The BBC is asking whether cats should be culled to stop extinctions. Of course, the author is discussing the culling of feral cats primarily in places where there are native species preyed upon by these cats. There have been rare instances of species being made extinct by predation from feral cats; hence the question.
The comments following the article pretty well support the idea of culling feral cats to stop extinctions. So, the general public agree that killing feral cats is okay if it is to protect native species which are considered more valuable than feral cats because humans always engage in speciesism; one species being arbitrarily more valuable than another. I’ve never understood speciesism. It is an entirely human concept brought about by the mess that humans have created.
By “mess” I mean that the reason why we have to consider culling feral cats is because we created an impossible problem by creating feral cats in the first place. They wouldn’t exist but for us. They are the product of human carelessness in cat ownership. We brought domestic cats to new places and some became feral. Bingo. A ravaging non-native species killing little mammalian native species at will.
It is the human who has created the feral cat who often lives a miserable life of persecution by humans particularly if they live on the continent of Australia.
Scientists are calling for a widespread culling of feral cats, dogs, pigs, goats, rats and mice to save the often endangered species they prey upon. So is not just cats but in every instance it is humans who have created this mess.
So, philosophically speaking, do humans have a moral obligation to treat feral cats more humanely seeing as we put them there in the first place? Do we compound the problem we created by being cruel to feral cats and other animals? They are innocent victims like the animals they prey upon.
Or do we find a better method based on science such as contraception. Not enough, in my view, has been done to find a durable and effective female cat contraceptive which would gradually reduce the predator population size and remove the necessity to kill them.
Every current method to kill feral cats in the wild causes suffering. The most common is poisoning and perhaps the second most common is shooting. Shooters say that they can kill a cat instantly but they can’t. And they can’t tell the difference between feral cats and domestic cats at the distance and so there is a likelihood that they will kill someone’s pet leading to litigation and compensation or even criminal charges.
Dr. Nick Holmes from the group Island Conservation said that, “Eradicating invasive mammals from islands is a powerful way to remove a key threat to island species and prevent extinctions and conserve biodiversity”.
He is correct of course. You remove a predator and the more vulnerable and more valuable species “in the eyes of humans” is protected.
But if you are religious and believe in a God; God does not practice speciesism. In the eyes of God, the feral cat has the same value as an endangered bird on an island.
Apparently there is a study which had identified 107 islands where eradication projects could benefit 9.4% of the Earth’s threatened island species. It is on islands where native species are the most vulnerable because they are enclosed in a relatively small space and have never experienced the threat of a feral cat predator. This makes them highly vulnerable to predation. It is on islands where there have been the rare instances of bird extinction once again because of a human created problem, the inadvertent introduction of feral cats because they brought domestic cats to the island and then let them run riot and become feral.
The Australian authorities have been in the process of culling feral cats on their continent for a very long time. Their objective is to kill them all but they will never attain it. They don’t even know how many feral cats there are but they make estimates as to the number of native species feral cats kill despite this.
Some culls have already taken place in islands. The world’s largest rodent eradication project was recently declared a success on the UK territory of South Georgia. It is now rat free for the first time in 200 years. I don’t know the history of this island but it certain that the rats were introduced to it from ships docking at the island and rats jumping off and invading the island.
There are plans to eradicate mice on Gough Island. They are eating seabird chicks. And a rat eradication project on Henderson Island in the Pacific is proposed, as I understand it, to save the endangered Henderson petrel.
The point of this short note is that we should not dive into killing as a means to protect species that we consider more valuable than these non-native predators. We should look at alternatives and take the moral high ground.
