The Great Cat Cull

Not For Cat Lovers


Last week I produced a post for my lone reader to learn if, in fact, he was reading this drivel. He is, it turns out, and he even commented about the contents and was surprised that the Brits killed all those pets and that John Barrymore also may have dispatched his dogs. (For that post see: Factlet (2) -Brits and Their Pets.)

 For his benefit I will continue with the animal theme and for the rest of you I offer a “Scoop.”
If you pick up the New York Times tomorrow, you will find in the Magazine the following article:
“The Culling: Australia is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats,” Jessica Camille, Aguirre, New York Times Magazine, April 28, 2019.

The article begins with a photograph of a gun-toting Aussie emerging from the Outback with a dead cat and describes how some other Aussies are flying overhead dropping thousands of poisonous sausages. 

Feral cats are a real problem down-under it appears and the Australian government decided in 2015 that two million should be eradicated. It is estimated that over 200,000 were killed during the first year even though Brigitte Bardot and 160,000 others objected. The cats are being culled because: 
"In addition to mammals, cats kill an estimated 377 million birds and 649 million reptiles every year in Australia. (In the United States, the numbers are even more striking: Scientists estimate that free-roaming cats kill 1.3 to 4 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals every year.)"

That should be enough to entice you to read the article and enough to satisfy my lone reader.

Post Script:
I thought by writing this stuff down it might help me remember it. That is not working. I have only vague memories that I already have written about the feral cats here in London, Ontario. See: Feral Cats and Dead Birds.
For those of you wondering how I know the contents of the New York Times for tomorrow - it's simple. Subscribe and you get articles early, but now I don't have anything new to read on Sunday and we may get some snow.

Feral Cats and Dead Birds

From the Culture Wars to the Cat Wars

I have already paid more attention than I intended to the wars waging on campuses and had no intention at all of bringing up the subject of ‘cats’. But, just yesterday a new little kitten showed up under our bird feeder and a few days ago the cat from the house next door wandered away with one of the chipmunks we had been feeding dangling from his mouth.  I have tended to ignore the piles of bird feathers. Perhaps for these reasons I noticed this particular email with the subject heading “The Case Against Cats”. That is the title of an article by Colin Dickey in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Sept. 7, 2016. That is when I learned among other things that:

“The news that house cats are laying waste to wide swaths of biodiversity has not, like revelations about climate change or other ecological evils, led to some kind of scientific consensus about what was to be done. It’s led, instead, to the establishment of two warring camps: the cat people and the bird people. The bird people think that the wholesale slaughter of the world’s bird population is a problem requiring human intervention, namely the banning of feral and outdoor cats, forced sterilization, and euthanization. The cat people are aghast at these solutions, and argue instead that cats, being innate predators, should be allowed to fulfill their natural directive.”

The article is a review of this new book from Princeton University Press: Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, Peter P. Marra & Chris Santella. From the publisher’s site you will learn that:

“This compelling book traces the historical and cultural ties between humans and cats from early domestication to the current boom in pet ownership, along the way accessibly explaining the science of extinction, population modeling, and feline diseases. It charts the developments that have led to our present impasse—from Stan Temple’s breakthrough studies on cat predation in Wisconsin to cat-eradication programs underway in Australia today. It describes how a small but vocal minority of cat advocates has campaigned successfully for no action in much the same way that special interest groups have stymied attempts to curtail smoking and climate change.”

Some blurbs:
"We know that nature’s theater bristles with industrious carnivores and omnivores--hawks that pluck cardinals right off a bird feeder, squirrels that grab eggs from crows’ nests, and crows that grab babies from squirrels’ nests. What makes free-ranging cats such an exceptionally dangerous threat to birds and other wildlife? The book describes a number of factors."--Natalie Angier, New York Review of Books.

"Cats, most of them unowned free-ranging cats, kill as many as four billion birds in the United States each year. What, if anything, should be done about it? Cat Wars tackles this difficult dilemma. If you are a cat lover, a bird lover, a philosopher, an ethicist, or just anyone interested in gut-wrenching dilemmas, you will find this a gripping book."--Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

For the hard and hard-to-believe numbers of deaths caused by cats you can also see: The Impact of Free-ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States,” by Scott R. Loss, Nature Communications, Jan. 29, 2013.

The problem of feral felines is a large one. Now you know so my job here is done. For my part, I will start locally with my BB gun and my new NIMBY cat policy.