Has Dr. Hurley truly changed her tune about killing feral cats? Isn’t leaving feral queens with nursing kittens outside to die, when programs are in place to save them, the same thing?
Dr. Hurley once believed in the killing of feral cats but has changed her tune again. Do we really want to follow her studies in San Francisco where we’ve had more progressive programs?
Dr. Kate Hurley Million Cat Challenge 1/30/2019
8 minutes into the video:
"...and one that I really believed in deeply, was to go out and set traps, go out and collect the cats in those traps, bring them back in a wire cage just like the one I’m holding in this picture. And if the cat was too fearful for me to set it up in a cage and vaccinate it, I personally took that cat straight back to euthanasia, shook her to the bottom of that wire carrier and gave her a lethal injection as kindly as I knew how. I did that hundreds and thousands of times, in the heart felt belief that it was the best thing I could do to protect the welfare of cats that were not adapted to living in the wild and to protect the welfare of all the creatures that live in the Monterey Bay. That’s what I believed. I was willing to take the life of a cat, because I believed it would spare the life of a bird. That’s a hard thing to say and I’m sure there are some in this audience who are shocked by that. But I think we can all agree on no matter where we’re coming from or what we’ve done, it is our obligation to set that aside and make management decisions both in the United States and globally, based on research about practices that will actually work. Whether we want that to be the case or not, we need to look at what does the evidence actually tell us. And so here's where I am now, I’m at UC Davis, one of the top veterinary medical schools in the whole...