Incidentally...

Last week, I received a call from an officer of the town council, asking me if I know the feeder in area X - which is about 1 km away from my block. I do pass by area X occasionally, and I've seen several well-fed ear-tipped cats there. It seems there had been complaints about the community cats there scratching cars and making noise. However, most complaints were made anonymously, so the TC could not verify if the complaints were true. I guess the complainants would love to just have the cats removed and terminated, and that is something the sympathetic TC officers are trying not to do.

I do not know who the feeder of area X is, so I'm not sure how I can help. I could go to that area and wait for the feeder to show up, but that would be very unproductive since I don't know what time the feeder feeds the cats. Besides, I really don't have the time.

In a subsequent phone call to the officer, I told her that there will always be community cats around, as long as HDB continues to disallow pet cats in flats, and there is no control on cat abandonment. To this, the officer was utterly shocked! She had absolutely no idea that cats aren't allowed in HDB flats! She asked why, so I told her about HDB's standard template reply about cats being "nomadic, shed fur, noisy...blah blah...", to which her immediate reply was: "But dogs are even more noisy!". She works in the TC so I'm sure she knows what she's talking about.

As she's not familiar with cats, I told her about the territorial nature of cats and the vacuum effect if existing cats are removed. Hopefully, she has a better understanding now and can better deal with such complaints on the job.