Felines Fatales

One thing the animal-rights community and wildlife advocates agree on is the importance of keeping pet cats indoors. But that’s only half a solution or less because cats have been reproducing in the wild since European contact. For instance, recalling his 1866 visit to Hawaii, Mark Twain wrote: “I saw cats—Tom cats, Mary Ann cats, long-tailed cats, bobtail cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, walleyed cats, cross-eyed cats . . . platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats.”

The “multitudes” of feral cats that blight America hasten the extinction process. On Hawaii’s Big Island, for example, they depredate about one of every ten nests of the palila—an endangered honeycreeper (see “Last Chance,” Incite, May-June 2009). Ten thousand feet up on Mauna Loa, cats are snatching endangered Hawaiian petrels from their burrows. The single chick can’t fly for 15 weeks, and adults don’t breed until they’re at least five. On Kauai threatened Newell’s shearwaters get disoriented by lights and crash. Usually they’re unhurt, but because they can’t take off from land people pick them up and deposit them in large “mail boxes” at fire stations from which they’re collected and returned to the sea. But feral cats have learned to congregate under the lights, and, increasingly, they’re killing the birds before they can be rescued.

On Maui, where, at last count, the public maintains 110 feral cat colonies, two cats killed 143 wedge-tailed shearwaters in one night. Wedge-tailed shearwaters lay one egg a year after they’re seven years old, and if one parent is killed, the chick dies. One study turned up Hawaiian stilt parts in 12 percent of feral cat stomachs. Scott Fisher of the Maui Coastal Land Trust points out that seabird guano that used to enrich coastal wetlands throughout the state has declined to the point that alien plants are destroying these habitats.

When Fern Duvall, a biologist with the Hawaii Division of Forestry and Wildlife, compared seabird production on main islands and offshore islands where cats were absent, he found 13 percent nesting success on the former, 83 percent on the latter.

Duvall points out that the fact that there are fewer birds in urban areas doesn’t mean TNR is okay in cities like Honolulu. “We finally have the amakihi, one of our native honeycreepers, somehow adjusting to avian malaria,” he says. “This is the thing everyone’s been waiting for, a forest bird adjusting to introduced disease. They’re recolonizing former habitat in Honolulu only to be taken out by feral cats.”

Although feral cats elsewhere in the nation must contend with coyotes, foxes, fishers, bobcats, and harsh winters, they frequently outnumber all native, midsized mammalian predators combined and compete with them and raptors for prey. This is the case in Wisconsin, where, in the late 1980s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state Department of Natural Resources fretted that in creating new habitat for declining grassland birds they were funneling them into cat gullets. Accordingly, they commissioned Stanley Temple, then a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to undertake a major field study of feral cats.

Temple surveyed 1,200 landowners in rural Wisconsin, finding that feral cats, if they can be called that in a place where winters force dependence on humans, live in barns, scavenging and with no vet care. Most pet cats, he learned, were allowed to hunt outdoors. The data provided an accurate estimate of at least 1.4 million free-ranging cats in rural Wisconsin. And from observing cats he’d radio-collared and examining scats and stomach contents (the latter obtained with a mild emetic), he got an accurate estimate of between five and six birds killed per cat per year. That means that cats were annually knocking off somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million birds just in rural Wisconsin.

It got so bad that in 2005 the Wisconsin Conservation Congress—a purely advisory entity sired by Aldo Leopold to ensure public participation in DNR decision making—considered a proposal to recommend that free-ranging cats be placed on the unprotected list along with skunks, starlings, and the like. At hearings in 72 counties the proposal was supported by a majority of the public. It was hardly a radical notion because cats have long been classified as unprotected wildlife in other states. It wasn’t even necessary because there had never been a Wisconsin law against drowning or shooting problem cats on one’s own property.

Still, cat lovers caterwauled. Failing to grasp the difference between game protected by seasons and bag limits and unprotected nongame, the press wrongly reported that the state was considering opening a hunting season on house cats. One inflammatory piece, in the Wisconsin State Journal, was used in a Society of Environmental Journalists workshop as an example of how to warp news. The din ultimately induced Governor Jim Doyle to issue a proclamation that cats wouldn’t be hunted in Wisconsin.

In all his research Temple never killed a cat. He never advocated cat removal. He never took a position on placing cats on the unprotected list. But because his data had been cited by wildlife advocates some cat lovers confronted him with hysterical shrieking sufficiently sustained to preclude response. Others vowed to kill him. One woman, recorded on his answering machine, hissed: “You cat-murdering bastard. What goes around comes around. I declare Stanley Temple season open.”