Scientist Pitches Proposal to Curb Bird Deaths: A Tax On Cats

 Birds in Germany are dying by the millions and Peter Berthold of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, says that cats are to blame. By his calculation, cats kill approximately 50 million birds each year in Germany alone. The solution, he says, to this travesty, is a cat tax.

No, this isn’t from The Onion. And it’s not April Fool’s Day.

This guy is totally serious.

Berthold, who holds a Ph.D. and a post-doctoral degree, believes that an “ecological compensation tax” would help control the amount of damage on bird populations. He’s clearly passionate about the cause, having been an active member of the Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft, an organization dedicated to the protection of birds, since 1955.

He says, about cats, “[s]ometimes they kill a wonderful red-coloured bullfinch, or a wryneck, which could be the last in the district.”

Continued:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2013/05/04/scientist-pitches-proposal-to-curb-bird-deaths-a-tax-on-cats/