Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Cat Wars
WORK NOTES: with Chris Santella
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
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NATIONALITY:
https://nationalzoo.si.edu/migratory-birds/pete-marra * http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/20/kill-all-stray-cats-and-keep-the-rest-indoors-says-us-academic/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Southern Connecticut State University, B.S.; Louisiana State University, M.S.; Dartmouth College, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Avian conservation scientist. Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, Washington, DC, director. Founder of various research and communication initiatives, such as the Migratory Connectivity Project, the Animal Mortality and Monitoring Program, and Neighborhood Nestwatch.
WRITINGS
Contributor to academic journals, including Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society, and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
SIDELIGHTS
Peter P. Marra is an avian conservation scientist. He is the director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. Marra’s research interests include disease ecology, urban ecosystem ecology, and the ecology of migratory birds. He has founded various research and communication initiatives, such as the Migratory Connectivity Project, the Animal Mortality and Monitoring Program, and Neighborhood Nestwatch.
Birds of Two Worlds
With Russell Greenberg, Marra coedited Birds of Two Worlds: The Ecology and Evolution of Migration in 2005. Deriving from a symposium at the Smithsonian Institution in 2002, the account spans thirty-three chapters discussing various phenomena related to avian migration. Topics include molecular approaches to the ecology and evolution of migration, stopover ecology of intercontinental migrants, impact of winter food supply on migratory birds, and paleoecology and fossil history of migratory landbirds.
A contributor to SciTech Book News observed that “like the book’s intended audience,” the contributors to the account “are biologists and scientists from several fields worldwide.”
Cat Wars
With coauthor Chris Santella, Marra published Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer in 2016. The authors posit that a massive stray cat culling is necessary in order to help reduce the rate at which birds are killed each year. They additionally propose that pets should be kept indoors exclusively except when on a leash. The authors also point to the health risks that cats pose toward humans, including through toxoplasmosis, rabies, and the plague.
Reviewing the book in the New Statesman, John Gray noted that the authors “make some attempt to appeal to cat lovers by suggesting that cats be kept indoors and allowed to work off their excess energy on feline versions of hamster wheels,” adding that owners “‘can get a leash and walk their cats as tens of millions walk their dogs.'” Santella found that “it is obvious from these examples that the authors … have little knowledge of and even less affection for cats.” Santella remarked that “the principal rationale for a mass cull of the cat population is environmental conservation. But the risk that cats pose to the environment is not enough alone to explain the authors’ intense hostility to Felis silvestris. The danger of disease can be countered by programmes such as Trap-Neuter-Return.” Santella appended that “the risk to birds can be diminished by bells and other devices. (Birds also spread diseases, some of them potentially fatal, but this is rarely mentioned by cat haters.) More fundamentally, it is distinctly odd to single out one branch of a nonhuman species as a destroyer of ecological diversity when the main culprit in this regard is by any reasonable measure the human animal. With their superlative proficiency as hunters, cats may have altered the ecosystem in parts of the world. But it is human beings that are driving the planetary mass extinction that is under way.”
Writing in the Atlantic, Britt Peterson observed that the authors “take the easy way out. They’re so clearly not cat lovers that they can’t really begin to comprehend those of us who are. The best they can do in their otherwise informative anti-cat polemic is to tell us that cats have long been ‘tolerated by their human neighbors because of their supreme pet-like characteristics.'” Peterson shared that “the authors of Cat Wars argue for a combination of spay/neuter programs, enclosed sanctuaries, and euthanasia. But they’re well aware of the obstacles,” finding that “they may well be right that the political difficulties are more daunting than the logistical ones.” In a review in Library Journal, Cynthia Lee Knight cited that “this book is not recommended on its own merits” but admitted that because of the “polarizing approach” the authors take to the subject, there may be an interest in some quarters. Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Nancy Szokan suggested that “in a country where the authors estimate that ninety million or so cats live in homes—a society that’s also obsessed with cute-kitten videos—do you think anyone’s going to have a problem with this? You can’t help but wait for the fur to fly.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Atlantic, December 1, 2016, Britt Peterson, review of Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, p. 40.
Library Journal, September 1, 2016, Cynthia Lee Knight, review of Cat Wars, p. 136.
New Statesman, February 3, 2017, John Gray, review of Cat Wars, p. 40.
SciTech Book News, September 1, 2005, review of Birds of Two Worlds: The Ecology and Evolution of Migration.
Telegraph (London, England), September 20, 2016, Patrick Sawer, “Kill Unwanted Stray Cats and Keep the Rest Indoors, Says U.S. Academic.”
Washington Post Book World, September 19, 2016, Nancy Szokan, review of Cat Wars.
ONLINE
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (September 7, 2016), Colin Dickey, review of Cat Wars.
Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center Web site, https://nationalzoo.si.edu/ (July 14, 2017), author profile.*
Pete Marra
Center Head
Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center
B.S., Southern Connecticut State University; M.S., Louisiana State University; Ph.D., Dartmouth College
Pete Marra is the director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. His research in avian conservation science has three broad themes, including the ecology of migratory birds, urban ecosystem ecology and disease ecology.
Marra's primary interests lie in understanding the factors that control population persistence and dynamics, so his research examines the roles of climate, habitat, food and pathogens, as well as other anthropogenic sources of mortality on the individual condition of both migratory and resident birds. Marra's research emphasizes incorporating events throughout the annual cycle to understand how more complex interactions across seasons drive the ecology and evolution of species, and he uses this information to find conservation solutions. To do this, he has developed and incorporated multiple novel and emerging tracking techniques into his research.
Marra has founded several large research and communication initiatives, including Neighborhood Nestwatch, The Migratory Connectivity Project and the Animal Mortality and Monitoring Program. Communicating his science and his excitement for the conservation of wildlife to as wide an audience as possible, including the general public, is a high priority of his overall program.
Marra and his students, post docs and colleagues have published more than 170 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Marra’s recent book is entitled "Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer."
Marra earned a B.S. from Southern Connecticut State University, a master's from Louisiana State University and a Ph.D from Dartmouth College.
He is co-founder of Tree House Concerts, an avid fly fisherman, passionate cook and father of two.
Recent papers:
Cohen, Emily B., Barrow, Wylie C., Buler, Jeffrey J., Deppe, Jill L., Farnsworth, Andrew, Marra, Peter P., McWilliams, Scott R., Mehlman, David W., Wilson, R. R., Woodrey, Mark S. and Moore, Frank R. 2017. How do en route events around the Gulf of Mexico influence migratory landbird populations?. The Condor, 327-343. http://dx.doi.org/10.1650/CONDOR-17-20.1
Cooper, Nathan W., Hallworth, Michael T. and Marra, Peter P. 2017. Light-level geolocation reveals wintering distribution, migration routes, and primary stopover locations of an endangered long-distance migratory songbird. Journal of Avian Biology, 209-219. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jav.01096
Kennedy, Christina M., Zipkin, Elise F. and Marra, Peter P. 2017. Differential matrix use by Neotropical birds based on species traits and landscape condition. Ecological Applications: A Publication of the Ecological Society of America, 619-631. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/eap.1470
Projects
A Message from the Director
Welcome to the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC), your virtual gateway to the groundbreaking research conducted by our staff, post docs and students.
Our work broadly focuses on the ecology, evolution and conservation of migratory birds. Whether it's studying annual migratory movements, collecting long-term data on migratory birds from North to South America, working with bird-friendly coffee farmers in Nicaragua or bridging classrooms across the Americas—we do it because we're passionate about science, conservation, education and, of course, birds!
We face some extreme challenges in bird science and conservation, but I firmly believe the scientific advances from SMBC and the talented colleagues we work with are helping to tackle these issues head on.
In the coming years, we will continue to deploy the latest technologies to track species like long-billed curlews, Connecticut warblers, common nighthawks and mountain plovers as they traverse the globe, and wire-tailed manakins as they display on tropical leks in Ecuador's lowlands.
We will build complex population models to better understand why familiar species like the wood thrush and species like it are declining, and then work to apply that information on the ground to save species.
We will study how birds like the island scrub-jay might adapt to climate change, through our ongoing research in the Channel Islands—often called the California Galapagos.
We will continue to protect tropical habitat by promoting Bird Friendly Coffee.
And, we will share this information with more and more kids through our education program, Bridging the Americas, and with the public through our signature citizen-science program, Neighborhood Nestwatch.
This is why we're here. SMBC is committed to bringing the best and most innovative science to broad audiences. Effective solutions require a fundamental understanding of birds' biology. Think of us as natural history detectives searching for clues about birds and what influences their survival.
Why does it matter? That's easy—birds connect us to nature like no other animal. They are an everyday reminder that we are part of the natural world. As species decline or disappear, the integrity of Earth's tapestry, of which we are a part, becomes compromised. As the head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, I can't have that happen—not for my kids or yours. I'm optimistic for the future, the things we'll learn and the information we can provide to make a difference in the conservation of birds and other species.
So please, dive into our website and learn about the fascinating and vital work that goes on here. And know you can help—become a member of the Migratory Bird Center today and join the effort to conserve some of the greatest species on the planet.
Pete Marra, Ph.D
Director, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center
Kill unwanted stray cats and keep the rest indoors, says US academic
Dr Peter Marra says cats are causing widespread damage to the bird population
Dr Peter Marra says cats are causing widespread damage to the bird population Credit: Oliver Giel
Patrick Sawer, Senior Reporter
20 September 2016 • 12:06pm
It is not a suggestion that is likely to go down well with millions of cat lovers.
An American academic has recommended that all stray felines should be eradicated unless they can be found a home, because of the huge numbers of birds they kill.
Not only that, but Dr Peter Marra, the director of the Smithsonian migratory bird centre in Washington, says all domestic cats should be kept indoors or on a lead to stop the “devastating impact” they have on wildlife.
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He also says they would benefit from being kept inside to protect them from catching disease from other animals..
Dr Marra’s controversial ideas are contained in his newly published book Cat Wars, in which he advocates rounding up all stray cats, getting them adopted and - if new owners can not be found - euthanising them.
In the book he writes: "From a conservation ecology perspective, the most desirable solution seems clear—remove all free-ranging cats from the landscape by any means necessary.”
He goes on to add: "But such a solution is hardly practical given the legions of cats roaming the land – as many as 100 million unowned animals, plus 50 million owned cats that roam – and the painful question of what to do with the cats even if they could be captured.”
Dr Marra bases his controversial recommendations on a series of studies which he claims show the carnage inflicted by cats on birds and small mammals.
The conservation scientist says Britain's 8.1 million cats are responsible for the death of 55 million birds every year and pose a threat to entire species and that felines in the US kill between 1.3 and four billion birds every year.
A cat chasing a mouse in Warsaw's Lazienki park as two birds look on
A cat chasing a mouse in Warsaw's Lazienki park as two birds look on Credit: ALIK KEPLICZ/AP
Dr Marra said: "We've known for more than 100 years that cats can have a devastating impact on biodiversity. We really need to address the free roaming cat issue. People that own cats need to put them on a leash. With unowned cats our goal needs to be to get them off the landscape.”
He added: “What we propose is we look at where cats are intersecting with really biodiverse sensitive areas where there are threatened or endangered species or where they can have an impact on species that are declining in some way.
“Those cats need to be captured, adopted out and if they can’t be adopted out they will need to be euthanised."
Dr Marra, who describes himself as an “avid” fly fisherman, says that cats are responsible for the extinction of 63 species of birds, mammals and reptiles.
“They are doing what comes naturally to them. They are a predator,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme.
Dr Marra also criticised the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) for ignoring the scientific evidence and not doing enough to highlight the damage being inflicted by cats on Britain’s wildlife.
But the RSPB yesterday rejected Dr Marra’s conclusions about the impact of cats on Britain’s birdlife.
A spokeswoman for the charity said: “Although cats kill millions of birds and small mammals each year, there is no evidence that this is the main cause of decline in any bird species in the UK.”
The RSPB said that in certain circumstances cat predation can be more of a concern, particularly around vulnerable sites such as some offshore islands.
In 2002 the charity helped remove feral cats from Ascension Island to help frigate birds, which were threatened with extinction, recolognise their former home.
“The RSPB goes to great lengths to provide recommendations for cat and garden owners on how to reduce any fatalities, including advice on the benefits of fitting a collar with a bell and a range of other deterrents,” said the spokeswoman.
The Cat Protection charity also dismissed Dr Marra’s call, saying: “Research has cited many other factors for bird and small mammal species loss, including mismanagement and loss of traditional wildlife habitat, climate change and the increased use of pesticides and fertilisers in modern farming practices.”
