WITH regard to your recent leader article about cats. I found it very refreshing that someone has at last spoken eloquently about the unfettered anti-social behaviour we have to endure from these pampered pests.

Foxes get bad press, and justly so, but cats are equally as bad and society seems to want to ignore them, presumably because the middle-class letter-writers with the ears of power are the very people that own them.

I am the caretaker in a primary school in Sidcup and have to deal daily with the filthy doings of cats and foxes in the school grounds. This is comparatively easy on the hard surfaces, but we do not stand a chance in the grass.

The real test of job dedication goes to the staff who have to clean up the five-year old's who tread, slip and fall in the excreta. It can be only a matter of time before the health time-bomb inherent in these accidents goes off.

However, what really concerns me is the ignorance of the cat owners who argue until they are blue in the face that their animal would never do its business in my grounds, and if it really had then it would bury it deep enough never to be found. This is after I have seen the very same cats perform day after day.

When I have had the temerity to say shoo to cats in mid-defecate, you can be sure that the whole of the owner's family will appear screaming abuse, and almost throw themselves at the perimeter fence in an uncontrollable rage like wild animals trying to get to me.

One crass remark that was shouted at me was: "How would you feel if the cat ran into the road and got run over?" Well, quite frankly, if it meant one more child was spared the trauma of being immersed in repulsive squidge, then I would be overjoyed.

DAVE SWINBURN

Sidcup

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000.Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.