Streitfeld 

"The strength of facts. The power of truth. Reporting stories you can trust."
-- The New York Times' preposterous assertion on its web site

In his much celebrated 1906 publication, The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines a liar as "a lawyer with a roving commission," which is a fair enough assessment in its own right. If he were alive today, however, he would be a good deal closer to the truth if he were to substitute The New York Times with its worldwide circulation for the word lawyer.

For example, never having cared so much as a rat's ass for either the truth or fair play, the members of the Sulzberger Gang were up to their old underhanded tricks once again on May 26th when they served up yet still another propaganda offensive against cats. This time around the object of The Times' libels and outright lies were the sixty-eight cats that belong to a managed colony located on the grounds of the sprawling Googleplex in Mountain View, sixty-two kilometers south of San Francisco, and whom the newspaper falsely blames for a precipitate decline in the burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia) population in adjacent Shoreline Park.

In order to grease the skids for the cats' eventual demise, The Times called upon a menteur à triple étage by the name of David Streitfeld who not only lacks a background in ecological issues but, if online reports are credible, never has even so much as attended college. Yet in spite of lacking that usual prerequisite, he has been able to easily secure more than twenty years' worth of plum assignments scribbling about technology for not only The Times but the likes of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times as well.

Of course, it goes almost without saying that those who gnaw on the same moldy bagel and slobber over the same bowl of rancid matzo ball soup as those doing the hiring always have a leg up on the competition. Being every bit as bereft of ability, honesty, and integrity as management is another huge advantage that the Streitfelds of this world enjoy; after all, birds of the same rotten feather flock together.

Furthermore, this is not the first time that Streitfeld's accuracy and fairness have been called into question; au contraire, he apparently is not even a competent business reporter. (See hughhowey.com, September 15, 2014, "David Streitfeld Is Dangerous and Disingenuous" and Business Insider, February 14, 2011, "David Streitfeld Knows Better Than This.")

Yet in spite of all of that, Streitfeld has the chutzpah to brag about having won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013. That in itself tells the world all that it ever needs to know about those who hand out those awards in that singling out a no-account, rotten bum like Streitfeld for excellence in journalism would be the equivalent of the National Organization for Women designating Harvey Weinstein as its "Man of the Year."

True to form like all inveterate liars, he wasted no time by declaring from the outset that "only in Shoreline Park are the newcomers eating the natives." Leaving aside for the time being that it never has been proven that cats in general and those belonging to the Googleplex in particular are responsible for the decline in burrowing owls, Streitfeld is wrong in assuming that the owls are native to Shoreline Park and that the cats are interlopers.

Mountain View purchased that particular tract of land, now totaling seven-hundred-fifty acres, in 1968 with the intention of turning it into a recreation area but the cost of trucking in huge amount of dirt in order to raise it to twenty feet above sea level so as to prevent future flooding proved to be too costly and that idea was abandoned. The record is not clear but apparently before that time the area was either flooded a good deal of the time or totally under water and that in turn makes it highly unlikely that there were either any burrowing owls or cats to be found on the premises.

Mountain View instead chose to fill in the area the cheap way by importing garbage from San Francisco. By 1983, however, the city reckoned that it had collected enough refuse so as to belatedly transform the area into Shoreline Park.

Whether it was the owls or the cats that arrived first on the scene is unclear but regardless of that it surely must have been tough sledding for any and all creatures owing to the methane fires that periodically broke out, the toxic ground underneath, and the occasional flooding that stubbornly persisted. Much more to the point, the area never was intended to be exclusively a wildlife refuge and that clearly can be seen by the wholesale development that rapidly ensued.

Most notably, there is Shoreline Golf Links which boasts an eighteen-hole course, a pro shop, driving range, and a fifty-acre artificial lake. Also located in the park are the Shoreline Aquatic Center, which features sailing, surfing, and rowing, the Shoreline Cafe, Michael's at Shoreline, a restaurant, the Shoreline Amphitheatre, and the transplanted Rengstorff House.

Press reports claim that by sometime in the 1980's hundreds of burrowing owls had settled in Shoreline Park but those same dispatches fail to make any mention whatsoever of cats. Nevertheless, that does not preclude the distinct possibility that they were living there then and possibly even before the owls arrived.

None of that has prevented Stephanie Ellis of the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society (SCVAS) from putting in a claim of exclusivity on behalf of the owls. "Studies have shown cats kill millions of birds a year," she bellowed to the Mountain View Voice of Palo Alto on April 2, 2014. (See "Council Balks at Controversial Cat Rules.") "Cats are not (a) native species and they are not in decline however they are putting birds at risk that are in decline."

From there she went on to showcase not only her prejudices but abysmal ignorance as well. "If you remove cats the argument is more will move in, but feeding areas and cat colonies are actually attractive to other cats because of pheromones," she declared.

As any simpleton should know, cats that belong to managed colonies, such as those that are cared for by GCat Rescue at the Googleplex, are sterilized before being released and as such their mating days are a thing of the past. Even when they have not been altered it is not unusual for an alpha male to drive out the other toms so that he can have a lion's share of the available females for himself.

While she was busily divesting cats of any and all rights to live in Shoreline Park, Ellis conveniently failed to mention that her organization has been removing owls from the park in order to relocate them to a raptor breeding facility in Idaho. The birds' eggs are then returned to nests in the park, Moffett Federal Airfield near Sunnyvale, and the Alviso section of San Jose to, hopefully, be raised by other owls.

