Cats are Not Your Friends
I have been interested in invasive species for a while; in fact I taught a course in conservation ecology at Silliman university a few years ago. Here are the lecture notes, I hoper they are useful for some of you:
The reason I am bringing this up is because a new paper came out about invasive cats, which details the terrible toll these animals take on ecosystems. Domestic cats are originally from North Africa, I believe. They have been introduced in a wide range of habitats in many places in the world; there are no free-ranging cats in Antarctica, but they kill birds, lizards, small mammals and many other animals from Australia to North America and in many places in-between. Issues are always worse on island ecosystems, like those of the Philippines. The new paper provides a world-wide summary of these problems:
Here is the paper, it’s open access, you can download the whole paper:
Another piece of writing about cats and the environments they destroy is this piece in Outside Online Magazine. It’s a few years old, but it’s worth re-visiting, I consider it a classic, and an excellent piece of science communication. Feral cats are an absolute terrible disaster for the ecosystems of the Hawaiian ecosystems, and folks who are driven 100% by emotions and 0% by reasoning are a big part of the problem.
“They say they want them gone. Well, they’d be gone if they’d let us spay and neuter!” … “These people just don’t get it.”… “The other people who just don’t get it, apparently, are scientists.”
Ask yourself: Are you making decisions because you are taken aback by big eyes and a fluffy fur, or are you an environmentalist who wants the best for the natural environment? Are you pro-nature, or pro your own unreflected emotions, pro-cutesy? If you are pro cutesy, get a hello kitty fluffy stuffed doll and hug it every day, but don’t act to destroy the bird fauna of where you live, by means of maintaining free-ranging cat populations.
Ok, so my take is pretty clear, I think free-ranging cats are an absolute catastrophe. Am I a bit biased? Sure. Am I right. Also, yes. Why am I biased? A feral cat which walked into our kitchen bit me, and I had some serious pain and infection in my hand to deal with for over two weeks, plus I had to get rabies and tetanus shots. Less than this causing an irrational (it’s not) bias, this really demonstrates that feral cats are also dangerous to humans. Here is my video narrating this sucky incident:
