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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sidwithey" data-source="post: 1405992" data-attributes="member: 61892">I'm enjoying this thread, as it raises some fundamental issues. My feeling on magpie control is pretty ambivalent.  I do think the population is artificially high due to the amount of road kill and exposed rubbish dumps, and I am not opposed to them being trapped or shot humanely. I don't have quite the same attitude to domestic cats as usually they are someone's pet and I would have no desire to cause distress to anyone.  I think the situation would be different ith a large population of feral cats, - a situation I heard of in South Africa where over 30 feral cats were culled from a 3acre garden.Some previous posters have made the distinction between cats killing birds and mice.  I would not make this distinction, as to me the life of an individual mouse or a bird has equal value or lack of value.This brings me long windedly to my point that these discussions are usually fueled by an emotional response to the death of an individual animal, rather than the health of a population or ecosystem.  Of course nearly every human being does have an emotional response on some level, but my belief is that this response should be recognised as such, and there should be an effort to ratonalise it.  At the root of this is the anthropomorphic response, the idea that living animals have behavioural patterns that can be explained using experience of our emotions, feelings and motivations.  I do believe that this response is counter productive and can skew our decisions and responses when approaching problems such as ecological imbalance.  My belief is that anthropomorhism is fundamentally flawed when dealing with the vast majority of the animal kingdom.  There is some evidence of a basic human like emotional response in some of the higher mammals such as primates and whales, but very limited.We should therefore stand back in awe and amazement at the natural world around us, respect all living things, be it a rat or an elephant, and appreciate it for what it is, rather than as a reflection of our intellect and emotions.And here endeth the sermon</blockquote>

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