That may or may not be a good idea from a conservation standpoint but there cannot be any disputing that is absurd for the SCVAS to claim that such fledglings are native to Shoreline Park. Mercifully, Old "Smell Us" Ellis has since then left the SCVAS and the Bay Area in favor of Eastham, Massachusetts, where she now spews her prejudices, lies, and filth for the benefit of Wild Care Incorporated; California's loss has become the Bay State's gain.

It also is imperative to point out that GCat Rescue was not formed until 2010 and that the burrowing owls in Shoreline Park were in decline long before then. In fact, the birds have been listed as a species of special concern by the California Fish and Game Commission ever since the late 1970's.

They additionally are listed as a species of special concern in another ten states as well as being endangered in Canada and threatened in Mexico. In North and South American as a whole, however, they are listed as a species of "least concern" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Gland, Switzerland.

In North America, the IUCN blames the USDA's Wildlife Services for its annual mass slaughter of prairie dogs, in whose burrows the owls often nest, for their decline. The appropriation of their habitats by farmers, miners, oil companies, developers, and others is putting additional pressure on the birds.

Much more importantly, it is not cats that the IUCN blames for the birds' decline but rather motorists, badgers, coyotes, snakes, and dogs. Whereas conditions and threats vary by location and circumstances, it is difficult to see how that GCat Rescue's TNR program is harming the owls.

For instance, over the course of the past eight years the charity has trapped two-hundred-thirty-eight cats and found homes for one-hundred-forty-nine of them. Besides, the sixty-eight of them that it has returned to the Googleplex it and, presumably, its partners at the Humane Society of Silicon Valley in Milpitas, have killed twenty-one others.

Some estimates put the number of homeless cats in Santa Clara County at one-hundred-twenty-five-thousand and some of them may have been dumped in Shoreline Park and thus missed by GCat Rescue which does not trap there. The Silicon Valley Animal Control Authority (SVACA) of Santa Clara does admittedly trap about a dozen cats annually in the vicinity of Shoreline Park but it is believed that most of them are returned to GCat Rescue under its Feral Freedom Program. It does, however, kill other cats that it traps in Mountain View and during 2013 its kill-rate was a whopping sixteen per cent.

It thus seems clear that ornithologists and wildlife biologists should be commending, not excoriating, GCat Rescue for removing and finding homes for the cats that have been so cruelly abandoned at the Googleplex. The cats that it has killed are another matter altogether and the charity accordingly should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for its crimes.

None of those nuances are to be found in Streitfeld's drivel. First of all, he purposefully neglects to inform readers of The Times of the owls' IUCN classification.

A Trio of Burrowing Owls

Instead, he further confounds the issue by, on the one hand, claiming that only a "handful" of them remain in Shoreline Park while, on the other hand, stating there there are only fifty of the birds left in Silicon Valley. That, supposedly, is his backhanded way of accusing the cats of killing burrowing owls throughout Silicon Valley even though it is difficult to see how that he arrived at that conclusion since he, as far as it has been revealed, only toured the Googleplex.

Nevertheless, this slicker from Manhattan goes on to categorically declare that all the cats in Shoreline Park are the product of the Googleplex. Yet, he simultaneously pleads total ignorance as to the number of cats that GCat Rescue has sterilized and released.

Given Streitfeld's extreme prejudice and agenda, it is not the least bit surprising what he did next. First of all, he claims to have sent an unspecified number of e-mail letters to GCat Rescue that went unanswered.

Following that, he claims to have contacted an unidentified spokeswoman from Google who refused to discuss the matter with him. Readers of The Times only have his word as to what actually transpired but it certainly would appear in hindsight that he never wanted GCat Rescue's side of the story in the first place; rather, his agenda from the get-go was to smear cats and their advocates and that is precisely what he proceeded to do.

First of all, if he had so much as an honest bone in his malignant carcass he would have either interviewed someone from GCat Rescue or refrained from writing his one-sided pack of lies. If he did in fact contact the charity and was refused an interview it was only because it is well aware of The New York Times' biases and therefore did not trust him to fairly present its side of the story.

Besides, if he had had the slightest bit of interest in telling the cats' side of the story he easily could have contacted Fat Cat Rescue of Mountain View, the Palo Alto Humane Society, the Humane Society of Silicon Valley, the SVACA, or any number of feline rescue groups in the Bay Area. Failing that, he always could have contacted either Louise Holton of Alley Cat Rescue in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, or Becky Robinson of Alley Cat Allies in Bethesda, Maryland.

If he had been too lazy to have done any of that, he simply could have researched the issue online. Presumably, the billionaires who own The New York Times provide their scribes with computers.

For example, Fat Cat Rescue's dire warning regarding the consequences of outlawing TNR is easily found on the web. "The best we can do is manage the population," a spokesman for the group told the Mountain View Voice in the April 2, 2014 article cited supra. "The volunteers will not be doing the trapping and you will have an explosion of the population and it will backfire."

After having purposefully and systematically excluded all cat advocacy groups from the debate, Streitfeld proceeded to call to the witness box no fewer than six die-hard cat-haters to bash the species with impunity One of them was an unidentified wildlife biologist who works for the city of Mountain View and he wasted no time in telling The Times that he was worried about the cats' "significant impacts" on "especially burrowing owls."

He next called upon bicyclist and photographer Johanna van de Woestijne who not only groused about seeing cats in the park but supplied him with, presumably gratis, a series of snaps that she has taken of the cats. One of them purports to show a cat making its way through the tall grass with something in its mouth but it is impossible to tell even if it is another animal, let alone what species.

Another of her snaps shows a cat streaking across a barren expanse of ground that she alleges is inside the park. That very well could be the case but the public only has hers and Streitfeld's word for it.

Nevertheless, contrary to what she and Streitfeld would have the world to believe, those two photographs serve only to discredit their smear campaign. That is because if inveterate cat-haters such as them had in their possession photographic evidence of any cat killing an owl there can be little doubt that they would have splashed it all over both The Times and the Internet. Given that they have not done so, they surely must not have such evidence in their possession and as a consequence they have instead resorted to innuendoes and circumstantial evidence.

Streitfeld even goes further by insinuating that cats killed three owls in 2015 alone. "The remains of an owl -- a leg, a wing, a few scattered feathers -- were found here in 2015, shortly after a feral cat was seen stalking it," he declares. "Another owl was discovered dead in its burrow, and a third disappeared that year and was presumed killed."

Since both he and Woestijne have plenty of money and nothing better to do with their time and talents than to attack cats, they easily could have had necropsies performed on the remains of the two dead owls but they were not about to do that because they are not only too cheap and lazy to have done so but scared to death that the examinations might have shown that the owls had died from something other than being attacked by a cat.

Toward the end of his spiel, Streitfeld claims that a cat belonging to GCat Rescue was trapped twice last year by the SVACA only to later be found dead in the park during the month of August. He does not, however, shed any tears over the cat's demise or, much more pertinently, even speculate as to its cause of death.

That is because The New York Times, ornithologists, and wildlife biologists fervently believe that they are endowed with a carte blanche right to kill cats with impunity. If either the SVACA or GCat Rescue were doing their jobs, they would have demanded that a police inquiry had been opened into the cat's death. Perhaps either Woetijne or one of her cat-hating confederates killed it.

Shani Kleinhaus of the SCVAS not only lambasted GCat Rescue, but conscientious private citizens as well, for feeding cats. "It's a problem," she cried her eyes out to The New York Times. "Many of the avian species around the Bay breed on or close to the ground, and the cats prey on them at their most vulnerable moments -- sitting on their eggs caring for their young."

Streitfeld, who could not be bothered with contacting so much as one supporter of the cats, did have more than enough time to go on a leisurely tour of GCat Rescue's feeding stations and winterized shelters that was conducted by none other than Eileen McLaughlin of the Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge (the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge) of Palo Alto. Not surprisingly, she, the SCVAS, and Woestijne have been lobbying Google to scrap its TNR initiative ever since 2012.

"They told us it was something their employees were doing and they couldn't interfere," she groused to The New York Times. "We lose the owls, we lose something else next, and then something else. We need biodiversity."

Finally, in order to round out his hatchet job, Streitfeld went to considerable effort in order to dredge up Travis R. "Hardcore Cat-Hater" Longcore of Los Angeles. He even was studious enough in order to include in his article a link to one of his anti-cat rants.

"Cats that are fed still hunt. Even neutered cats and spayed cats hunt," he pontificated to The Times. "If you have an outdoor cat sanctuary, you can expect there to be consequences to the native wildlife."

"Hardcore" Longcore, as it might be recalled by some, teaches geography at both UCLA and the University of Southern California but he is perhaps better known for his work with the Urban Wildlands Group which in 2009 was able to successfully persuade Thomas I. McKnew, Jr. of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County to ban the city of Los Angeles from implementing its own TNR program. (See the Los Angeles Daily News of Woodland Hills, December 18, 2009, "Court Ruling Barring Los Angeles from Sterilizing Feral Cats Stirs Controversy" and The Daily Breeze of Torrance, October 3, 2013, "Proposed Los Angeles City Policy Would Ban Feeding Feral Cats Near Sensitive Habitats.")

Sticking it to cats has become such great fun at UCLA that "Hardcore" Longcore's fellow cartographer, Gregory S. Okin, is on record as begrudging them, and dogs, of the enjoyment of their daily bread. (See PLOS ONE, May 2, 2017, "Environmental Impacts of Food Consumption by Dogs and Cats," The Washington Post, August 4, 2017, "The Hidden Costs of Dog and Cat Food," and Deutsche Welle, August 8, 2017, "Your Cat Is Killing the Earth -- but You Can Prevent It.")

There can be little doubt, however, that "Hardcore" Longcore has a big mouth and that he knows how to use it but that which is often overlooked is the petit fait that he also is an unabashed liar. For instance, for this prancing and strutting map jockey to declare that cats hunt and chase is not only superfluous but disingenuous and designed to take advantage of the feeble-minded.

That is demonstrated by the well-known fact that most cats will chase almost anything. For instance, does their penchant for chasing strings automatically transform them into murderers of yarn? According to "Hardcore" Longcore that is surely the case.

Many shelters are guilty of indulging in the same patented dishonesty. They do so by ramming pens and pencils through the bars of cages holding imprisoned cats and when the occupants respond by grabbing at the objects they pronounce them on the spot to be wild as a pretext for snuffing out their lives en masse.