Can cats teach us how to live? we should celebrate the solitary hunters among us
John Gray
146.5352 (Feb. 3, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
A philosopher once assured me, many years ago, that he had converted his cat to veganism. Believing he was joking, I asked how he had achieved this feat. Had he supplied the cat with mouse-flavoured vegan food? Had he presented his cat with other cats, already practising veganism, as feline role models? Or had he argued with the cat and convinced it that eating meat is wrong? My interlocutor wasn't amused, and I realised that he really believed the cat had opted for a meat-free diet. So I ended our exchange with a simple question: did the cat go out? It did, he told me. That solved the mystery. Plainly, the cat was supplementing its diet by covert hunting. If it ever brought home any of the carcasses--a practice to which ethically undeveloped cats are sadly prone--the virtuous philosopher had managed not to notice them.
It is not hard to imagine how the cat on the receiving end of this experiment in moral education must have viewed its human teacher. Perplexity at the absurdity of his behaviour would soon have been followed by contemptuous indifference. Seldom doing anything unless it serves a definite purpose or gives immediate satisfaction, cats are arch-realists. Faced with human folly, they simply go their own way.
The independence of cats is one of the features most admired by those of us who love them. Given their evolutionary history as solitary hunters, it is easily explained. Seeking their prey alone, cats--with the exception of lions and sometimes cheetahs--have not developed patterns of collective action and hierarchy of the kind found in dogs and other pack animals. "Herding cats" is a metaphor based on fact: cats don't live in herds. As they are highly territorial and notoriously picky in their eating habits, they make an unlikely candidate for domestication. And yet, more than almost any other species, cats have learned to live on intimate terms with human beings. How has this come about?
As Abigail Tucker explains in her immensely informative and enjoyable book, wild cats need space: large tracts of land that can sustain the sources of meat that are their sole food supply. Human settlements posed a big challenge to these "hyper-carnivores". When forests are cleared for farming, native prey species disappear, or shrink in numbers. Lacking the prey they relied on in the past, wild cats can only turn to animals that human beings have domesticated--cattle, sheep and the like. Inevitably, this makes cats enemies of human beings. It is not recreational hunting or the use of body parts as aphrodisiacs that is condemning so many wild cats to extinction, though these disgusting practices are hastening the end of wild tigers. It is habitat destruction, an inevitable concomitant of human expansion.
So, it is all the more extraordinary that one particular type of cat--Felis silvestris, a small and sturdy tabby--should have been able to spread worldwide as a result of learning to live with human beings. By invading the villages that were established 12,000 years ago in parts of what is now Turkey, these cats were able to turn the human shift to a more sedentary life to their advantage. Preying on other animals attracted by stored seeds and grains and harvesting waste meat left behind after slaughtered animals had been eaten, they made human settlements into reliable sources of food. Recent evidence points to a comparable process taking place independently in China roughly five millennia ago, when a central Asian variety of Felis silvestris pursued a similar strategy.
Having entered into close proximity with human beings, cats were quickly recognised as being useful to them. Employing cats for pest control on farms and ships became common. They spread to parts of the world where they were not previously known. In many countries, they outnumber any other species as co-inhabitants.
Cats initiated this process of domestication themselves, and on their own terms. Unlike other species that foraged in early human settlements, they have continued to live in close quarters with human beings ever since. For a minor predator, it is an extraordinary triumph. As Tucker writes:
A house cat is not really a fur baby, but it
is something altogether more remarkable:
a tiny conquistador with the whole planet
at its feet. House cats would not exist
without humans, but we didn't really
create them, nor do we control them now.
Our relationship is less about ownership
than aiding and abetting.
Predictably, there has also been a counter-reaction against cats. Tucker highlights the aims and methods of this movement:
... the worldwide ecological community
is, in some areas, attempting full-on
felinicide. People bomb cats' lairs with
targeted viruses and deadly poisons.
They rain hell on cats with shotguns and
hounds. Australia is leading the fight ...
the government has bankrolled pioneering
research in cat poisons, including the
development of a toxic kangaroo sausage
called Eridicat. The Australians have also
tested the Cat Assassin, a metal tunnel
into which cats are lured and then misted
with poison. Scientists have considered
despatching Tasmanian devils (carnivorous
marsupials that live wild only on the island
of Tasmania) to dismember cats.
Among these advocates of felinicide are the authors of Cat Wars. For Peter P Marra and Chris Santella, cats are "environmental contaminants like DDT" which spread diseases and disrupt ecological balance. A chapter luridly entitled "Zombie Makers" describes how cats spread rabies, parasitic Toxoplasma gondii and the pathogen responsible for the Black Death. According to the authors, schizophrenia, which they describe in simplistic terms as "a severe brain disorder", can be caused by infections emanating from cats. These fearful zombie-makers are also responsible for the deaths of countless birds (Marra is the director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Centre). The only solution is to reduce cat numbers and eliminate stray cats completely. Making sure the reader is clear about what they are recommending, the authors write: "Euthanasia must be part of a successful solution."
Marra and Santella make some attempt to appeal to cat lovers by suggesting that cats be kept indoors and allowed to work off their excess energy on feline versions of hamster wheels. If "cat owners" insist on giving their animal companions experience of the outdoors, "they can get a leash and walk their cats as tens of millions walk their dogs".
It is obvious from these examples that the authors--unlike Tucker, whose delight in the species is evident on every page--have little knowledge of and even less affection for cats. Do they imagine that cats will accept life on a leash as dogs have done? Are they so ignorant of the differences between the two species? Maybe not. They seem bent on feline mass extermination. At the end of their book they write:
With cats wandering the landscape it
is not difficult to imagine a time in the
not-so-distant future when your son or
daughter enters a natural history museum
and comes upon a small exhibit for a piping
plover, a roseate tern, a Hawaiian Crow,
a Florida scrub-jay, a Key Largo cotton
mouse, a Choctawhatchee beach mouse, a
Catalina Island shrew, a Lower Keys rabbit,
or any number of other species from
islands and continents around the world with
the label "Now Extinct".
As can be seen from this passage, the principal rationale for a mass cull of the cat population is environmental conservation. But the risk that cats pose to the environment is not enough alone to explain the authors' intense hostility to Felis silvestris. The danger of disease can be countered by programmes such as Trap-Neuter-Return, widely implemented in the US, in which cats living outdoors are taken to clinics for vaccination and spaying and then released. The risk to birds can be diminished by bells and other devices. (Birds also spread diseases, some of them potentially fatal, but this is rarely mentioned by cat haters.) More fundamentally, it is distinctly odd to single out one branch of a non-human species as a destroyer of ecological diversity when the main culprit in this regard is by any reasonable measure the human animal. With their superlative proficiency as hunters, cats may have altered the ecosystem in parts of the world. But it is human beings that are driving the planetary mass extinction that is under way.
