Whose fault? House cat brought to remote Island (1894). A year later a species was extinct.

This article is a reminder that we should not blame the domestic or feral cat, as an invasive species on the continent of Australia and New Zealand, for the destruction of a part of the wildlife of those countries. At root, this is not the fault of the cat. 

Lyall's Wren. Image credit at base of page.

In fact, the cat is an innocent victim as much a victim as the wildlife that they kill. It is the human who is the creator of invasive species by transporting animals across the globe. We must remind ourselves of that. It may help us treat the feral cat more humanely. 

This is not happening in Australia where they blame the feral cat as a horrible invasive species attacking and killing their vulnerable, native small mammals and marsupials which are ideal prey animals for feral cats.

So why have I addressed this problem again today? Well, Forbes have an article about a "house cat" brought to a remote island in 1894 and a year later a bird species was extinct.

That species was a charming bird - adapted to life on an island - called the Lyall's Wren. Because there was an abundance of food on Stephens Island they never evolved to fly. 

This was a small, flightless bird once native to Stephens Island, New Zealand, known for its unique adaptations to a predator-free environment. It relied on its agility and camouflage rather than flight to get around its habitat but once the domestic cat was imported into the island by a lighthouse keeper in 1894 to keep them company in the solitude and monotony of that job, the bird rapidly became extinct through incessant attacks by this domestic cat and the cat's offspring.

The cat brought to the island was called Tibbles and she was pregnant! An instant family of cats brought to the island where they were allowed to roam outside of the lighthouse, into the habitat of this sweet flightless bird who suddenly became catastrophically vulnerable to predation, something they had never experienced before.

It was a unique set of circumstances but the fault lies firmly at the feet of the lighthouse keeper. The cat didn't make their way to the island by themselves. The lighthouse keeper allowed the cat to out into the habitat of this bird as mentioned. Back in the day they didn't understand the problems of conservation and predation by domestic cats.

But this single act has stained the international reputation of the domestic cat ever since. It's one more reason why the Australian authorities go diligently about their business of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of feral cats on the continent. The authorities there constantly recite this story of the destruction of an entire species of bird at the hands of a ravaging predator; the humble domestic cat.

The lighthouse keeper was David Lyall. The bird was named after him. He brought his family, his wife and at least one son and their cat to Stephens Island. He was an amateur natural history enthusiast. He was delighted to be sent to the island. He knew there would be species to study and discover. He didn't understand the dangers of bringing his cat Tibbles.

Tibbles was equally delighted because all around her was wildlife to be attacked and eaten. She would bring this small bird subsequently called Lyall's Wren back to her owner who would perform amateur taxidermy operations on the deceased animals.

By the time the catastrophic conservation problem of Tibbles had been realised, it was too late. The last known sighting of a live Lyall's Wren was in 1895, just a year after Tibbles was brought to Stephens Island.

Image credit: By John Gerrard Keulemans - Ibis 1895, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11097962

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

To save birds should we kill off cats (National Geographic)?

A National Geographic author, Noah Strycker, titled their recent article: "To save birds should we kill off cats?"

What kind of title is that? I don't think you could write a more absurd title about domestic and stray cats than that. I guess you know what the article is about; it's about the predation of birds by domestic, stray and feral cats all over the world. This topic comes up all the time. And my response comes up all the time because what they say annoys me.

They rely on numerous studies about cat predation on wildlife and they come to the general conclusion that domestic cats and stray cats kill billions of wild animals including precious birds which are more precious to humans than mice (speciesism).

But the studies are in quite small areas and you can't conclusively decide that bird populations are under threat or that anyone bird species is currently under threat of being made extinct by domestic and stray cat predation. The studies don't conclude that. In fact, in the UK, the RSPB, some time ago, said that there was no evidence that bird species where under general threat of extinction by cat predation.

