{"id":378,"date":"2018-08-04T13:50:32","date_gmt":"2018-08-04T20:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=378"},"modified":"2018-09-12T08:58:03","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T15:58:03","slug":"now-the-greens-want-your-cat-2009","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/now-the-greens-want-your-cat-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Now the Greens Want Your Cat (2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Part of the job of a column writer is to jump on ideas and arguments that are preposterous. It\u2019s a fun part of the job, too. This was my Seattle Times editorial column of April 15, 2009.<\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/b>On April 2, a day late, Seattle author Knute Berger had an article in\u00a0Crosscut.com<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>titled, \u201cSave the Planet: Get Rid of Your Cat.\u201d Cats, he said, are bad for the environment.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Why? Bird populations are down and cat populations up. Scientists have no proof, but they suspect a continental case of \u201cnonnative species predation.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Well, I had a cat. His name was Mao. He would not kill birds. Many times I wished Mao would do his Darwinian duty, particularly on the pigeons that perched on my roof, scratching the pebbles from the asphalt shingles and fouling the gutters. Mao would watch birds, his teeth chattering, but as a predator he was all talk and no work. He died at age 19 with a perfect score of zero.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I thought Mao was a good Seattle cat, left-wing name and all, but I see from Crosscut that he was still bad for the environment. He ate food from cans. Some of it contained ocean fish, and that was bad, and some contained meat from farm animals, and that was bad, too.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As a kitten, Mao had been raised on a meatless diet of catnip-flavored carrots prepared by his first owner, a Seattle vegan. The diet had nearly killed him, and I believe he would have been stunted for life if my wife and I had not weaned him from veganism with a can of salmon.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0His intake aside, there remained the matter of his other end. According to Berger, cat feces may spread toxoplasmosis, possibly even to marine mammals in Puget Sound.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mao did not poop in the Sound. He never had any inclination that way. He preferred a box, the stuff in which went to a landfill in Boardman, Ore. Sometimes Mao eschewed his box for the ground, but that is only the way of nature.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>But enough of my late cat. The living have other worries, more of them all the time. In Seattle we worry about cars, which the city taxes with parking meters and blocked intersections; plastic and paper disposable bags, which the city wants to tax; beach fires at Golden Gardens, which the Parks Department once wanted to ban because of their effect on global warming; and bottled water, which the city will no longer buy for employees.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The water is a puzzle. Why do so many people walk the sidewalks clutching bottles of water? Nobody did this when I was a kid, unless they were going camping. We did not arrive home prune-like from dehydration. So I agree with Mayor Nickels about the bottled water.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Of the rest of the clamor \u2014 Is it green to do this? Is it green to do that? What’s my carbon footprint? \u2014 I grow weary, and mumble privately that I do not care. If you follow the logic, it is not green to do much of anything that living things do.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I Google the words \u201cgreen\u201d and \u201ctoilet paper\u201d and I am instructed thus: \u201cAccording to Greenpeace’s recent release of its first Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide, \u2018Americans could save more than 400,000 trees if each family bought a roll of recycled toilet paper \u2014 just once.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Not only is there recycled toilet paper, but they have a guide about it. Politically correct toilet paper may not yet be\u00a0de rigueur<\/i>in my progressive city, but the day is young.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We save the Earth by tying our lives in little knots.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mao, bless him, lived a simpler life. You could harangue him about the environment and he didn’t care. He ate what he wanted and went where he wanted. He watched the birds, and he dreamed of carnage.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a9 2009 The Seattle Times<\/span><\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Part of the job of a column writer is to jump on ideas and arguments that are preposterous. It\u2019s a fun part of the job, too. This was my Seattle Times editorial column of April 15, 2009. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0On April 2, a day late, Seattle author Knute Berger had an article in\u00a0Crosscut.com\u00a0titled, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-378","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":728,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/378\/revisions\/728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}