Another striking feature of the campaign against cats is how little attention is given to the benefits they confer on human beings. For most of the time in which they have cohabited with people, cats lived outdoors.
It is only relatively recently that they began to live in human households in large numbers. What is it that has allowed them to make this evolutionary step? Ailurophobes will say it is the anthropomorphism of cat lovers, who treat their feline housemates as surrogate human beings. But for many cat lovers, I suspect the opposite is true. What they cherish is not how cats resemble us, but their differences from us. Living with cats opens a window into a world beyond our own and teaches us something important about what it means to be human.
One of the most attractive features of cats is that contentment is their default state. Unlike human beings--particularly of the modern variety--they do not spend their days in laborious pursuit of a fantasy of happiness. They are comfortable with themselves and their lives, and remain in that condition for as long as they are not threatened. When they are not eating or sleeping, they pass the time exploring and playing, never asking for reasons to live. Life itself is enough for them.
If there are people who can't stand cats--and it seems there are many--one reason may be envy. As Jeffrey Masson, whose The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats is the best book on cats ever published, has written:
In English, if not in "cat", the word
contentment conveys something of a
feeling of being at peace with the world
or with yourself. It is more of a state than
a fleeting emotion. A person can be happy
(momentarily) without being content.
Contentment cannot he purchased;
happiness, on the other hand, has a price.
For us, happiness is a serious business.
Whereas human beings search for happiness in an ever-increasing plethora of religions and therapies, cats enjoy contentment as their birthright. Why this is so is worth exploring. Cats show no sign of regretting the past or fretting about the future. They live, absorbed in the present moment. It will be said that this is because they cannot envision the past or future. Perhaps so, though their habit of demanding their breakfast at the accustomed hour shows they do have a sense of the passage of time. But cats, unlike people, are not haunted by an anxious sense that time is slipping away. Not thinking of their lives as stories in which they are moving towards some better state, they meet each day as it comes. They do not waste their lives dreading the time when their lives must end. Not fearing death, they enjoy a kind of immortality. All animals have these qualities but they seem particularly pronounced in cats. Of all the animals that have lived closely with human beings, cats must surely be the least influenced by them.
"When I play with my cat," Montaigne wrote, "how do I know she is not playing with me?" With creatures that can be understood only partly by us, one can only speculate about their inner life. Yet it is tempting to suppose that the secret of feline contentment is that cats have no need to defer to a picture of themselves as they imagine they should be. Certainly they have a sense of dignity: they avoid people who treat them disrespectfully, for instance. Yet cats do not struggle to remake themselves according to any ideal self-image. Not inwardly divided, they are happy to be themselves.
Again, it will be said that this is because they have no moral sense. There are many cases of heroic devotion in which cats have risked pain and death to protect their kittens. But it is true that they cannot be taught moral emotions in the way dogs have been taught to feel shame. Cats are certainly not virtue signallers. Nor--except when it concerns their offspring--are they at all inclined to self-sacrifice. But given that cats, consequently, do not kill other cats or anything else in order to become martyrs to some absurd belief system, that may be no bad thing. There are no feline suicide-warriors.
The moralising philosopher who believed he had persuaded his cat to adopt a meat-free diet only showed how silly philosophers can be. Rather than seek to teach his cat, he would have been wiser to learn from it, as Montaigne did. Living in accord with their nature, cats do not need moral instruction. Dissatisfaction with our natural condition, on the other hand, seems to be natural for human beings. The human animal never ceases to strive for some higher form of life. Cats make no such effort. Without any process of laborious cogitation, these lucid, playful and supremely adaptable creatures already know how to live.
John Gray is the NS lead book reviewer and the author of "Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals" (Granta)
Caption: Domestic gods: Felis silvestris has survived and flourished by turning human settlements into reliable sources of food
The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World
Abigail Tucker
Simon & Schuster, 256pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling]
Cat Wars: the Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer
Peter P Marra and Chris Santella
Princeton University Press, 216pp. 19.95 [pounds sterling]
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gray, John. "Can cats teach us how to live? we should celebrate the solitary hunters among us." New Statesman, 3 Feb. 2017, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484156000&it=r&asid=34af89dfc50ede9c1c89786f59fb1a05. Accessed 3 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A484156000
The case against cats: the animal so many dote on ranks among the world's most destructive predators
Britt Peterson
318.5 (Dec. 2016): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Atlantic Media, Inc.
http://www.theatlantic.com
CAT WARS: THE DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES OF A CUDDLY KILLER
PETER P. MARRA, AND CHRIS SANTELLA
Princeton University Press
THE LION IN THE LIVING ROOM: HOW HOUSE CATS TAMED US AND TOOK OVER THE WORLD
ABIGAIL TUCKER
Simon & Schuster
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
NEW ZEALAND'S RECENT ANNOUNCEMENT of a plan to eradicate all invasive predators, including feral cats, sparked an immediate response--and not in defense of the stoat, up there with cats among the top too on the Global Invasive Species list. "Cat murdering New Zealand[ers] are for the birds," one commenter vented on The Washington Post's website. "Removing cats from an area is a futile effort--one that cannot succeed," another warned. When Australia announced a plan in 2015 to cull 2 million feral cats, the singer Morrissey declared them "2 million smaller versions of Cecil the lion." The actress Brigitte Bardot called the cull "animal genocide." Needless to say, no celebrity outrage or online indignation has greeted New Zealand's or Australia's expensive and long-standing rat-eradication programs.
What makes an animal a pet--a creature to which our emotions attach, sometimes in logic-warping ways--is surprisingly difficult to pin down. Cats are a particularly puzzling case. Domesticated some 9,500 years ago, they still don't strike humans as completely tame. They live with us, but even indoor cats aren't entirely dependent on us, certainly not in the emotional way dogs are. They do many things that seem to defy rational explanation, which is no small source of their allure: the blanket-attack ritual, the full-body keyboard plop, the blank-wall stare, and perhaps most dramatic, the post-poop freak-out. One of my cats performs a ninja leap about three feet up one side of the door frame, then slides down, firefighter-style, to the floor.
