Feral cat eats a small Australian native mammal and is poisoned by a PPI

The Aussies have created another novel way of killing feral cats. They spend many thousands of hours dreaming up new ways and this is the latest. They inject into a native small mammal such as a bilby, a rice-sized implant. They call them population protecting implants or PPIs. They are placed under the skin of the animal. These small mammals are dinner-sized creatures for the feral cats of the Australian continent.

Note: this is me reporting and commenting on the news. Journos call them op-eds.

Bilby - Credit: UniSA.

When inside the prey animal nothing happens. The pellet is covered by a protective coating. It contains a toxin derived from a natural poison in native plants. PPIs are harmless to tolerant native mammals they say.

However, once the mammal is eaten by a feral cat they become a deadly toxin as the implant is activated in the predator's stomach. They don't tell me how that transformation from a passive object under the skin becomes a deadly poison in a cat's stomach. I guess it must be the stomach acid of the feral cat which breaks down the coating.

Neither am I told whether the poisoned cat dies an agonising death or quietly. I'll presume it is the former but who cares 😕.

Thought: when my cat eats a mouse he leaves the gall bladder as it contains bile. Will feral cats learn to leave behind the PPI when they eat the bilby? They might. If so the project would be an expensive washout.

The technology has been developed by the University of South Australia. The objective: to curb feral cat predatory behaviour. It is the small ground dwelling mammals who are most at threat and it seems to me which most concern Australia's conservationists. It seems that the ulterior or higher objective is to teach feral cats that these small mammals are poisonous and therefore to be avoided.

Feral cat Australia. Photo: Pixabay.

Two other native species in this bracket are the bettong and quoll. They've been forced to think about alternative methods of controlling feral cats because current schemes to remove them from the landscape have had limited success. This is despite throwing frozen sausages containing 1080 poison from helicopters. This particular poison causes a painful death. That doesn't concern the scientists of Australia.

The University has collaborated with researchers from local ecology groups, Ecological Horizons and Peacock Biosciences and the University of Adelaide.

At present 30 bilbies have been implanted with PPIs at the Arid Recovery. This is a 123 km² wildlife reserve in the north of South Australia. This is a trial. The results will hopefully prove the effectiveness of this technology.

Comment: it seems to me that they have to trap these small mammals to implant the PPI. That is going to take a lot of effort and money. Will the reward i.e. the killing of a single feral cat each time be commensurate with the financial and manpower cost? My prediction is that this is cost ineffective and it is a project that will fizzle out. Unless feral cats, as mentioned, learn that these mammals are poisonous and avoid them. That would be a major success but it will take a long time.

Are cats psychopaths and do psychopathic animals exist?

I think this is a question that should not be asked. It's a dangerous question to ask in my opinion. Psychopathy is a human concept that relates to humans. It's a way of measuring human behaviour which is antisocial, amoral and which demonstrates the inability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships. Psychopaths fail to learn from experience and express extreme egocentricity. So I don't think you can measure animal behaviour with a tool that is designed to measure human behaviour. You get into all sorts of complexities and problems if you try and do that. You end up at a dead end.

Psycho cat. This is an anthropomorphized cat in the human image. It shows that we are applying human concepts inappropriately to animals.

But they say that cats are inherently psychopathic. They say that all domestic cats are psychopaths. But this is instinctive, natural behaviour by domestic cats. I suppose what they're referring to, the experts, is that domestic cats like to hunt and prey on animals and show no remorse. They even play with animals before they kill them. An act of barbaric, unfeeling callousness. It's horrible by human standards but entirely natural by the standards of a predator. So all predators are psychopaths if we get into this kind of discussion.

On a finer point, it is believed that 1% of men and 0.3-0.7% of females can be classified as psychopaths. People are human-animals. We are animals to put it bluntly. And therefore psychopathic animals do exist by definition.

But as animals' brains function differently to human brains I think you will need to devise a test for animals if you want to measure whether their behaviour is psychopathic or not. Even that might be pointless.

Also, when we measure a person a psychopathic we measure that person's behaviour against norms, and moral standards in human society. In order to decide if a person is psychopathic you must measure them against society's norms as we see them. You can't measure cats and other animals against human society norms and moral standards. It is going to fail.

This is a subject which is not been formally studied by scientists. Although you will see slightly amusing stories in the news media about domestic cats being psychopathic. It's the kind of article that journalists like to write.

The fact of the matter is that when intelligent people discuss whether domestic cats and other animals are psychopathic, they end up at a dead end. They come to a place, once they've thought about this, where they can't make a decision and provide an answer to that question. That's because the question is inappropriately formulated. As mentioned, psychopathy is a concept which describes a small percentage of humans.

In any case, I would argue that it is an artificial concept. It is people labelling other people. But there is a wide spectrum of human behaviours. We don't need to label them at the extremes. You could argue that a psychopathic person is behaving normally at that end of the spectrum of human behaviour. We can expect people to behave like that sometimes.

My thoughts have come to a dead end. It's not worth discussing this. It doesn't get you anywhere. It doesn't enlighten you. We should never apply human concepts to animals. We should get into the heads of animals and try and sense what it is like to live in their world to understand them but not brand them and label them with human mental conditions.

P.S. Humans have a habit of labelling other humans. On a slightly different subject, humans are finally understanding that the sexual preferences and genders of humans is a continuous spectrum from one extreme to the other. In the past we labelled people as female and male, as women and men. But because of the woke movement people are being forced (and this is a good thing) into relating to other people in a more refined and fluid way. Sexual preferences and gender is not a black-and-white situation. I don't think we should label anybody in any way. Perhaps one day we won't. Everyone with any sexual preference and preferences regarding their gender should be accepted as normal even if it might be unusual.

