Madmen and the Threat to Cats

According to the Daily Express, Peter Marra, a "leading scientist," thinks that cats should be culled on a global scale, and any allowed to live should be banned from going outside. There have been similar views expressed, though in a less obviously madman voice, by some conservationists in the United Kingdom, including Chris Packham. (And now Stephen Moss.)

Thing is, over the past fifty years or so, around the world there have been a number of determined anti-cat pogoms, usually launched by local governments in authoritarian communist countries, and the result has been a plague of rats and/or mice every time. Voles, too, are capable of staging spectacular plagues in rural areas; this is usually a sign that foxes have been suppressed as well as cats. Cats are indeed efficient hunters, and human civilization might have fallen long ago if they weren't. Control of rodents by poisons and traps is expensive and simply doesn't work. Rodents become immune to the poisons and the traps have to be laid in unrealistic numbers and it takes a huge amount of man hours to keep checking and resetting the traps. 

The last flat the blog author lived in had rats in the basement (where all the electricity meters were) and despite months of fiddling about blocking holes and laying poison, the professional human pest controller had completely failed to eradicate them, even though they were chewing on wiring and posing a lethal fire hazard thereby to the people living in the flats. There were no cats allowed in the building. The landlord eventually put the flats up for auction because he couldn't get on top of the rat problem and obviously piously hoped that someone else would have better luck! 

In parts of Southern England, Ring Necked Parakeet populations are also reaching plague levels, so we need to be suspicious of cat haters claiming that they are just trying to protect the birds.

Further on the same topic:
The RSPB has stated that responsible cat ownership is not a conservation issue in the United Kingdom.
It has also been established, for example, that what caused the huge drop in Nightingale numbers in England was not predation but a big increase in the number of Muntjac deer selectively eating the Nightingale's habitat of low woodland undergrowth. Other species have suffered badly from changes in the countries that they have to cross to reach the British Isles, making migration more difficult. This includes deserts spreading, water holes drying up, increased cultivation and development of former woodlands after (arson initiated) forest fires. Migration often proceeds as if along a chain of islands, between water sources and woodland across North Africa and Southern Europe. Small bird species, such as Great Tits, tend to disappear when Ring Necked Parakeets are present in large numbers. This isn't predation so much as the smaller birds simply been driven away from their food sources and nest sites by the larger, noisier and more aggressive birds.

The idea that because cats catch things, cats must die, is what Psychiatrists call "an overvalued idea". Like going from the idea that it's immodest of young women to wear shorts, to needing to stab young women to death if they are wearing shorts. Overvalued ideas are behind a lot of extremist positions.

The value of cats is most obvious when they are removed (temporarily one hopes) from the situation.