’25 native animals’. Or how animal welfare groups promote cat abuse

In The New Scientist of May 21, 1994, Ian Anderson published a piece titled “Should the Cat Take the Rap?” which discussed the issues surrounding cats and wildlife in Australia.

It mentioned David Paton, a professor credited with triggering much of the anti-cat sentiment nationwide and subsequent measures against cats. Paton concluded that domestic cats kill on average 25 native animals per year, including mammals, birds and reptiles.
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The 1994 release of Ian Anderson’s paper attracted the attention of cat welfare groups, politicians and even the international media.

However, the biggest outcry was from the public, with this ’25 native animals’ number becoming the mantra for huge anti-cat sentiment in Australia. From The New York Times;

The Stray Cats of Australia: 9 Lives Seen as 9 Too Many

As if in some B-movie thriller, people here are raising a hue and cry about an alien predator that is spreading out of control across the land: a plague of millions of killer house cats run wild.

Interlopers on this isolated island continent like the settlers who brought them here 200 years ago, stray cats have multiplied through Australia’s deserts, forests and urban alleys, driving indigenous species to extinction as they go.

Conservationists have been warning for years about this feline colonization, but lately their cause has been taken up in a nationwide alarm that is being met with anguished opposition from cat lovers.

”I am calling for the total eradication of cats in Australia,” proclaimed Richard Evans, a member of Parliament, putting the issue on the national agenda last October.

”Cats are responsible for 39 species being either extinct, locally extinct or near extinct in Australia,” Mr. Evans said the other day. Domestic cats each kill some 25 native animals a year, and wild cats kill as many as 1,000 a year, the National Parks and Wildlife Service says.

This article noted the anti-cat backlash had gotten to the point that, “people were getting out golf sticks and hitting them (cats)”, and MP Richard Evans became the mouthpiece for the Anderson paper, calling for laws requiring all cats to be desexed, a cat registry and cat curfews.

Fast forward to today, and the magic ‘25 native animals‘ number is still getting bandied about. Brisbane vet from VetShopAustralia, Dr Mark Perissinotto has this morning launched a scathing attack on the cat, claiming…

“… each cat can kill up to 25 creatures every year and with more than 2.2 million pet cats nationwide, the annual wildlife death toll could add up to more than 55 million”.

“Cats can be very efficient destroyers of wildlife such as the blue wren, feathertail gliders, sugar gliders, ringtail possums, bandicoots, small bats, frogs and lizards”, Dr Perissinotto said.

’25 native animals’ is often quoted as gospel by the media and forms the scientific basis for many local council cat control plans. And with animal welfare groups using this new round of anti-cat hysteria in a drive to get their compulsory desexing legislation passed, in 2009 the same anti-cat community behaviour and council policies which attracted international attention more than a decade ago are raising their head again:

Cats suffer as cruelty spirals
What’s Rocky’s problem with cats? That’s a question that’s got an animal welfare officer scratching his head.

According to the central region’s RSPCA senior inspector Shayne Towers-Hammond a large number of the district’s animal cruelty matters involve the abuse of cats.

“Cats are having a very bad time here,” Mr Towers-Hammond said.

Call for crackdown on ‘noisy sex’ cats
They’re the neighbours from hell, but not as we know it.

A St Clair man is fed up with wayward neighbourhood cats who he says kill, fight, crap and have noisy sex in his frontyard and has launched a petition calling on Penrith Council to tame their bad behaviour.

“If you let your cat out it will be a nuisance: kill things, chase other cats around and go do a poop in someone else’s garden, David said.

Trapped cats ‘thrown in lake’
The City of Swan has received a number of complaints about the law changes, with neighbours allowed to trap cats on private property and take them to the pound without notifying owners.

The trapped cats that were thrown into the lake were not in the City of Swan.

Feral cats face instant death
The news comes after feral cats and wandering pet cats featured in a series of Advocate reports in July.

The stories were sparked by a letter from a Hornsby Heights resident to their neighbours, threatening to trap and kill cats that were found on the letter writer’s property.

Under the plan presented to the council meeting last night, cats identified by vets as feral would be destroyed without the usual requirement of impounding them for seven days.

But do cats really deserve to be persecuted?

If we’re going to support trapping programs that see cats impounded and killed, and if welfare groups are going to use it to drive council policies, don’t we owe it to the cats who’s lives are on the line to be examining this ’25 native animals a year’ number more closely?

Firstly; although this figure is still quoted;

(David) Paton’s 1991 survey in Adelaide found that household cats were known to prey upon 67 native bird species, 18 mammal species, 4 snake and 3 frog species. Paton concluded that domestic cats kill on average 25 native animals per year, including mammals, birds and reptiles.
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It was discredited at the time due to the method of data collection he used to build his figures.