One of GCat Rescue's Feeding Stations That Birders Want Removed

Since cats will chase almost anything, they do sometimes chase birds but what despisers of the species, such as "Hardcore" Longcore, Woestijne, Kleinhuas, and McLaughlin, purposefully conceal from the uninitiated is that they seldom catch them. If anyone ever bothered to honestly look into the matter they soon would discover that innumerable homeowners have backyards that are chock-full of both cats and songbirds. Some of those birds are so fearless and adept at avoiding the cats that they repeatedly help themselves to their vittles and water.

Most outrageous of all, ornithologists' holier-than-thou attitude serves as convenient smokescreen in order to cover up the fact that birds, including owls, feast on cats. Furthermore, these attacks and killings not only occur in rural areas but also in strictly urban settings.

Many of these city-dwelling birds of prey are likewise fed and protected by ornithologists and others who are beside themselves with joy every time that they either kill or maim for life a cat. (See Cat Defender posts of July 31, 2006, August 14, 2008, August 1, 2011, and February 16, 2012 entitled, respectively, "A Fifteen-Year-Old Cat Named Bamboo Miraculously Survives Being Abducted and Mauled by a Hoot Owl in British Columbia," "Birds Killing Cats: Blackie Is Abducted by a Sea Gull and Then Dropped but Her Fall Is Broken by a Barbed-Wire Fence," "Eddie Is Saved by an Outdoor Umbrella after He Is Abducted from the Balcony of His Manhattan Apartment and Then Dropped by a Retailed Hawk," and "Hawk Suffers Puncture Wounds to His Stomach and One Paw When He Is Abducted by a Raptor Hired to Patrol a City Dump on Vancouver Island.")

When the total number of cats and kittens that are killed each year by birds is added to the total that ornithologists and wildlife biologists extirpate en masse it surely dwarfs by a wide margin the number of birds that cats kill. The unwillingness of "Hardcore" Longcore and other despisers of the species to own up to that is their biggest lie of all.

With one day of the week devoted to making the rounds signing up for the various checks that he receives, another day spent collecting and cashing them, and the remaining ones given over to strutting, preening, admiring his reflection in mirrors and windows as he passes by, "Hardcore" Longcore never has been able to find much time to engage in any halfway serious intellectual toil and why should he? He already is making a pretty penny spreading lies about cats.

When Mark Tapley was asked to draw a verbal picture of the United States in Charles Dickens' 1844 novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, he rendered the following depiction that just happens to fit "Hardcore" Longcore to a tee:

"I should want to draw it like a bat, for its short-sightedness; like a bantam for its bragging; like a magpie for its honesty; like a peacock for its vanity; like an ostrich, for its putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it..."

Whereas ground-nesting avian species, such as burrowing owls, are more vulnerable to predation than those that reside in trees, Streitfeld's insinuations and outright lies hardly support his ludicrous conclusions. "Gradually, public records requests and old-fashioned snooping uncovered a trail," he thundered triumphantly. "It led southeast from the sun-burnished slopes of the park up Permanente Creek and into the ever-expanding empire of Google."

In making such an assertion he completely ignores that it has only been fairly recently that cats in general and those that belong to GCat Rescue in particular have been implicated in the long-term decline of burrowing owls in Shoreline Park. In the past, for example, an accusatory finger has been pointed at Shoreline Golf Links but that certainly has not deterred it from still proclaiming on its web site that its course "allows you (duffers) to play alongside our famed bird sanctuary."

No one is seemingly willing to speculate as to how many owls and other animals have met their Waterloos on its links, but it is common knowledge that the pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and other assorted chemicals that are ladled on such courses in order to maintain them in tiptop shape are lethal to animals. Wildlife Services also willingly removes all animals, except those explicitly protected by law, that the operators of these expensive playgrounds for idlers and the well-heeled say must go.

Plus, at Shoreline Golf Links an unspecified number of owls have been struck and killed by golf balls. Even more deplorable, in March of 2014 a duffer killed a pair of the birds by stopping up their burrow with a plastic seed and sand bottle that is used to repair divots. (See the Mountain View Voice, June 10, 2014, "Burrowing Owls Found Dead at Shoreline Golf Course.")

Foxes, skunks, raccoons, dogs, hawks, and other raptors also have been accused of preying upon the owls. Even park maintenance workers are suspected of running over them with their trucks.

Development in and around the park would appear to be, however, the owls' biggest menace in that it is not only robbing them of their habitat but also the mice that they hunt for sustenance. For example, Mountain View has constructed Fußball and baseball fields south of the golf course where the owls used to hunt.

In 2008, the city paid US$150,000 in order to relocate a pair of the birds in order to accommodate Google's plans to build a new hotel, conference center, and office building at Shoreline Boulevard and Charleston Road. The owls in turn were removed to a tract of land in Shoreland Park. (See the Mountain View Voice, January 10, 2008, "Burrowing Owls Versus Google.")

More recently, Google enlarged its Charleston East campus and that plan, despite bringing in thousands of new residents to the area, has received the wholehearted endorsement of none other than Kleinhaus of the SCVAS. Specifically, she has argued that such development would not adversely affect the owls because their habitat is separated from it by the four-lane Amphitheatre Parkway.