We don't like to see it cats killing birds. It is an aspect of domestic cat ownership which is unwanted. We wish that all domestic cats were cuddly, furry non-predator creatures who kept us company and never had any desire to kill but unfortunately they are top predators and we domesticated them with their approval.

They are our responsibility. We created all the feral cats on the planet. We created all of stray cats on the planet. As mentioned we domesticated the cat. We are responsible and if we don't like the fact that they kill birds then we don't just kill all cats to resolve that problem we look to ourselves to resolve it humanely and responsibly.

And on that topic, you will find one very firm conclusion about the loss of bird species and the overall threat to wildlife in general. It all comes from humans. Human activity. Global warming caused by human activity. The building of human settlements destroying habitat.

There are no studies which compare the number of birds indirectly or directly killed by humans and the number of birds indirectly or directly killed by cats. But if there was such a study I would like to propose that humans kill far more birds than cats. Most of it indirectly but sometimes directly like building tall buildings into which migrating birds fly and die en masse.

But even if you go to the studies which conclude that a particular bird species on an island somewhere has been made extinct by domestic cats turned feral, you have to go to the human and their behaviour to find blame. These people imported domestic cats to an island and set them free where they procreated and became feral. But for that they would have been no predation of birds on those islands.

All invasive species including the feral cat, for example, in Australia, have been created through human activity. Humans create invasive species because they transport them from one continent to another. From one country to another.

How do you think hippopotamuses arrived in South America and started to procreate? Because a drug baron in that country decided to import hippopotamuses into his private zoo. When this drug baron was captured and put into prison for life, the zoo was abandoned and the hippopotamuses were freed and procreated. South America now has a very peculiar invasive species: hippopotamuses. Point made. Humans have created invasive species because humans are the only animal that can travel so widely and freely across oceans and bring other species with them either deliberately or accidentally.

So to blame the cat for devastating bird predation is incorrect anyway and it is a distortion of the truth to imply that cats kill birds and humans don't. If we are to kill any predator to protect birds it should be the top predator on the planet: the human. That would be equally absurd. Nobody is proposing that we kill humans to protect birds.

What we should be proposing is that human behaviour should be altered to protect wildlife in general including birds. At present there is no attempt whatsoever to do this at scale. There will be small projects in various countries but the general trend or tenor of human activity is to destroy nature and therefore animals that live within nature and that will go on for the indefinite future.

So this article on the respected online magazine National Geographic is idiotic and the headline is click bait. That's why I am addressing it. It needs to be counteracted with a counterargument. What's your argument?

You may know, incidentally, that in Australia they do think and believe that they can exterminate all feral cats by shooting them or poisoning them! So on that continent they actually agree with this National Geographic journalist. They think it's feasible to wipe out the feral cat population in Australia. However, they don't know how many feral cats there are. They don't know exactly where they all are. In killing feral cats with poison they kill other animals. Their task is impossible. As they don't know how many feral cats there are they can't assess how many birds are killed by cats. They say they can but they can't. More idiotic behaviour in my opinion. And it's cruel and inhumane. It's entirely wrong. Because, as mentioned, it totally ignores the origin of the feral cat problem: people.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Human destruction of animals versus cat destruction of animals

This is going to be short because I don't have a lot of reference material on it but I would like to remind people that when humans criticise the feral and to a lesser extent the domestic cat for the destruction of native animal species, they are forgetting that humans destroy far more through their activities.

Humans destroy animals through habitat destruction and on a much lesser scale through the destruction of prey animals which support native species. There are three ways that humans destroy habitat. For the sake of clarity, I'm referring to the habitat in which wild animals live and without which they cannot live. The three ways are (1) exploitation of resources and (2) pollution and (3) the introduction of exotic species. Habitat destruction by humans is considered to be the most important cause of species extinctions in many studies.

