Lost cat posters have a paradoxical, double-edged pathos. A lost family pet is obviously a tragedy for the family, but what about the cat? Was the taste of complete freedom afforded by the cat flap finally too much to resist? Was there perhaps a better food supply in the offing somewhere else, so the cat found a new family? Most likely, of course, the freely roaming cat in question fell victim to a passing vehicle. Cats and roads are a fatal combination. So, who thought the cat flap was a good idea?
These days, it is more and more fashionable to keep cats as exclusively indoor pets. It has dawned on many cat lovers that a beloved cat will live longer as a family member if it is contained, and not left to run free and under the wheels of a passing car. Years ago, when we had a cat, the family thought it was cruel to keep a cat permanently indoors. Cats are so obviously born to roam, hunt and kill (and to enjoy it) that it does seem wrong to lock them up. Dead mice and small birds occasionally turned up on the doormat. And tragically, one of our cats ended up as roadkill.
Today, more and more, priority is being given to the welfare of the hunting cat’s victims, because so often those victims are native birds and small mammals which are threatened with extinction. Not only do we want to prevent pet cats from killing these creatures in the neighbourhood, but we also want to limit the number of stray cats that roam into the bush, where they are a major threat to whole populations of native wildlife. To this end, in Canberra, many a suburb on the city’s fringes is signposted as a ‘cat containment area’. If a stray cat can be traced to the owner’s front door, you may get a fine.
Just as this shift in attitudes about animal welfare has been taking place, public awareness of Australia’s impending extinction crisis has slowly – albeit too slowly – grown. This is encouraged by, among other things, the development in towns and cities of recreational spaces that are expressive of conservation values, as distinct from being facilities designed solely for various kinds of human activity, such as exercise and barbecues. I visited one such place recently in Sydney’s eastern suburbs – a local council project that was transforming a vacated military depot into a patch of urban bushland.
As I walked the paths and trails my attention was artfully drawn to various bits of signage describing the native species that might be encouraged to repopulate the area once it was replanted with the right flora. Lizards, frogs and birds were highlighted. A small section of creek was being rehabilitated and indeed, frogs were calling and croaking; and native shrubs and trees were providing food and shelter to bird species typical of this coastal habitat, such as New Holland Honeyeaters and Little Wattlebirds.
It was all very well presented, and the rehabilitation seemed to be going well. Then, as I walked by the tiny length of rehabilitated creek, I came across a lost cat poster stuck to the glass on a display board. Its jarring incongruity summed up some of the challenges faced by these hopeful municipal conservationists. The cat was endearingly cute, and a phone number was provided in case a passer-by had any information on its whereabouts. Perhaps the person who posted it thought this was a likely place for their stray cat to end up – lizards and birds aplenty to sustain it – or perhaps these posters were stuck up randomly on every available space in the neighbourhood. Either way, the juxtaposition of that poster and this piece of signage, in this place, struck me in the moment as being emblematic of the scope and nature of the problem of invasive species in Australia.
The image I recorded of this noticeboard rewards close inspection. On the first panel of the display is a vivid depiction of the impact of invasive species, while the second panel answers the question ‘what are we doing?’ But obliterating the text about ‘managing our flora and fauna’ and ‘moving forward’ with measures to combat invasive species is the lost cat poster. It announces something else altogether about what ‘we’ are doing – namely, letting our cats roam into nature reserves. And irony upon irony, someone has posted another message on the display (this time, thoughtfully without obliterating any of the official text) calling for ‘responsible pet ownership’ – in this case, cleaning up our dog poo.
Nearly all our pets are exotic animals (save the budgerigar). Cats, dogs, ferrets and many other exotic creatures end up escaping into the Australian bush because they are ‘lost’ or perhaps just abandoned. They join the bands of roaming feral farm animals (pigs, goats, wild horses and so on) that populate the outback.
Our attitudes towards these freedom-loving invasive species are ambiguous. We even make a legal distinction between some invasive species and others that are deemed a ‘pest’. The latter damage crops and livelihoods and have generally got much more attention than those that merely damage native species. Among the latter, even when escaped, we still want to appropriate them to our desires, rather than seeing them first and foremost as harmful. They become objects of a new kind of fascination. Many of us delight in the idea of wild camels roaming the deserts of Central Australia because they are part of our ‘heritage’; and many also celebrate the wild horses, or Brumbies, in the High Country of Victoria and New South Wales, even though they wreak havoc on fragile Alpine habitats. Perhaps in a sign of the times, plans to cull these herds are now fuel for culture wars between city woke and country redneck factions.
Also in this vein, myths of roaming ‘big cats’ in the bush are part of Australian folk lore. Every kind of fearsome, exotic feline has supposedly been spotted out there. They are reported and investigated with the same fanatical fascination as flying saucers. Maybe there has been the odd escaped circus tiger, but clearly the overwhelming majority of these bush beasts are just overgrown feral domestic cats further enlarged to the eye by a vivid imagination.
House cats let loose notoriously thrive and grow into feline monsters as they feast on the native wildlife, which have never experienced such an efficient predator over the millennia of their evolution. Over time, the fiercest and fittest cats survive, so they get bigger and stronger. Once, on a birding trip and driving down an outback road in South Australia, one such monster sauntered across the track fifty yards ahead of us. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was huge. ‘Just a cat’ said the driver, who had seen plenty. Down the road, he showed us the abandoned mound of a Mallee Fowl, not seen in that vicinity for some time and no doubt either devoured or scared off by one of those moggy monsters. The cat was just doing what cats do, of course.
The enormity of the challenge of dealing with the feral cat problem lies primarily in the seeming impossibility of eradicating the existing feral population. Cats feast on defenceless native animals but shy away from poisonous baits; they are resourceful and adapt rapidly to different kinds of environment; and they are elusive. Faced with the failure of eradication schemes, ecologists are now seriously experimenting with quickening the pace of the evolutionary process by which their native prey may acquire effective defences.
This is on the one hand a heroic effort necessitated by the urgency of the crisis but, on the other, a bit too much like ‘blaming the victim’ for comfort. But I suppose that if we are so ready to punish the cats, we are already in the midst of a morass of moral dilemmas of our own making, so probably it’s OK to plough on with trying to modify the behaviour of native wildlife just in case it may work.
I’m not against owning pets, although I am glad that there is some degree of control and regulation to prevent some of the worst features of pet ownership. Pets seem to bring out the best and worst in humans – our capacity for nurturing and affection on the one hand but also our casual carelessness towards the animal kingdom on the other. Rightly, there are strict controls on trade in wild animals so that the desire to own pets does not directly diminish wild populations of the same species. But there are too few disincentives against some of the harms we cause when we try to domesticate inappropriate species or when we dispose of unwanted pets irresponsibly once our careless desires are satisfied, or circumstances change.
I am an ardent supporter of local pet cat containment regulations. I would go further. All cats should be licensed and tagged; any cat roaming free should be impounded, and punitive fees for reclaiming them should be levied on the owners. In this and many other things, I am no doubt a relic of past times, when people seemed more ready to accept arguments for laws that limited the expression of our every individual want and desire on the grounds that there are more important things to do than to satisfy all of them. So be it.
Limiting the damage done by both pet and feral cats is a critical part of halting Australia’s extinction crisis. Preventing the continuing escape of domestic pets with tougher regulations is a start, and in the long term would be an essential component of a sustainable long-term solution. Part of the prevention process will include heightening of awareness, such that lost cat posters become viewed as a signal of negligence as much as an appeal to the heartstrings. Accepting our responsibility for being the root cause of the problem is an important part of launching a more comprehensive program, whatever that might be and however distant the chances of success.