"Google is looking to mitigate and build habitat for the owls to create places where the population can increase," she averred to the Mountain View Voice on November 14, 2016. (See "Worries over Dwindling Burrowing Owl Population.") "If the conditions are right, we think the owls will come back."

Considerably less trusting souls can immediately detect the old familiar smell of the Audubons' legendary greed, double-dealing, and hypocrisy topped off by their customary scapegoating of cats. If additional proof of Kleinhaus's perfidy should be needed, it can be found in the fact that she is on Google's payroll as a consultant on matters relating to the owls.

The extent of her sellout, and possibly McLaughlin's and Woestijen's as well, is not known but it has been disclosed that in 2016 Google gave SCVAS an unspecified amount of money so that it could produce a self-guided birding map as well as to organize tours of the Googleplex. The company also financed the writing and printing of one of the so-called charity's brochures that was entitled "Make Your Home Safe for Birds."

Other financial entanglements doubtlessly exist between the birders and Google but Streitfeld and The New York Times have intentionally concealed those underhanded dealings from the public. As a matter of ethics and honesty, charities, public advocacy groups and, especially, sleazy rags such as The Times should publicly disclose their sources of income, political and other affiliations, and their ingrained prejudices.

For instance, all stories appearing in The Times about cats should include at the top of the page a disclaimer that the paper hates them with a passion and will do everything in its power to screw them to the wall. It should not be allowed under any circumstances to continue to get away with masquerading as an impartial beacon of truth and candor.

Kleinhaus's shameful hypocrisy is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg as far as double-dealing ornithologists and wildlife biologists are concerned. First of all, they have been blamed for a decline in the burrowing owl population by scaring them away from their nests while traipsing through their dwindling habitat in order to photograph and videotape their activities.

Secondly, by coming too close to their nests they are frightening the birds into leaving their burrows and scurrying around defensively in front of them and that in turn is alerting hawks and other predators to their presence. (See the Mountain View Voice, September 2, 2011, "Will New Plan Save the Burrowing Owls?")

In addition to Kleinhaus's dealing from both ends of the deck, it would be awfully interesting to know just how many of the owls and she and her confederates, Woestijne and McLaughlin, have killed indirectly through both their harassment of them and by repeatedly sauntering through their habitat. Unfortunately, that is one question that is destined to remain unanswered because all of them are far too dishonest to ever come clean in a million years.

Anyone even remotely familiar with how that ornithologists operate knows only too well that they not only hate cats but, more much importantly, they only care about certain species of birds. Specifically, they only stir themselves to action whenever it comes to those birds that they have a monetary interest in protecting and, accordingly, can exploit as a means of demonizing and eradicating cats.

For example, the National Audubon Society allowed oil to be drilled in its Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, for more than fifty years. Through that effort it took in more than US$25 million in royalties. It never has said, however, how many birds, deer, muskrats, alligators, otters, and other animals that it killed or the toll that its activities inflicted upon that once pristine environment.

It likewise has allowed oil drilling in its Bernard W. Baker Sanctuary in Bellevue, Michigan. From that effort it has raked in at least US$500,000 at the expense of the Sandhill Cranes and other animals that live there.

 Hate-Filled Old Hag Eileen McLaughlin Thinks She Owns the World

It also allows oil drilling in the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, east of Bonita Springs, and at doubtlessly other locations under its dominion. It staggers the mind how that any organization could claim to be so madly in love with birds on the one hand while simultaneously turning over their habitats to companies to drill for oil. One can only imagine the conniption fits that loudmouths Kleinhaus, Woestijne, and McLaughlin would have if ExxonMobil showed up on their front lawns one morning and commenced drilling for oil.

Their outrageous hypocrisy also serves to undermine conservation efforts elsewhere, especially on public lands. (See the Institute for Energy Research, February 13, 2015, "Environmentalists Allow Oil Drilling on Their Land, but Oppose It in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.")

Whenever these twenty-four carat fraudsters are not having a high old time of it rolling in the hay with Google, the oil companies, and other fire-breathing capitalists, they while away the hours by ingratiating themselves with the various feline expulsion and eradication departments that exist within the federal bureaucracy, such as Wildlife Services, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the United States Corps of Army Engineers, the United States Postal Service, and the National Park Service. It is a productive strategy and birders have recorded many impressive victories over the years. (See Cat Defender posts of May 24, 2007, June 23, 2011, February 24, 2012, April 17, 2010, February 11, 2009, and August 7, 2014 entitled, respectively, "The United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the USDA's Wildlife Services Commence Trapping and Killing Cats on Florida's Big Pine Key," "Wallowing in Welfare Dollars, Lies, and Prejudice, the Bloodthirsty United States Fish and Wildlife Service Is Again Killing Cats in the Florida Keys," "The United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the Humane Society Hoist a Glass in Celebration of Their Extermination of the Cats on San Nicolas Island," "Lake Lanier's Cats Face an Uncertain Future Following Their Ouster by the Liars and Defamers at the United States Army Corps of Engineers," "The United States Postal Service Knuckles Under to the Threats and Lies of a Cat-Hater and Gives Sammy the Boot," and "The National Park Service Racks Up a Major Victory by Expelling the Plum Beach Cats but It Is Thwarted in Its Burning Desire to Dance a Merry Little Jig on Their Graves.")