Habitat destruction includes deforestation primarily. Many wild cat species live in forests and depend upon the forests. Across the globe there is massive deforestation. The island of Borneo was pretty much covered in forests but thousands of square miles have been erased over the last 50 years. The Borneo Bay cat lives in this forest. An elusive cat which is highly endangered now because of deforestation. That is just one example.

Bornean Bay Cat. Photograph copyright Jim Sanderson, Ph.D – Please respect copyright.

Other ways that humans have destroyed habitat is through water quality deterioration, drainage of wetlands, mining, agricultural use of prairies, and fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides all change the environment of a variety of bird habitat which led to declines in populations. I don't have hard data but these environmental changes negatively impact birds far more than feral cat predation.

And the experts say that it is "crucial to view cat predation within the context of habitat destruction, since cats have not been shown to be the primary cause of the loss of native species on mainland continents (Mead 1982; Mitchell and Beck 1992). MR Slater says that "unfortunately, evidence regarding extinction is often anecdotal, circumstantial or historical."

I am quoting from MR Slater's section in the book The Welfare of Cats. This section deals with the extinction of native species. It is highly relevant today because global warming is putting pressure on nature and the animals that live within it. Global warming is due to human activity but humans in reaction to that knowledge are reluctant to curb activities which create global warming and instead they criticise the feral cat in Australia for decimating wildlife species.  Humankind is myopic in respect of endangering wild species. Humankind wants to deflect attention away from their anti-conservation behavior.

And MR Slater states something which I like to read, and I'll say it again; habitat destruction by humans is the most important cause of species extinctions. It was and it is and it will be the major cause of the extinction of species because the world relies on economic growth. In relying on growth, you have to rely on increased population size and inevitably economic growth leads to the destruction of habitat.

Until politicians and economists totally adjust their ideal model for society which as stated is economic growth there will be more wild animal extinctions.

Extinction of mammals on islands by introduced domestic and feral cats

When the predation of wildlife by feral and domestic cats is raised as a topic the devastating impact of cats on islands is invariably a major issue. Wildlife species on islands are particularly vulnerable because they are isolated from many of the diseases, predators and parasites that plague mammals on the mainland.

Stewart Island - Photo: Getty Images / tsvibrav

Dr. Bradshaw states that island species account for 83% of all documented extinctions of mammals. However, scientists can only implicate feral cats in the destruction of wildlife on these islands in about 15% of such extinctions. And further, within that 15% of such extinctions to which the blame is only the feral cat, other introduced predators should take their share of the responsibility according to Bradshaw in his book Cat Sense.

He says that mongooses, cane toads and especially rats are equally if not more devastating than feral cats on wildlife predation. Black rats a.k.a. ship rats, it is claimed, can do more damage than any other introduced predator. It is ironic, therefore, that it may be beneficial or there are at least some benefits to not slaughtering feral cats because cats are reasonably effective hunters of black rats according to Dr. Bradshaw.

If you attempt to exterminate feral cats (as is currently the objective of Australian legislatures) you might find that the outcome is far worse than imagined in terms of the population of black rats. He cites the example of Stewart Island off the coast of New Zealand. On that island feral cats have existed for more than 200 years with an endangered flightless parrot called the kakapo (owl parrot Strigops habroptilus). The cats mainly fed on the introduced species of the brown and black rat. Those species of rat have been held responsible for the extinction of several other species of birds in the same area.

Removing the cats in these places might lead to an increase in the rat population which in turn might lead to the extinction of the kakapo.

That's just an example because sometimes eradicating cats from an island can lead to a dramatic recovery in the population of certain vertebrate species. Bradshaw cites examples such as iguanas on Long Cay in the West Indies. Also, deer mice on Coronado Island in the Gulf of California.

Although, there is no doubt that the sheer number of feral cats in most places must have a significant impact on wildlife. The difficulty, as I see it, is quantifying that impact and the way that ornithologists and their organisations latch onto biased or estimated predation rates in rather poor studies to further their agenda which is to in effect kill large numbers of cats.