There's some tough decisions to be made. We all love cats. Unfortunately, that little animal, when feral on small islands, can drive rare birds to extinction. You would never get a campaign going in this country to control feral cats, yet they have done so in New Zealand. They have tried to do so in Australia. These are tough decisions.

We don't have all the laws, all the procedures for containment that we need. We don't have accountability. We don't have accountability in the nursery trade, for example. Shouldn't we have to bond those companies that introduce new pets and plants? The public pays for the results of inadvertent invasions. The cost can be considerable and they can effect health and so forth. So we need ways for people to be aware of the problem and aware of their responsibilities for releasing organisms into the environment. We're talking billions of dollars for control of such invasives as the zebra mussel. Although the zebra mussel is filtering the waters of the Great Lakes, it's also clogging all the water ways and causing a lot of damage.

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