Ever once in a while all the sucking up and ingratiating themselves to the authorities backfires on ornithologists as it did in nearby Walnut Creek, thirty-four kilometers west of San Francisco, back in 2009. (See Cat Defender post of March 10, 2009 entitled "The Audubons' Dirty Dealings with the Mercenary United States Fish and Wildlife Service Rebound to the Detriment of Acorn Woodpeckers.")

Last but certainly not least to put in her two cents' worth was Janet Alexander of the SVACA and she gave it to GCat Rescue with both barrels. "Google understands the cats are not supposed to cross the line into the park," she barked to The New York Times.

Whether or not that is a true statement is a debatable point but there does not appear to be in situ any per se law that bars them from the park. Nevertheless, Streitfeld put that quote to good use as the caption of a photograph taken by, not Woestijne, but rather The Times' own Jason Henry that purports to show a cat making its way toward the owls' nesting area.

"One recent evening, as dusk yielded to darkness, a cat came up the path from Google (Googleplex)," Streitfeld declared in the May 26th article itself. "It was heading straight for the owls' domain."

Although the photograph was taken in the twilight and at a considerable distance, it hardly shows what Streitfield maintains. On the contrary, the cat is heading down the path toward the Googleplex and that can be determined by the points of its ears and the movement of one of its rear legs.

To top it all off, once he had finished with his labors on behalf of the cat-haters, Strietfeld was overcome with an irresistible urge to wax philosophical on the deplorable state of human nature. "Like so many stories these days about Big Tech, this is a tale about how attempts to do good often produce unexpected consequences, and how even smart people (especially, perhaps, smart people) can be reluctant to rethink their convictions," the colossal liar and big phony summed up.

First of all, ornithologists, wildlife biologists and, especially, The New York Times have never so much as once ever paused to rethink their views on cats. Year in and year out they are always singing the same old song that cats are evil and all of them should be killed.

Secondly, Streitfeld and The New York Times never have recognized any distinction between the good and the truth on the one hand and the bad and outright lies on the other hand. To put the matter succinctly, Streitfeld's  anti-cat screed is a complete fabrication in both words and pictures from start to finish.

How it all came to fruition is, however, a matter of conjecture because The Times never publicly discloses who decides which stories it is going to publish and who and what animals it is going to libel to the hilt. Although looks, admittedly, can be deceiving, Streitfeld does not strike one as possessing the prerequisite brain power needed in order to have concocted on his own such a smear job.

That in turn lends itself to speculation that either Kleinhaus, McLaughlin, or Woestijne have at their disposal a likeminded confederate within the editorial apparatchik of The Times and that individual in turn assigned Streitfeld to be the architect of their hatchet job on cats. Even then he would still have to be either a whore for hire or an inveterate cat-hater himself to have penned such a hideously lopsided smear.

His shenanigans are strikingly familiar to anyone who has followed The New York Times' coverage of cat and bird issues over the years. For example, in 2006 amateur ornithologist James Munn Stevenson of Galveston was caught redhanded gunning down cats.

He even bragged on social media that he had shot and killed upwards of two-hundred-fifty of them. (See Cat Defender posts of November 22, 2006, November 20, 2007, and August 7, 2008 entitled, respectively, "Evil Galveston Bird Lover Is Finally Arrested After Having Gunned Down Hundreds of Cats," "Bird Lovers All Over the World Rejoice as Serial Killer James M. Stevenson Is Rewarded by a Galveston Court for Gunning Down Hundreds of Cats," and "Crime Pays! Having Made Fools Out of Galveston Prosecutors, Serial Cat Killer James Munn Stevenson Is Now a Hero and Laughing All the Way to the Bank.")

Not about to stand idly by and allow one of the world's most prolific cat killers to be publicly pilloried, The New York Times followed the lead of the Houston Chronicle and hired bird-lover Bruce Barcott to do a long-winded piece on the matter. (See Cat Defender post of May 1, 2007 entitled "The Houston Chronicle Launches a Propaganda Offensive on Behalf of Serial Cat Killer Jim Stevenson.")

What ensued was a virulent anti-cat screed that was almost as lopsidedly biased as Streitfeld's unctuous gruntings. Most notably, Barcott not only allotted considerable time and space to three pro-bird advocacy groups to bash cats with impunity, but eight inveterate cat-haters, and three journals. By contrast, he allowed only English biologist Roger Tabor, Carma Crimins, a TNR practitioner from Portland, Oregon, and John Newland, the San Luis Pass Bridge toll collector who had apprehended Stevenson, to speak up for the felines.

Secondly, just as Streitfeld turned over the pages of The Times to Woestijne so that she could showcase her anti-cat photographs, Barcott and The Times employed Brooklyn artist Jilian Tamaki to render a pair of sketches that depicted cats stalking birds. By contrast, The Times categorically turned down Newland's offer to provide it with photographs of some of the cats that Stevenson had murdered in cold blood.

The third unmistakable similarity between the two articles lies in how that The Times chose to showcase them. For instance, Barcott's anti-cat spiel appeared in the newspaper's Sunday magazine whereas Streitfield's piece, although it first appeared online on Saturday, May 26th, turned up on page one of The Times' Sunday, May 27th edition. The latter article also was given a multiple column headline that read: "Google Doesn't Hate Owls. It Just Loves Cats" and it was accompanied by one of Woestijne's photographs of the owls.