Even the discoveries, in the past several decades, that cats carry a parasite that could contribute to schizophrenia, and that outdoor cats wreak ecological disaster, haven't budged a curiously imbalanced relationship with this furry companion--or maybe cohabitant is more accurate. More than a third of all households in the United States now have a pet cat (the total count is estimated to be close to 100 million animals), which marks a 50 percent rise since the 1980s. Their owners feed them, stroke them, shovel their litter, spend ages trying to photograph their yawns from the cutest angle for Instagram. They ignore their owners, mostly sleep, intermittently deign to serve as purring lap warmers, and occasionally drop a half-dead mouse on the rug. Mysterious as cats are, however, the greatest mystery about cats centers on humans. Why do so many of us love them so much when they are so bad for us, and for our planet? And if we could resolve this first mystery, would we be any closer to solving the world's cat problem?
IN CAT WARS: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, Peter P. Marra, the head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and Chris Santella, a widely published travel writer, take the easy way out. They're so clearly not cat lovers that they can't really begin to comprehend those of us who are. The best they can do in their otherwise informative anti-cat polemic is to tell us that cats have long been "tolerated by their human neighbors because of their supreme pet-like characteristics."
Merely tolerated? Rat-catchers aboard colonizing ships in the 18th and 19th centuries, cats immediately inspired a craze when they were introduced to islands in the Pacific, the reporter Abigail Tucker writes in The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World. "A passion arose for cats," according to the log of a ship that landed in Samoa, "and they were obtained by all possible means." Tucker takes an intriguing stab at accounting for that still-thriving passion. "Cats look uncannily like us," she proposes, and locates their appeal not in their alien aura but in the spell their familiarity exerts and the protective fascination it elicits. "Even better, they look like our infants." Given their baby-size bodies; large, front-facing eyes; and yet oddly predatory mien, it's no wonder we find them "mesmerizing."
Tucker is certainly right to suggest that the current cat predicament is rooted in peculiarly fraught power relations between these cuddly yet opaque creatures and Homo sapiens. History reveals felines as the ultimate opportunists, biologically primed to exploit their human enablers--among many other creatures. As both books reveal, cats travel well, reproduce quickly, and are savage and omnivorous predators. When Mark Twain arrived in Hawaii in 1866, some 90 years after cats had strolled down the gangplanks of Captain Cook's fleet and conquered the hearts of the natives, he observed "platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats."
The bloody takeover was well under way, and has continued. Those felines, who have since multiplied in feral-cat colonies throughout the archipelago, prey on endangered birds such as the petrel, the nene, and the Laysan albatross, and have helped decimate the Hawaiian crow. In Australia, with its 3 million pet cats and 20 million feral cats (and about 23 million people), cats have contributed to wiping out several mouse, rat, and bandicoot species. They currently threaten the much-beloved greater bilby. Cats are implicated, according to one study, in 14 percent of all reptile, mammal, and bird extinctions on islands--33 animal species in all.
And the feline menace isn't limited to islands. Cats imperil species around the world, including our own, with which their relations have become--at least on the surface--more symbiotic. A century ago, when they were still viewed as a quasi-domesticated form of vermin control, cats were also regularly deemed vermin themselves--a germ-carrying danger to be treated as such. The New York SPCA, for instance, gassed 300,000 strays during a 1911 polio scare. The invention of kitty litter in 1947 heralded the thoroughly housebound cat, and a new identity, or rather, disguise: The pampered pet had arrived, but the semi-pest still lurked.
Toxoplasma gondii, mostly found in outdoor cats, is one of the most common parasites in humans. It is present in nearly half of the world's population, according to estimates. Often acquired by eating undercooked meat from animals who ingested tainted cat poop, it can cause a disease called toxoplasmosis, which is especially dangerous for infants and the immunosuppressed, but may pose risks for others as well. Carriers of the parasite seem to suffer at higher rates from Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, migraines, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. There's evidence for a schizophrenia link, too. And in a twist worthy of a Cheshire Cat smile, Toxoplasma gondii may change our behavior in some bizarre ways, actually encouraging an attraction, in men, to cat pee. (In "How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy," which appeared in these pages four years ago, Kathleen McAuliffe reported on pioneering research into the parasite's effects.)
Stop and think about the adaptive brilliance: More humans seduced by house cats means more besotted allies willing to take to the barricades in defense of all cats, ignoring the broader free-ranging-cat menace. And it is broad. Toxoplasmosis also afflicts nonhuman animals, from beluga whales to kangaroos. Because of runoff in the ocean from sewage containing cat feces, the disease has seriously affected marine mammals like seals (including the endangered Hawaiian-monk variety), sea otters, and manatees over the past several decades.
A 2013 study co-authored by Marra estimated that outdoor cats in the U.S. kill--not by disease--somewhere between 1.3 billion and 4 billion birds and between 6.3 billion and 22.3 billion mammals each year. It's fair to say, as Tucker does, that cats maybe considered "nightmarish invaders, capable of ransacking whole ecosystems and annihilating feebler life-forms in their path."
IF THAT CHARACTERIZATION Calls to mind another species (our own), perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that solutions for the cat problem have proved hard to come by. Both of these books emphasize that altruistic impulses and calmly rational responses have been in notably short supply. As birders have become poignantly aware of cats' impact on biodiversity, two camps have dug in: cat people and bird people. Extremism reigns in a war of Tom and Jerry-esque brutality over how to handle the free-ranging-cat problem. Bird people want all outdoor cats to go. Some have gone vigilante and poisoned or shot strays. Cat people have fought back, occasionally with death threats of their own--against people.
Even if compromise did seem more feasible, both books suggest that a moderate and affordable solution doesn't really exist. The primary answer, at least in the United States (host to roughly too million outdoor cats), is trap-neuter-return. The approach, popular in many counties, involves just what the name suggests, with cats ideally returned to the cat communities they were part of, now spayed and under the official or semi-official auspices of "managers." Proponents argue that TNR prevents rampant breeding, and is more humane than euthanasia. But TNR, according to Tucker as well as Marra and Santella, is not especially effective at accomplishing its primary stated goal of keeping cat populations in check. To do that, you'd need to spay or neuter nearly all the animals in a colony, whereas most TNR programs target a small fraction. So the cats continue to breed--and hunt. They routinely get fed, too, by the colony supervisors. As one article in a scientific journal put it, the practice is "cat hoarding without walls."
