El Graduado
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My wife said I need to run this by ScubaBoard before I pursue it any further.
I do not know what to do about the feral dog problem on Cozumel, but I think I have found a solution for the feral cats. In China, there is a big demand for cat pelts to use in the fake fur and plush toy industries. I found a company in Shantou, China, that is paying $2.43 USD for cat pelts. I figure I will start my cat-pelt enterprise by purchasing a couple of small pick-up trucks and mounting some chicken-wire cages in the beds, hiring a driver and a catcher equipped with a tranquilizer dart gun and big net for each truck. They will spend the first few months driving around the island, picking up strays and bringing them to our cat breeding ranch just outside town.
As soon as we start gathering the cats, we can start breeding rats for their food. A female Norway rat (those are the really big ones) can have six litters a year, with up to sixteen baby rats to a litter. A young female Norway rat can have her first litter at six weeks of age, so we could have a veritable unending supply of rats to use as cat-food, at virtually no cost. Later, we will skin the cats and feed their carcasses to the rats. This would also help to avoid any garbage-pick-up charges from the city. The cats can have four to six kittens per litter and three litters per year. If we only skin the males and let the females breed 20 times before we skin them, we could have a breeding stock of around 10,000 cats at the end of the second year. I figure five full-time cat-skinners can skin around 1,200 cats in eight hours, if they peel them like you do frog legs. At $2.43 USD per skin, that’s almost $3,000.00 USD per day. Of course, this number will rise exponentially since each female would be replicating herself a minimum of 80 times before we skinned her. At some point, we’d need to find a market larger than China. Once the cat-skin ranch is operating at full production, we can start working on cross-breeding cats with the invasive Boa constrictors on the island, since these snakes shed their own skin. If the cross-breed is viable, we could save on the wages we pay the cat-skinners!