Given that The Times' circulation on Sundays is double what it is during the remainder of the week, it is easy to see why that it chose to showcase both Barcott's and Streitfeld's pieces in such a fashion. C'est-à-dire, once the paper had decided to libel cats it was committed to attracting the largest audience possible for its lies. (See Cat Defender post of December 8, 2007 entitled "All the Lies That Fit: Scheming New York Times Hires a Bird Lover to Render His 'Unbiased' Support for James M. Stevenson.")

Shortly thereafter in 2009, The Times called upon the services of its own Andrew C. Revkin to once again stick it to cats. His most egregious act of patented dishonesty involved his misuse of a sixteen-minute video produced by Bryan Kortis of Neighborhood Cats in Manhattan.

The first seven minutes of it are critical of cats and TNR and, not surprisingly, Revkin did not hesitate to post that portion of it online with his story. The second half of the video, while no great shakes in its own right, did render a qualified endorsement of TNR.

Revkin was not about to allow the readers of The Times to view that part of it and it accordingly did not accompany his article. (See Cat Defender post of June 15, 2009 entitled "The American Bird Conservancy, The New York Times, and the Humane Society Unite to Form an Achse des Bösen Against Cats.")

Revkin since then has moved on and nowadays is spreading his anti-cat venom for his new employers at National Geographic. (See Cat Defender post of April 15, 2005 entitled "National Geographic Is Trying to Exterminate Cats.")

Whereas The New York Times is busily agitating for the mass annihilation of cats, some of its comrades-in-arms within the corporate media establishment, such as Ted Greenberg of NBC-Philadelphia, are contenting themselves with killing kittens. For example, when he received an urgent telephone call in early June of 2012 from his fellow tribal member, Evelyn Koegler, of the Aloe Village Senior Complex he immediately jumped in his old jalopy and burned up the seventy-five kilometers that separate the City of Brotherly Love from Egg Harbor City in southern New Jersey in order to come to her assistance.

Once on the scene he did not waste any time in filing two on air defamatory reports about the cats but he did not stop there; rather, he took the bold step of calling in a local exterminator who promptly removed six kittens. "I really appreciate the fact that Channel 10 helped me and really helped the neighbors," Koegler cooed in the aftermath. "We couldn't do anything about it but you did and we thank you."

Streitfeld Claims This Cat Is Coming "Up the Path" to Hunt Owls

Every bit as dishonest as the day is long, Greenberg falsely informed his viewers that the kittens would be evaluated for adoption upon their arrival at the Atlantic County Animal Shelter in Pleasantville but that turned out to have been hardly what transpired. On the contrary, they were killed upon arrival. (See Cat Defender post of July 7, 2012 entitled "NBC Philadelphia Conspires with a Virulent Cat-Hater and an Exterminator in Order to Have Six Newborn and Totally Innocent Kittens Killed in Southern New Jersey.")

For a group of people who are all the time running off at the mouth about their rights and prerogatives, Greenberg, Streitfeld, and their fellow tribesmen never have evinced much in the way of regard for animals, Mother Earth, and goyim. Rather, they are more than willing to put the screws to almost anyone and any animal so long as it advances them in this world.

Then there is the Orlando Sentinel which in 2013 did not even think twice about publishing a clarion call issued by Ted Williams and the National Audubon Society that cats should be poisoned out of existence with acetaminophen. (See Cat Defender post of May 18, 2013 entitled "Ted Williams and the National Audubon Society Issue a Call for Cats to Be Poisoned with Tylenol® and Then Try to Lie Out of It.")

Other news organization that have published related stories on the burrowing owls have demonstrated themselves to be lazy and brainless twits who are incapable of much more than parroting and rehashing Streitfeld's lies. They also believe, like him, that there is only one side to this story.

For example, the only bit of initiative displayed by Kristin Lam of The Mercury News of San Jose was to afford Woestijne another opportunity to spout more of her anti-cat rhetoric which she promptly took full advantage of by calling for the removal of the cats' feeding stations and for them to be confined behind a fence. "Google can certainly afford to enclose their campus cats in catios," she blowed to The Mercury News on May 30th. (See "Google Group's Feral Cats Threaten Burrowing Owls at Shoreline Park.") "There are plenty of good designs available."

Since she is the one who is doing the complaining, it is she who should be fencing in the owls and standing guard over them night and day. Moreover, she should get her hands out of Google's pockets and pay for the care and protection of the owls herself.

Other than allowing Kleinhaus to endorse "Hardcore" Longcore's nonsense about cats and hunting, the best that lazy and prejudiced Old Lammer Scammer could come up with was to reiterate Streitfeld's unsubstantiated claim that there was a proven correlation between a decline in the population of burrowing owls in Shoreline Park and Google's cats. She even confounds the number of owls living in the park with those nesting in Santa Clara County as a whole.

Her abysmal laziness is most vividly demonstrated, however, in her acceptance of Streitfeld's claim that GCat Rescue has not disclosed how many cats that it has sterilized and returned to the Googleplex. If she had had enough initiative to have checked out the rescue group's web site she never would have committed such a glaring faux pas.

Demonstrating that journalists in Old Blighty are every bit as lazy and biased against cats as their American counterparts was Rob Crilly, the New York bureau chief of The Telegraph. Other than reiterating Streitfeld's lies, the only thing that he added to this debate was to expose the depth of the owls' defenders hatred of cats.