Eradication, which has been tried on about too islands (from the Galapagos to California's San Nicolas) over the past 30 years, is usually successful--but can be hard-won and very expensive, even in a self-contained space. To dig out every last kitten from an island's rocky crevices costs up to $100,000 per square mile. Herding cats isn't easy. Most programs use traps and toxic bait; some rely on "specialist cat-hunting dogs." And then there are the daunting public-relations challenges.
With their eye on non-island countries, namely America, the authors of Cat Wars argue for a combination of spay/neuter programs, enclosed sanctuaries, and euthanasia. But they're well aware of the obstacles. "We would find it preferential-if not quite realistic--to see all free-ranging cats removed from the environment," Marra and Santella write. The not quite realistic is as much a nod to the power of pro-cat sentiment in the United States as it is to the practical impossibility of somehow stashing all the stray and feral cats in giant, smelly cat houses. They may well be right that the political difficulties are more daunting than the logistical ones. (Good luck even getting cat owners to keep their pets inside; according to studies the authors cite, 40 to 70 percent of house cats are allowed to roam, and the majority of them spend their time doing what outdoor cats do--hunting.) When a Kiwi philanthropist and activist named Gareth Morgan launched a website supporting an outdoor-cat-free New Zealand back in 2013, he said much of his hate mail came from America. "It really feels like I've taken on the gun lobby," he told Tucker.
Guns don't purr, of course, or lie across your belly at the end of a long day like a small, furry pillow. Then again, cats--however cute--are lethal and heartless. That's essential to their charm, I would argue: We care about cats so much because (unlike babies) they really don't care about us. Even their purring seems to be all about them. They are egotistical and self-sufficient, and not really house pets, and we like the sense that we're more dependent on them than they are on us. Otherwise we would get dogs. To make the rest of nature pay the price for that preference, though, is an act of supreme selfishness. You might think we were spending a little too much time with our cats.
Illustration by ERIC HYQUISI
Britt Peterson is a contributing editor at Washingtonian magazine and a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Peterson, Britt. "The case against cats: the animal so many dote on ranks among the world's most destructive predators." The Atlantic, Dec. 2016, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472473994&it=r&asid=c0fb5cdffe84bf19df9e2003c90f269a. Accessed 3 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472473994
Marra, Peter P. & Chris Santella. Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer
Cynthia Lee Knight
141.14 (Sept. 1, 2016): p136.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Marra, Peter P. & Chris Santella. Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer. Princeton Univ. Oct. 2016.232p. photos, index. ISBN 9780691167411. $24.95; ebk. ISBN 9781400882878. NAT HIST
In 2013, Marra (director, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Ctr.) authored a headline-grabbing predation study estimating that 60 to 100 million outdoor cats (any cat outside, whether owned or stray) kill around a billion birds and mammals a year. Marra and coauthor Santella (The Tug Is the Drug) cite this statistic as the primary reason that free-ranging cats should be eradicated by any means necessary, including large-scale euthanasia, shooting, and poisoning. In addition, the authors claim that cats pose an imminent public health threat (because of rabies, plague, and toxoplasmosis) and could be the final blow to species already on the brink of extinction. To a great extent, Mara and Santella exaggerate the "looming" public health and extinction threats posed by free-ranging cats in this country. By repeatedly referring to the domestic cat as a plague and an invasive species, they make mass eradication seem an appropriate punishment for bird-killing cats, but no animal welfare organization endorses such action. They also fail to disclose that Marra is one of the authors of the 2013 cat predation study. VERDICT This book is not recommended on its own merits, but the pitting of cat lovers against bird lovers is the kind of polarizing approach that draws media attention, so there may be demand for it among those interested in the topic.--Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJ
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Knight, Cynthia Lee. "Marra, Peter P. & Chris Santella. Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 136. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462044980&it=r&asid=c4e553a6495b092249810b00ec4d8e69. Accessed 3 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462044980
Birds of two worlds; the ecology and evolution of migration
(Sept. 2005):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
0801881072
Birds of two worlds; the ecology and evolution of migration.
Ed. by Russell Greenberg and Peter P. Marra.
Johns Hopkins U. Press
2005
466 pages
$110.00
Hardcover
QL698
This volume, which resulted from a March 2002 symposium hosted by the Smithsonian Institution, is the third in a series of publications, all derived from symposia, that present the latest research on the phenomenon of avian migration. (The earlier volumes are Migrant birds in the neotropics, 1980, and Ecology and conservation of neotropical migrant landbirds, 1992.) The present volume presents 33 chapters on the how and why of bird migration, with chapter topics that include the paleoecology and fossil history of migratory landbirds, molecular approaches to the evolution and ecology of migration, digestive physiology of migratory birds, stopover ecology of intercontinental migrants, fuel storage rates, and impact of winter food supply on migratory birds. The contributors--like the book's intended audience--are biologists and scientists from several fields worldwide. The editors are both affiliated with the Smithsonian.
([c] 2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Birds of two worlds; the ecology and evolution of migration." SciTech Book News, Sept. 2005. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA138410112&it=r&asid=87764bb6e945295dcea9b3caed12f806. Accessed 3 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A138410112
Pet peeves: In a scathing new book, two bird lovers put the 'cat' in catastrophe
Nancy Szokan
(Sept. 19, 2016): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Nancy Szokan
Cat Wars
Peter P. Marra and Chris Santella
"Inside, cats make excellent pets; loose on the landscape, they are - by no fault of their own - unrelenting killers and cauldrons of disease."
That's actually a fairly restrained quote. Peter P. Marra, director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoo, and his co-author, Chris Santella, mince no words in their combative new book, "Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer."
Laying out an argument that outdoor cats - mostly feral animals but also pets allowed to roam outside the house - kill between 1.3 billion and 4 billion birds in the United States every year, they describe cats as an "invasive species" that is "contributing to the catastrophic downward spiral of many bird and mammal populations," possibly even to a "sixth mass extinction" that could affect the whole planet.
In a chapter titled "The Zombie Makers: Cats as Agents of Disease," the authors warn not only that cats are capable of spreading rabies and plague to humans but that they are host to "even more-insidious disease organisms" such as Toxoplasma, a parasite they link, to varying degrees, to extinction of other species and to fever, fatigue, headaches, blindness and even mental illness in people. "Cat-transmitted pathogens have impacted millions of humans," they write, "and pose one of the least understood but most critical public-health challenges of our time."
That's pretty inflammatory language. But this is not a screed - it's well written, extensively footnoted and usefully indexed, and the praise on the back cover is impressive.
