Word: cats
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While fond of his cat, British biologist Peter Churcher looked askance at its practice of dragging small mammals and birds into his Bedfordshire house and devouring them under the kitchen table "to the sound of crunching bones." One of Churcher's associates, John Lawton, a professor of community ecology at the University of London, was similarly impressed by his own cat's predatory pursuits. With the natural curiosity of true scientists, they decided to look further into the depredations of felines. If all the domestic cats in Britain caught as much prey as theirs did, the two men reasoned, they...
...reaching this astonishing conclusion, the intrepid investigators used only the most rigorous scientific methods. Choosing Churcher's small village as their test site, they conducted a feline census and found that 78 cats resided in the community's 173 houses, "a slightly higher incidence of cat owning than in Britain as a whole." Owners of 77 of the cats agreed to cooperate. Each was given a supply of consecutively numbered polyethylene bags labeled with his cat's code letter and asked to store whatever was left of any prey his pet brought home...
...full year the scientists made weekly rounds of the village, collecting bags and identifying the remains. If the cat had consumed the entire catch, the victim was simply recorded as an "unknown." Otherwise, the identification process was simple, the scientists report, although "initially -- the study began during the summer months -- it was rather smelly." Surprisingly enough, they write, "the villagers were much less squeamish than we had expected." In fact, some went about their assigned task with great gusto, placing their cats' trophies in home freezers to await collection...
...Will cat fanciers find these conclusions unsettling? Evidently not. When the authors' work was published earlier in a scientific journal, including the fact that a few Bedfordshire cats had each contributed as many as 100 items of prey to the study, they received letters from other cat owners boasting of their own pets' prowess. The record, they report, is currently held by a cat from Dorset that dragged in more than 400 little creatures in one year. The scientists are aghast. "These proud owners," they report, "seem quite unperturbed by the slaughter...
...choicest plums in Government is a diplomatic posting in an agreeable locale. And what a pleasant task it is for a new President to reward old friends and fat-cat party contributors by handing out such assignments. Judging from the appointments he made during his first six months in the White House, George Bush must be finding that task very pleasant indeed. A study by Government Executive magazine, a journal serving public officials, found that of Bush's first 37 ambassadorial nominations, 70% have been political appointees rather than career Foreign Service officers. That compares with 59% for Ronald Reagan...