What is a man without the beasts?  If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit.  For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man.  All things are connected. 

Dot found this piece on connectedness in a letter from Chief Seattle to President Franklin Pierce.  In posting this she knows she’ll get a lot of bad press from cat people, but she’s not big on felines in her garden.  She believes cats disturb the natural order of things by killing the lizards and frogs and birds that help keep insects at bay. 

Dot remembers that before the foxes ate our barn cats, she and her predecessors were plagued with fleas.  In those days I often found lizard heads and piles of bird feathers attesting to our cats’ hunting forays.  After the wild foxes ate the cats a funny thing happened.  We began to see the lizards and frogs and birds return to the garden.  Then the fleas went away.  Dot thinks that these reptiles were consuming the fleas and their larvae, and many other unwanted pests such as earwigs and slugs.  She decided that we’d forgo replacing the cats in the event that the return of this natural balance was behind the new flea-free life.   

For more information on the problem of cats and wildlife click here  http://www.wildlife.org/policy/index.cfm?tname=policystatements&statement=ps28