Jared Diamond, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning "Guns, Germs and Steel" focused on how environmental forces shaped human society, says, "If you are a cat lover, a bird lover, a philosopher, an ethicist, or just anyone interested in gut-wrenching dilemmas, you will find this a gripping book."
And best-selling novelist Jonathan Franzen, who made the problem of cats killing songbirds a key plot element in his novel "Freedom," calls it a "compassionate handling of a highly fraught issue."
"Compassionate" seems an odd word for a book that advocates "zero tolerance for free-ranging cats. . . . If the animals cannot be trapped, other means must be taken to remove them from the landscape - be it the use of select poisons or the retention of professional hunters."
Hmm. In a country where the authors estimate that 90 million or so cats live in homes - a society that's also obsessed with cute-kitten videos - do you think anyone's going to have a problem with this? You can't help but wait for the fur to fly.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Szokan, Nancy. "Pet peeves: In a scathing new book, two bird lovers put the 'cat' in catastrophe." Washington Post, 19 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463991327&it=r&asid=ad82d43efd7b22ebdc283404fbfab4fe. Accessed 3 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463991327
The Case Against Cats
By Colin Dickey
1804
21
17
SEPTEMBER 7, 2016
IMAGINE THERE’S NO CAT. Imagine there’s no mouser, no pet, no fuzzy thing rubbing against your leg, meowing for dinner. Imagine there’s no word for jazz hipsters, nothing to always land on its feet, nothing for animal hoarders to hoard, nothing to dangle from a tree limb telling you to “Hang in there!” Imagine there’re no cat memes, no Grumpy or Nyan Cat, no cat playing keyboard or framed by a misspelled catchphrase. Imagine a world without cats.
It’s not that easy to do. The cat has become ubiquitous in our lives, whether serving as pest repellent, loyal friend and companion, inexhaustible reservoir of metaphor and cultural association, or internet content. This last is the latest, but not the least, of the cat’s accomplishments. Of all the things that get shared, retweeted, liked, favorited, loved, or memed on any given day of our networked lives, up at the top of the list is always cats: cats with their heads between slices of bread, cats trying to fit into a cardboard box, cats riding around on Roombas in shark costumes. Because we love them, we put them anywhere and everywhere, spreading their images far and wide.
Cats are colonizers: this is what they do. They have colonized the internet just as they have colonized so many other habitats, always with the help of humans. This is the lesson of Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, a new book by conservation scientist Peter P. Marra and travel writer Chris Santella. From remote islands in the Pacific to the marshes of Galveston Bay, Cat Wars traces the various ways in which felines have infiltrated new landscapes, inevitably sowing death and devastation wherever they go.
Perhaps the most famous case of genocide-by-cat is that of the remote Stephens Island in New Zealand. Before the end of the 19th century, it was home to a unique species: the Stephens Island wren. One of only a few species of flightless songbirds, the wren ran low to the ground, looking more like a mouse than a bird. After a lighthouse was built on the island in 1894, a small human settlement was established; and with humans, invariably, come pets. At some point a pregnant cat, brought over from the mainland, escaped and roamed wild. The island’s wrens, unused to facing such a skillful predator, were no match for the feral cats that spread throughout the island. Within a year, the Stephens Island wren was extinct. It would take another 30 years to eradicate the feral cats.
This is not an isolated incident. Cats have contributed to species decline and habitat reduction in dozens of other cases. Because they’re so cute and beloved, we have little conception of — and little incentive to find out — how much damage cats are doing to our environment. When researcher Scott Loss tallied up the number of animals killed by North American housecats in a single year, the results were absolutely staggering: between 6.3 and 22.3 billion mammals, between 1.3 and 4 billion birds, between 95 and 299 million amphibians, and between 258 and 822 million reptiles.
¤
It is undeniable, then, that cats are a menace to animal society, particularly those cats that are allowed to roam free outdoors. We have known this for almost a century. In 1929, the ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush commented that “the widespread dissemination of cats in the woods and in the open or farming country, and the destruction of birds by them, is a much more important matter than most people suspect, and is not to be lightly put aside, as it has an important bearing on the welfare of the human race.” Forbush, having tallied up an impressive anecdotal record of death and destruction, concluded that the cat “has disturbed the biological balance and has become a destructive force among native birds and mammals.” The cat doesn’t much care if its prey is threatened with extinction. Any small mammal, bird, or reptile is fair game, regardless of its rarity.
In one of Cat Wars’s more enlightening analogies, Marra and Santella compare housecats to the pesticide DDT. The cat, they argue, is one of the earliest known invasive species, and invasive species, they argue, are “simply another form of an environmental contaminant; like DDT, they can cause great harm and, once introduced, can be exceptionally difficult to remove from the environment.” Both started out as human technologies used to rid the landscape of unwanted pests, and both came with unintended side effects and unwanted additional destruction in the wild. Given the amount of energy we have devoted to banning DDT and ridding the environment of its consequences, it’s noteworthy that we seem so uninterested in a similar remedy for the scourge of cats, which, by most metrics, are far more destructive. The authors note that, while cats have been implicated in the decline and extinction of some 175 different species, “there are no confirmed bird extinctions from the pesticide DDT.”
The news that housecats are laying waste to wide swaths of biodiversity has not, like revelations about climate change or other ecological evils, led to some kind of scientific consensus about what was to be done. It’s led, instead, to the establishment of two warring camps: the cat people and the bird people. The bird people think that the wholesale slaughter of the world’s bird population is a problem requiring human intervention, namely the banning of feral and outdoor cats, forced sterilization, and euthanization. The cat people are aghast at these solutions, and argue instead that cats, being innate predators, should be allowed to fulfill their natural directive. When University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Temple published a report noting the high number of birds being killed by cats, he was besieged with death threats. “Many Wisconsites (at least those who wrote letters to the editor and hate mail to Temple),” Marra and Santella write, “were much more concerned that cats were being blamed for songbird deaths than with the fact that millions of songbirds were being killed. And some were more troubled about the possibility of cats being killed than they were about the life of a researcher.”
In the ensuing stalemate, legislation has been halfheartedly introduced, allowed to languish in committee, and finally scuttled altogether. Half-measures have been introduced that do no good. Invective has been hurled from both sides with increasing ferocity. And, meanwhile, cats continue to kill all manner of creature of field and stream.
