SHOULD CATS BE CULLED?
The Stephens Island wren was a tiny, flightless songbird that once lived on an island off the coast of New Zealand. But in 1894, a new lighthouse keeper moved to the island, along with his pet cat, Tibbles. Within a year – or so the story goes – Tibbles had eradicated the entire species. The extinction of the Stephens Island wren should be a warning to us all, said Stephen Moss in the Daily Mail. Cats are an ecological nightmare. They kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds every year in the US alone (as well as 22 billion small mammals). What makes this “carnage” even worse is that domestic cats have no need to hunt for food: they “torture” and kill other animals “simply for their own sadistic amusement”. Now, an American ornithologist has called for drastic action to curb this feline menace. In his book, Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, Dr Peter P. Marra says that cats should not be allowed outside except on a leash, and calls for a mass “cull” of stray cats.
Dr Marra has identified the wrong suspect, said Liz Jones in The Mail on Sunday. It isn’t cats who inflict the most suffering and death on bird populations: it’s humans. We are the ones who keep chickens – the most populous bird species on the planet – in vast, squalid battery farms. It is our poor stewardship of the land that has led to climate change, habitat loss, industrial agriculture and pollution – all much bigger threats to birds than the domestic moggy. Even the RSPB says that Britain’s 7.4 million pet cats, and nine million strays, rank pretty low on the danger list: most of the birds they kill are weak or injured, and therefore likely to die anyway.
Cats may not be the only, or the biggest, threat to wildlife, said The Wall Street Journal, but they are “the easiest problem to fix”. Putting cats on a lead is much less complicated than tackling “many-levelled threats like climate change”. And given how important birds are to the environment – pollinating plants, spreading seeds and controlling insects – a cull of strays is just common sense. But persuading cat lovers to see the bigger picture isn’t easy. As Dr Marra puts it: “This should be the low-hanging fruit. But as it turns out, it might be easier stopping climate change than stopping cats.”