Kitty, Kitty...BANG! BANG!

So I've been super busy at work, and we're in the process of buying a house, so there's no time for blogging, which is a bummer for me, a reprieve for you. But this I had to write about.

You have doubtless heard of the atrocious displacement of animals from their natural habitat by encroaching development- development necessitated by population explosions caused by a lack of proper birth control. It's an outrage that these poor helpless animals, who were clearly on the land first, are being displaced by irrational and selfish parasites. It has to end. We must realize that we humans are members of nature as much as any other animal. It's time we finally come to see that the mountain lions have no right to continue to take our land away. Our cities have been here long before those lions were born. We were here first.

A couple blocks from us, there have been several dozens of mountain lion sightings over the last few months (as in one every couple days). This is quite frightening to me as a father, and angering as a citizen given the ridiculous stance the animal rights groups are taking. Santa Paula is not growing. There is no human development encroaching on the territory of established cats in the Santa Paula/Ojai/Ventura Triangle. The cats are moving into our territory because their population is exploding, thanks in large part to the idiotic prop 117 of 1990 that ended sport hunting of large cats in California--sport hunting needed to control the population of animals. But 'animal rights' activists HATE the idea of humans controling animal populations.

I have some experience in this subject. I grew up in Wyoming in a family of hunting and fishing guides. We were constantly in contact with the Bureau of Land Management and other civic entities that controls the population of large animals. The issue of population control was as front and center in my household as cartalk in a family of mechanics. And Wyoming has the largest population of lions in the country.

We have 4 good couple friends who have seen a lion in their backyard in the last month--all of whom have small children, one of whom is at the center of the big controversy of the Feb. 17th KILLING OF A LION CUB by Santa Paula police. Don't forget that this 30lb. cub was going to grow into a 150lb. killing machine. And it's being taught by its mother to kill in your backyard. Read some of the comments of that article for 'fun'. It's amazing just how irrational rational animals can be. These people bitch and moan about large families and how they're a drain on society, yet scream against population control for predatory animals in the midst of our children?

Now for a ranting interlude: There's a little book I want you to read. Please. It's called "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" In it this man named "Charles Darwin" (that's no coincidence-it's really the same man that you have as your prophet, your idol) makes the argument that the primary mode of 'fitness' in natural selection, or 'survival of the fittest', as it was later called, is the ability to procreate. 'Procreate' is a big word, and one you're probably not familiar with, but it means to 'conceive, carry to term, and bear offspring'. And if you bear many offspring, then obviously the more 'fit' you are, and worthy of survival. So you see, Mrs. Anti-Large-Family, we are more 'fit' than you, mainly because you fill yourself with unnatural chemicals so that you cannot conceive and procreate. By your own naturalist principles, you must concede that parents of big families are more worthy of survival than you, because they propagate our species. Don't like what I say? Who cares. Their ideologies will win by the attrition of yours.

The frequency with which we are having sightings is alarming, and the news even caught the eye of Jay Leno (only the last 30 seconds is pertinent)



Funny and cute. But it's not going to be that way when a kid gets mauled because some 'animal rights' jerks put a greater value on a predatory cat than an innocent child, or more generally, on the procreative rights of a beast rather than a member of their own species. Where are the animal rights for human animals? When will our territory be protected? Are we not a member of 'Nature' like the mountain lion, and just as worthy of our own territory?