Should 'leopard' be capitalized?

No, the word "leopard" should not be capitalised because it is a common noun but there are some exceptions which I discuss below when the word becames part of an individual cat's name. 

None of the wild cat species should be capitalised including the lion and tiger. It's interesting, however, that you still see the names of wild cat species sometimes capitalised. 

I believe that there was a convention perhaps a hundred years ago when these nouns were capitalized. Grammar, after all, is an artificial convention. It is not an absolute set of rules set in stone. 

Humans decide what is and what isn't acceptable in terms of grammar and the current thinking is that the word "leopard" should not be capitalised and neither should any other name of the wild cat species. 

Sometimes, however, you will see a lion that has been named because they are famous i.e. 'Cecil the Lion'. Clearly, the whole name should be capitalised as all names are. The whole name is 'Cecil the Lion'. The intervening 'the' should stay in lowercase.

Sometimes man-eating leopards have been named such as the the Leopard of Rudraprayag; a leopard reputed to have killed over 125 people. It was eventually killed by hunter and author Jim Corbett who has a tiger reserve named after him in the north of India.

The cat has been given a name and the full name is as stated. In this case the word 'leopard' is capitalized as it is part of a proper name (proper noun). Once again the intervening 'of' is in lowercase.

Amur leopard. Photo in the public domain.

And when there is a prefix which tells you where the cat is from, the pre-fix should be capitalized as is the case for: Amur leopard and Siberian tiger for instance.

Macaque and kitten - a close symbiotic interspecies friendship

This is an interspecies friendship story from Indonesia in 2010. You may have heard about it. I am a great fan of interspecies friendships and there are many to see on the Internet. This particular story comes from a book I have on these sort of friendships called Unlikely Friendships.

RELATED: Interspecies friendship: donkey and domestic cat

The macaque and the kitten. An interspecies friendship in which both found something that was missing in their lives. The picture is deemed to be in the public domain.

In Indonesia there is a sacred forest in the town of Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali. In this place monkeys roam freely over a Hindu temple built many centuries ago. They are long-tailed macaques which are said to guard the temple from evil spirits.

A ginger tabby kitten strayed into the area and into the arms of one of these macaque primates. At this temple there are 300 macaques in four separate troops each with their own territory. People who saw the friendship develop were astonished.

One witness was Anne Young who was on vacation at the time visiting the Sacred Monkey Forest. She said the following:

"The pair had been together a few days, and whenever the park staff tried to capture the kitten, it would just run back to the monkey."

The macaque was a young male. He would groom the kitten. He would hug and nuzzle him and sometimes lay his head on the kitten's head. It was clear that he wanted to keep his kitten friend to himself. He became wary of the other macaques and indeed people who got too close. He would hide his 'prize' by climbing higher or going deep into the forest with his kitten in his arms.

On one occasion he used a leaf to cover the kitten. The kitten made no attempt to escape from the relationship. This macaque was not an alpha male or a leader.

It is believed that he was not getting a lot of attention from the other macaques and neither was he receiving attention from humans as they've become a nuisance in Ubud.

So the macaque found a friend and some attention as did the kitten. Perhaps they both craved friendship and a companion. It is probably as simple as that. A homeless kitten found a parent and a male primate found a child.

The story does not tell me how it ended. I'd like to know. Did they remain friends for the rest of the life of the cat?

Kitten thrown from car outside the home of the person who adopted him

Sometimes there can be a domestic cat merry-go-round. It happens all over the place in all developed countries to varying extents. I read about them a lot. One person throws a kitten away. Another person picks him up and lives with him the rest of his life. Sometimes that process is extended whereby the second owner also gives up the kitten or adult cat to a rescue. They adopt the cat out. The adopter might also relinquish their cat. It can be a merry-go-round.

Gray - a cat who was thrown away from a car as a kitten and adopted by the owner of the house near to where it happened. Photo: Janet Johson.

There is a good and rather stark example on the Internet. It comes from Janet Johnson. It happened last January when her son looked out of their front window at 8:15 PM. They live in South Carolina and the temperature was forecast to drop to 28°F. A cold night.

Johnson's son turned to her mother and said that somebody just threw something out of the car in front of their house. She went to the front door to have a look as the non-descript car pulled away.

Walking down the driveway was a little grey kitten about 4-5 months old. Johnson was not in the mood to adopt a kitten but she had lost a Maine Coon that she had adopted in 2011. He disappeared mysteriously the year before last. Perhaps he is another victim of the merry-go-round? Stolen and sold?

Johnson rescued and adopted the little grey kitten and called him Gray. She said that he is healthy, happy, neutered, loved and aggravating at 5 AM. The casualness with which the people in that non-descript car threw away their kitten is shocking. It was right in front of Johnson's house for anyone to see.

Throwing out kittens is a bit like fly tipping in the UK when people throw away items by the roadside along country lanes. They do this because it's easier to do rather than taking it down to the council tip. It's laziness. In respect of kittens it is callousness. The mentality of people who do this is very poor. They could take the kitten to a rescue centre. Too messy and too much trouble. Too embarrassing as the reason is probably allowing cats to breed.

But there is a merry-go-round between the bad people and the good people as illustrated. However, sometimes it's just about mediocre people who adopt and give up and then somebody else adopts and they give up and so it goes on.

This practice happened a lot during Covid lockdowns in the UK regarding dogs, actually. Casual and self-indulgent adoptions of puppies led to early relinquishments when they realised dog ownership is not a pushover, which led to advertising their dog for sale on social media (against the rules on Facebook) which in turn led to more careless adoptions and so on. The victims are the companion animals who are shunted around between different owners.