"If we want our wildlife we have to recognize these cats are people-dependent, and the people who maintain these colonies are actually facilitating their ability to survive outside," the old hag McLaughlin bellowed to The Telegraph on May 28th. (See "Cat Lovers at Google Are to Blame for Dwindling Owl Population, Say Wildlife Advocates.") "They can't do it without human help."

That is the usual sottise that bird lovers spout all the time and "Silly" Crilly fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Quite obviously, they want to argue on both sides of every issue and to always have everything their way.

For instance, in one breath they argue that cats are such maniacal killers that they are decimating wildlife while on the other hand they maintain that they are so lacking in survival instincts that they can only survive with handouts from their supporters. Both of those assertions cannot possibly be true but they do fit in nicely with the kill all cats agenda advocated by ornithologists and wildlife biologists.

Crilly additionally fails to point out that it is precisely the owls who are the resident welfare bums in the area. For instance, the city of Mountain View has, inter alia, constructed burrows for them to nest in, trimmed the grass around them so that they can better see approaching predators, installed surveillance cameras in Shoreline Park for their protection, and trapped and relocated squirrels from Shoreline Golf Links so that they can be tricked into building burrows for the owls.

The latter initiative is not only outrageous but cruel to boot. Moreover, trapping and relocating squirrels breaks up their communities, traumatizes them, and places their lives in jeopardy of predation. Besides, the lives of owls are certainly not any more valuable than those of squirrels.

Being au fond nothing more than fascists with haloes, ornithologists fervently believe that they have an unqualified right to nakedly exploit, defame, and even kill any animal in furtherance of their quest for worldwide domination. (See Cat Defender post of March 15, 2007 entitled "The Connecticut Audubon Society Shows Its True Colors by Calling for the Slaughter of Feral Cats, Mute Swans, Mallards, Canada Geese, and Deer.")

Furthermore, Crilly purposefully ignores, like Streitfeld and Lam, the one-hundred-forty-nine felines that GCat Rescue has removed from the Googleplex by placing them in homes. Instead, he elects to parrot Woestijne blatant lie that without GCat Rescue's efforts there would be fewer cats near Shoreline Park.

He also fully endorses McLaughlin's nonsense that Shoreline park is critical habitat for the survival of the owls. Even in agreeing with with her on that point he fails to realize that unless Mountain View gets serious about severely restricting development and limiting population growth and the mindless consumption that always accompanies it there is not going to be sufficient habitat and resources to support very many animals of any species.

Once the dust finally settles, Google in all likelihood will cave in to the birders' demands and give its managed TNR colony the boot. Apparently, several other high-tech giants in the area, including Facebook, already have felt the heat from ornithologists and capitulated.

In that case, GCat Rescue likely will fold its tent and surrender its cats to the Palo Alto Humane Society or some other extermination camp and that will be the end of them. The very best dénouement that can be hoped for is that the company's chairman, Eric Schmidt, will be able to somehow summon a little bit of the moxie that he demonstrated when he was upbraided for paying a corporate tax rate of only 2.3 per cent by sheltering the lion's share of his company's revenues in Ireland, Holland, and Bermuda.

"It's called capitalism," he proudly told The Independent of London on December 17, 2012. (See "Google Boss: I'm Very Proud of Our Tax Avoidance Scheme.") "We're proudly capitalistic."

Google therefore has it well within its prerogatives to proudly become a pro-cat company and in doing so to tell ingrates like Kleinhaus, Woestijne, and McLaughlin to go to blazes. While it is at it, the company also should cut off their supply of free shekels. Before they go to their graves, ornithologists and wildlife biologists should be forced into doing at least some honest toil.

Ornithologists also have long enjoyed a reputation as being some of the world's biggest liars but that is not anything new and it is not about to change. The real culprit here, however, is The New York Times which continues to abuse the privileged perch that it enjoys in society by spreading malicious, unsubstantiated lies about cats.

Besides its total lack of ethics and any sense of fair play, The Times' runaway hubris is indeed something to behold. "The strength of facts. The power of truth," it heralds on its web site. "Reporting stories you can trust."

If those sentiments had been uttered in jest, the whole world would be entirely justified in laughing right along with the high-muck-a-mucks who came up with them. Somehow that does not seem to have been the case; rather, it certainly sounds and looks like The Times has started to believe its own lies and bullshit and that puts it on a par with ornithologists and wildlife biologists.

"Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper," Thomas Jefferson opined in a January 12, 1819 epistle to Nathaniel Macon. Since he felt that way all those years ago, one can only imagine what he would think today of such a disgraceful rag as The New York Times.

Perhaps he would be forced into concluding that other than taking advantage of the naïve and uninformed as a means of feathering its own nest, The New York Times does not serve any useful purpose. It is so god-awful in fact that it is not even fit to wipe one's ass with and anyone foolish enough to even try soon would be seized with a case of the piles so unrelenting that even a boxcar load of Preparation H® would be insufficient to assuage the pain and burning.

Photos: the Los Angeles Times (Streitfeld), the Mountain View Voice (owls), Maritza Cruz of The Mercury News (a feeding station), and Jason Henry of The New York Times (McLaughlin and a cat in the twilight).