It takes a little bit of madness to work in the Smithsonian's Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoo. Dr. Nico Dauphine has it in spades.

Like often happens with zealots, love began to turn into hate.  And so cats must be dead.  Didn't she ever hear of the circle of life? While she was at the bird center, she was studying how domestic cats affect wildlife but she apparently got into home experimentation as well; she was busted putting rat poison into a bowl of cat food outside an apartment complex last March. 

 Right now, there are 5,000 PhDs working as janitors and another 8,000 are working as waitresses and waiters. How did Dauphine, in the world of the well-documented science publishing culture (well, her field is not science, it is advocacy) get that job, when a 2009 paper she co-wrote ridiculously claimed that cats killed a billion birds per year? 

Smithsonian bird researcher is convicted of trying to poison cats - LA Times