Feral Thoughts

Environment aside, breeding Savannah cats is a cruel practice

The recent airing of the BBC Documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed in Australia was an insight into the blinkered thinking of those breeding dogs for shows. Never mind the functionality of an animal, but focus entirely on the look, a look based on a mythological view of the breed. German Shepherds barely able to walk because of the need to match the animal's genetics to a breed standard stipulating a sloping back. King Charles Cavalier's with brains too big for their skulls (the opposite problem to their breeders). Hopefully the documentary and the public reaction to it has cracked a tiny ray of light into Kennel Clubs. 

In the past few days, the English Press has looked again at some of the issues with the Savannah cat (here and here), a breed sensibly banned from import into Australia last year. Its ban from Australia was on environmental grounds. However, there is an animal welfare issue with the breed that reminds me of the tunnel vision of many show-animal breeders: first-cross Savannah cats are pretty well all born prematurely.

Amongst "free-living" cats and "unhomed non-humans"

I glanced down the food table; there's the vegetarian; vegan; vegan-gluten-free; vegan, gluten-free, GM-free, Rainforest Alliance certified.  No ham that I can see.  Hmmm, should I ask?  Up at the bar is an area for "special meals", but if vegan gluten-GM-rainforest-free isn't special, what is?  Oh, that's nut-free-gluten-free-rainforest-vegan-free.  Damn those nuts.  This conference might be about animals and society, but it doesn't run to supplying bits of animal between slices of bread.

Ah well, I can live ham-free for a day. 

I'm not so sure about five days though.  Mind you, some people attended for seven days at the 2009 Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society - Minding Animals, delighting in the quadruple-certified foods, and very seriously contemplating the role of animals and society.  Serious was certainly a description I'd use.  I've never been to a philosopher dominated conference before, and wonder if they always take themselves so seriously.  Did Plato worry this much?

The feral cat versus the environment - denying past impacts will lead to future problems.

In his excellent 2006 book Australia's Mammal Extinctions - a 50,000 year history, Chris Johnson of James Cook University makes the comprehensive case for the role of feral cats in causing extinctions.  He concludes that with the exception of the toothache wallaby, cats and foxes can account for practically all of the mammal extinctions of the last two hundred years.

There are many people that have, quite correctly, questioned the role of feral cats.  Tim Low does so in Feral Future and Tim Flannery has done in the ABC special Ten million wild cats.  However, the case against the cat becomes more and more compelling as we understand more of the interactions of cats and other factors in the environment.

In his book Animal Nation (2006), Professor of Sociology at the University of Tasmania, Adrian Franklin argues that we should accept feral animals as part of country.  Our "species-cleansing" attitude is derided and Franklin argues for acceptance of humanity as simply another agent of nature, and to accept the changing mix and balance of species as inevitable, and given.  He uses the fact that the feral cat has become a totem animal in some Aboriginal families as evidence that environmentalist's views of feral animals are more bound to national history than natural history. 

Franklin goes much further than Low or Flannery who question the case against the cat. He doesn't go as far as some animal rights people that deny any environmental damage by cats in order to make the argument that we should just leave them be. 

It might be worth looking at a few of the controversial issues about feral cats:

• Cats arrived before white settlement.  Their role in dreaming stories is evidence of this.  Wrong.  Ian Abbot (2002) looked hard at the issue of when cats were introduced and there is no evidence it predated white settlement.  Aboriginal dreaming stories can develop reasonably quickly - when Andrew Burbidge and colleagues followed oral histories of animals, they even encountered a tractor dreaming site.  In the western deserts, cats would have arrived probably a generation ahead of white settlement, so the fact that cat dreaming might not be associated with white settlement is not surprising.

• Environmentalists in Australia persecute cats. Not really.  Budgets are small and the tools for cat control are few.  I don't know of any programs where people get budget and approval to simply go out and kill feral cats.  I sit as an observer on the inter-government Vertebrate Pests Committee and everyone is on about impact reduction, not simply feral animal numbers.  Certainly there is research going on to try and make cat control more effective, but most programs would be associated with clearing an island, sanctuary or reintroduction site.

• Cats are widespread across Australia and overlap with small mammals (especially in Tasmania), therefore they don't drive small mammals to extinction.  This view fails to take into account other factors in the environment.  Rainfall is one - cats are most effective as hunters in areas that are open, with sparse vegetation due to low rainfall.  Predation on cats is another - for example, numerous extinctions did not occur until Aborigines, who regularly hunted cats, left the land. 

It's this last point that I have most concerns about.  Things change in the environment and so cats can become a problem.  I don't think it is necessary to have a level of proof equivalent to a murder trial before we act.  For example:

• Researchers in the Northern Territory are reporting significant declines in small mammals in Kakadu National Park.  More regular burning patterns could be opening the country up to cat predation.

• Woylie (brush-tailed bettong) numbers in the South West of Western Australia have crashed.  Gathering evidence points to "mesopredator release" - that is, cats becoming more important predators as a result of fox control - as at least part of the cause.

• Tasmanian researchers report it is a lot harder to find a range of species in recent monitoring efforts.  Widespread demise of Tasmanian Devils might be responsible for rising feral cat populations.

In none of these cases do we have definitive proof of the role of feral cats.  But that is not a reason to simply sit back and accept them as an agent of nature, as Adrian Franklin puts it.  I can't abide this extreme Darwinism point of view and agree with the 7 out of 10 Australians that put feral cats in their "top 5" ferals of concern.

I argue we should do more about feral cats, ahead of getting definitive proof of their role in extinctions. 

Cat nominated as our biggest mistake

Frank Keenan from Biosecurity Queensland contemplated in an email to me that the cat might represent Australia's worst feral mistake.  Cane toads are firmly lodged in the national psyche as one of the dumbest moves we've made - introducing them as a biological control almost three quarters of a century ago.  However, in discussing the earlier post on TNR, Frank pointed out that cats were seeded to much of the country as a rabbit control measure.

Too much like the lady that swallowed the fly. 

I don't think we've ever introduced a third-order pest.  One to get rid of one we introduced to get rid of another?

What's on the menu?

Imagine a line of trucks from Sydney to Grafton on the New South Wales north coast.  More than five hours driving at the speed limit hurtling past truck after truck lined up bumper to bumper.

Now fill the back of every one of those trucks with wildlife.  Feathertail gliders, Mountain Pygmy Possums, dunnarts and New Holland mice.  Wonga pigeons and little penguins.  Green tree frogs and frill-necked lizards.  Fill those trucks to the top. (Yes, they'd be rabbits and black rats and a few Indian mynahs too).

A line of trucks from Sydney almost to Queensland filled with wildlife.  Unique wildlife.  Wildlife you don't really get anywhere else on earth.

That's the diet of Australia's feral cat population.  For one year.

It's hard to believe but there may be as many as 18 million feral cats in the country, each eating about a hundred and twenty five grams of food each day.  For a single cat eating only Mountain Pygmy Possums, that would be almost 800 possums a year.  If each cat eats 125 grams a day, that's a daily diet of 2250 tonnes, or 820,000 tonnes a year.  At an average payload of 25 tonnes, that's close to 33,000 truck-fulls.  And at 19 metres a truck (I rang the Australian Trucking Association), bumper-to-bumper they'd run for 622,440 metres.  Sydney to Grafton.  My goodness.

Of course those figures are based on a 3.8 kg average feral cat size.  If cats get bigger with new genes into the population (as we now know dogs have), they'll need to eat more.  The convoy of trucks would then be on the outskirts of Brisbane.

Thanks to Tony Buckmaster, PhD student with the CRC and Sydney University, for helping with these figures.