¤
Cat Wars raises an interesting ethical question: is it justifiable to kill one animal because that animal kills other animals in disproportionate numbers? The authors cite Bill Lynn, an ethicist who has supported the culling of one species as a means to protect another, calling such work a “sad good.” But Marc Bekoff, an evolutionary biologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, contends the opposite: that the life of each individual animal must be weighed separate from a concern for species and for diversity. This kind of dilemma — is it morally acceptable to sacrifice the one to save the many, or the many for the one? — has long vexed philosophers of human ethics, and it is fascinating to see it here played out with regards to interspecies warfare.
Rather than explore this difficulty further, though, Cat Wars remains mostly about the war between cat people and bird people. Marra and Santella are clearly bird people. (Marra, after all, is the head of the Smithsonian’s migratory bird center.) The pro-bird, anti-cat thrust of their book is not subtle. “Allowing owned cats to roam freely outside,” they write, is an example of “irresponsible pet ownership,” a message they drive home with increasing emphasis. (Full disclosure: I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m a dog person.)
Cat Wars is one of those strange books, reading which one can feel generally comfortable with the authors’ conclusions while growing increasingly frustrated with their bad faith arguments, rhetorical sleights-of-hand, and other abuses of the reader’s trust. A chapter that focuses on cats as disease vectors is the worst offender. They point out, correctly, that housecats can be carriers of bubonic plague (an Arizona man died in 1992 after catching plague from a cat) as well as rabies, and that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite found in cat feces, has been linked to behavioral changes in humans. It’s true, of course, that cats can transmit plague and other diseases, but this trait is not unique to them, nor are toxoplasma cysts restricted to outdoor cats. The haphazardness of these arguments makes the book seem indiscriminate in its anti-cat bias. Repeatedly, Marra and Santella offer rhetorically strong arguments that fall apart under scrutiny. They claim, for example, that “[w]ild birds and mammals […] have rights that do not seem to receive as much attention as the claimed rights of cats to wander freely outdoors.” It’s true that threatened and endangered species are protected under law, as are pets (mostly in the form of animal cruelty laws). But what can it mean to say that other, non-protected birds and mammals have “rights”? What kind of rights? Moral rights? Rights under some unstated but presumed “natural law”? Is this a call to extend legal protection to all American animals? Are all animals created equal? Does the equally invasive black rat lack rights that more charismatic native songbirds have?
Cat Wars also bends over backward to paint cat-owners, particularly those who advocate for outdoor lifestyles, as unstable and poorly educated. As Marra and Santella become increasingly polemical, they resort to refuting a straw-man “leading outdoor-cat advocate’s website” bullet-point-style:
CAT ADVOCATE CLAIMS: Cats have lived outdoors for more than 10,000 years — they are a natural part of the landscape
SCIENCE SAYS: Domestic cats are an invasive species throughout their current range, including North America
This point-counterpoint continues for much of a page, never getting any more thoughtful than this. Such language — including the gallingly general “science says” — enlightens no one, and serves only to quell dissension and shut down meaningful debate.
The authors also tend to overstate the unique role cats play in species destruction. The Hawaiian crow, for example, is among those whose “extinctions are attributed to cats,” according to the authors, but the list of dangers to the Hawaiian crow are long: coffee and fruit farmers (who began shooting the crows in the 1890s), mongooses and rats, deforestation, and the Hawaiian hawk (itself a threatened species). It is one thing to say that free-range cats are part of a complicated, interconnected set of ecological problems; it’s another altogether to afford them an outsized, murderous agency. By repeatedly overstating the case against cats, Marra and Santella turn what should have been a thoughtful and necessary discussion into rabid anti-feline propaganda.
¤
Cats, Marra and Santella want us to know, are an invasive species, no different from lion fish in the Caribbean or the eucalyptus in California. They are foreign-born (from an American perspective, anyway; their likely ancestor is the Near Eastern wildcat, native to North Africa and the Middle East). Once they move in, they quickly begin overtaking the local citizenry, upsetting the equilibrium of well-established biomes, sucking up resources that don’t belong to them, overstaying their visas and their welcomes. These sinister immigrants, once they put down roots, can be incredibly difficult to evict. They bring their foreign-born culture to their new homes, changing the landscape beyond recognition, diluting its purity and making it harder for native-born species to compete.
“How should we deal,” they ask, “with the animals that people have domesticated and enjoyed as beloved companions for thousands of years, but that when allowed to become feral or to freely range are capable of tearing away at the tapestry of life that has evolved since time immemorial?” It’s unclear to me why anyone with a background in biology and evolution would use a phrase like “time immemorial,” as though life evolved perfectly to a static equilibrium at some moment just before the arrival of humans. Language such as this, along with the very term “invasive species,” presumes a pristine, Edenic landscape that existed in some cloud-shrouded past. The invasive species itself has no agency here: it’s only further proof of humanity’s reckless, ecology-destroying hubris. We are the villains; cats are only our henchmen.
But we should remember that, while the Stephens Island wren died off due to human/feline interaction, almost all the other flightless songbirds went extinct thousands of years earlier, with no help from us or our pets. Nature, it seems, is no more precious with its creations than cats are. The problem here, as so often in these kinds of polemics, lies in the authors’ overreliance on the concept of the “natural.” Marra and Santella would have you believe that songbirds are natural, whereas invasive species like cats, imported from other ecosystems, are not. Cat lovers, on the other hand, would have you believe that the cat’s predatory instincts are equally “natural” and must also be respected. Each side appeals to this transcendental, undefined concept, arguing that it makes their position a priori correct. But what does it mean to be natural? (Everyone agrees that humans are most definitely unnatural, but that’s about it.)
A better question, and one for which there is no easy answer, is: Where, exactly, do cats belong? Are they animals, at home in the wild, where they must hash it out against other species, killing birds and being killed by coyotes and raccoons, dying of starvation or disease? Or are they social parasites, bred and evolved to light up the endorphins in our brain, providing comfort and emotional care in exchange for food and shelter? Currently, they are both, and we have no easy language for such a creature. The problem with the housecat is that it calls into question the very notion of a clean divide between human and nature. Every time they exit our houses or apartments through a pet flap or an open window they show us how easy it is to slip past the boundaries between our artificial world and the wilderness all around. If we want to make headway with this seemingly intractable debate, we’ll have to think harder about what “nature” really means — for the cats, for the birds, and for us.
Until then, the cat, along with all of its delicate prey, will just have to hang in there.
¤
Colin Dickey is the author, most recently, of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places.