28th Dec 2007
LAPD Hires Cats
I definitely sense a Cats and Dogs in the Workplace trend (as does GhostGirl). I’m not sure what it means, but I can think of a half dozen news stories about the working lives of cats and dogs (Cat Given Golden Handshake, Working Class Cats, Bringing Your Dog to Work, okay that’s only three, but they’re all very recent).
From LAPD enlists feral cats for rat patrol:
The Working Cats program of Voice for the Animals, a Los Angeles-based animal advocacy and rescue group, has placed feral cats in a handful of police stations with rodent problems, just as the group placed cats in the rat-plagued downtown flower district several years ago — to great effect.
Six feral cats were recently installed as ratters in the parking lot of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southeast Division, and another group will be housed at the Central Division early in the new year.
Their reputation as furtive and successful exterminators grew after feral cats were introduced to the parking lot of the Wilshire Division nearly six years ago. Rats had been burrowing into the equipment bags that bicycle officers stored in outside cages; inside the facility, mice were sometimes scurrying across people’s desks.
“Once we got the cats, problem solved,” said Cmdr. Kirk Albanese, a captain at the Wilshire station at the time. “I was almost an immediate believer.”
i LOVE! humane and sensical solutions
I do too.
We let the neighbor’s tomcat have as much space around our house and yard as he wants because he keeps the mice away.
My favoritest one of all time is where the City of SF employed goats to eat down all the scrub that a bunch of homeless people were camping in right by a school. With their cover blown, they left.
Please don’t start screaming about heartless treatment of the homeless. They were mostly drug dealers.
Goats are used for weed-abatement around here with great results (other than the goat poop).
However, I would be cautious characterizing any population as drug dealers who presumably deserve to have their housing eaten. There are a lot of homeless people in this country, especially the Bay Area, because of a lack of affordable rental housing and a great increase in poverty. Not to mention a decrease in public assistance and the erosion of working-class jobs.
I firmly believe that Jesus would have built housing for the homeless and offered mental health services and not employed goats to eat their housing. Yes, even with housing options and mental health services, a small amount of people will choose to be homeless and some people will choose to sell drugs, but we screw the poor over and over in this country and when they end up homeless we pretend that they are nothing like us.
And that was said quietly.
Weren’t we talking about a great alternative to euthanizing cats?
Sounds like a great idea to me. Let’s just be thankful the Exterminators didn’t raise a fuss and block the deal. (I’m a little peeved after reading articles about plumbers unions in the Southwest who are using their power to get in the way of waterless urinals.)