Anderson’s article noted that Paton’s cat predation surveys generally included only people who belonged to bird-watching societies, and that he had extrapolated this biased data to make sweeping estimations of wildlife predation nationwide. Paton then published his severely flawed and unrepresentative interpretations with much fanfare.

and

John Egerton at the University of Sydney was quoted as saying Paton’s work was biased and that building national campaigns on such a basis is wrong. Paton himself admitted that some of his studies were not controlled, but felt that his overall conclusions were sound despite using data from existing anti-cat households rather than from a mix of households.

and

His survey is flawed as it involved primarily ornithologists who may have inflated the submitted figures to enable an anti-cat bias. Cats are actually rodent specialists, but will take birds which are attracted into gardens by bird-food and hence made vulnerable to cat attacks hence an abnormally high number of birds would reported by bird-lovers.
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His figures also failed to take into account the influence of human sprawl on native animal welfare. While habitat destruction, cars and pollution have shown to be much more to blame for dwindling native animal numbers, than any single predator; the weighting, attention and priority they’re given is much less because the only scapegoat is ourselves, and the solution…. inconvenience.

(Not so popular as being a hater)

Also, in Australia the majority of cat owners live in highly urbanised areas, so it was suspected that a survey conducted over the full range of metropolitan populations would show that domestic cats catch very few native fauna. Due to the inconsiderate human trait of wiping out the natural landscape in its entirety, those native animals who are able to, have adapted to all aspects of living near us including habitat loss, urban dangers, the elimination of natural food supplies and new predators like dogs and cats, and if they haven’t been adaptable, they’ve been pushed out.

In addition to this study’s flaws, there has since been another more comprehensive study which cast huge doubt over the papers claims.

The Petcare Information and Advisory Service (PIAS) commissioned the independent market research organisation Reark Research Pty Ltd (Reark) to carry out a detailed survey of cats in all Australian capital cities except Darwin. The sample group represented domestic cat distribution within each city so that conclusions could be drawn about the total metropolitan cat population. This survey was conducted during 12 months from April 1993 and provided information on the cats’ hunting behavior and on the size, age and neuter status of the metropolitan cat population.

The objectives of the survey were:

– To clarify the hunting behavior of the metropolitan domestic cat, including what creatures are caught, how many creatures are caught and how many native creatures are caught

– To provide detailed information on the metropolitan cat population, including what percentage are neutered and the changes in cat population over the previous 12 months

– To provide information on factors likely to affect cat hunting behavior, e.g. tendency of cats to roam from the owner’s property and the wearing of bells

Over 4000 households were surveyed. This sample size reduced the likelihood of error when the results were extrapolated to the metropolitan domestic cat population as a whole. The questionnaire used an open and non-threatening approach to discuss the cat’s behavior. This reduced owner defensiveness about their cats’ behavior and habits. Media coverage of “cat issues” had a distinct anti-cat bias which was preventing the collection of useful data.

Reark analysed the results which indicated that:

– 41% of cats caught introduced mammals such as mice, rats and rabbits;

– 2% caught native mammals such as possums or bats;

– 17% caught reptiles or amphibians such as lizards, skinks, snakes or frogs; 19% caught introduced birds such as sparrows and starlings,

and

– 7% caught native birds such as magpies or honey eaters.

It is already known that proportionately, town cats will catch more birds than their country cousins; for the simple reason that both cats and birds are more common in towns. Many people feed birds and provide artificial nest sites in the form of nestboxes and buildings. A percentage of cats caught nothing at all due to being indoor-only pets or not being inclined to hunt.

56% of cats were reported to catch prey of some type and many caught prey of several different types. One flaw in this part of the survey was that owners could not determine whether a dead animal brought home by the cat had been killed by it or had been scavenged e.g. roadkill. In other studies some owners have reported seeing their cats scavenging in this way and bringing home creatures which are not found in Australia except as pets! Over the period 12 months to April 1994, surveys concluded that each metropolitan domestic cat caught on average:

Average Catch/Cat Units%

Native Species
Mammals 0.02 0%
Reptiles and amphibians 1.32 28%
Birds 0.23 5%
Sub Total 1.57 33%

Introduced Species
Mammals 0.80 17%
Reptiles and amphibians 0.00 0%
Birds 0.77 16%
Sub Total 3.19 67%

Total Prey Caught 4.76 100%
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The findings support the suspicion that metropolitan domestic cats are in fact catching substantially fewer native fauna than previously supposed. And due to the size, scope and lack of bias of this study, these results were considered much more trustworthy than the Paton findings. In fact, in the face of the following estimations, the results of the Paton study seem simply ludicrous;

During the survey year, each domestic cat is estimated to have caught on average:

– one fiftieth of a native animal

– one fifth of a native bird

– one and a third native reptitles or amphibians;

and

– half of all creatures caught were vermin – mice and rabbits

Report on the PIAS study here

While it might not sit well with the spittle spewing cat-haters in our community, cats aren’t having the huge environmental impact claimed. And contrary to common perceptions that cat numbers are increasing, the metropolitan domestic cat population is actually in decline and cat owners are getting more responsible, not less.

Cat welfare groups drumming up anti-cat sentiment in the name of ‘animal welfare’ is illogical and condemns cats to a future where they are regarded and treated even worse than they are now. ‘Cat hating’ and the celebration of their mistreatment is an Australian passion not seen in other parts of the world. And I have to wonder; did we as animal welfare groups bring this on ourselves?