The Cuddly Killer (classic)

24:22We began our work, which was aimed not at justifying persecuting cats, but simply to understand what the ecological impacts of the large number of free-ranging cats in rural Wisconsin might be. This is from a 2008 documentary called Here, Kitty, Kitty, about a fight in Wisconsin over a proposed measure that would allow for uncollared, unowned cats to be killed in the wild. Stanley Temple himself didn't personally endorse that measure, but he does appear in the documentary. Temple is a mild-mannered, bespectacled academic with a vest and a beard. You're going to hear some of the death threats against him in a moment, but for now, what I marvel at is how unlikely to inspire death threats this person seems.

25:05Dr. Grassland birds in Wisconsin were declining very significantly. They were becoming probably one of the most significant groups of declining birds for conservationists to worry about in the state. and all of the dimensions, all of the reasons for those declines in grassland birds were not fully understood. So the role of cats was perhaps a logical question. Alley Cat Allies is not in this documentary, though they have released a statement attacking Temple's research. In the film, the activist side is represented by a local pet store owner running a website called dontshootthecat.com. He also has a lot to say about Stanley Temple's research.

25:50Wow. I would certainly like to work on making sure that we correct some of the misimpressions that have been left out there, especially when it comes to those numbers. First of all, a feral cat is not a wild cat. It's just an unsocialized domestic cat. And our animal cruelty laws currently in Wisconsin protect those cats. And so what we want to do is really make sure that we had good science before we went into this. The advocate makes it clear that he does not trust Dr. Temple's research. He raises insinuations about the source of Temple's funding, about the pedigree of the journals who would publish this kind of work.

26:19I'm not sure those numbers, and those numbers you referred to are the Dr. Stanley Temple study, are highly questionable. And as you said, those are estimates, and they're not at all scientific data. This is not published scientific data we're talking about. This is a study, not a study at all, in fact, a report that was published over 10 years ago. This is not new information. It's completely based on estimates that are wildly exaggerated. It's really based on the relationship between Dr. Stanley Temple and the American Bird Conservancy which is probably the most rabidly anti-cat special interest lobby group in the United States.

26:47So I don't know that we can take Dr. Stanley Temple's science seriously. I want to pause to appreciate the American poetry of the phrase probably the most rabidly anti-cat special interest lobby group. Also, one wonders if calling someone rabidly anything in this context is more loaded than in others. Anyway, the primary reason cat advocates had a problem with Temple's research was that it was serving as supporting evidence for this measure. the one that would have designated feral cats as unprotected, therefore allowing people to hunt, trap, or kill them in the badger state. An unpleasant idea, which to some cat advocates sounded deeply repugnant.

27:25So much so that some of these advocates started calling Dr. Temple and leaving threatening voicemails. Monday, 11.06 p.m., line one. You cat-murdering bastard. What goes around comes around. I declare Stanley Temple season open.

27:49Just to be clear, there's no reason to believe these voicemails came from any official activist group. Every cause has its extremists. Ultimately, in the face of public backlash, the measure failed. After initial public hearings, the state declined to pursue the issue further. The governor expressed the idea that the whole Wisconsin shoots cats thing was bad for the state's brand. The documentary was filmed in 2005. Nearly two decades later, the state estimates that a third of Wisconsin's native bird species are now in decline. The fight, though, over why that number keeps dropping, continues.

28:26Here's something I struggle with. I'm honestly not really a cat or a bird partisan. I'm the undecided voter both sides would like to reach. I am absolutely ready to trust the data, saying a lot of birds have died since the early 2000s. But I'm also aware that human beings must be a giant part of this. Global warming, wind turbines, the addition my mom put on her kitchen where the birds are always flying in the windows. Cars, power lines, my cousin Kip in Texas who likes to hunt quail. Are we just treating cats as a scapegoat here? Pete Mara says absolutely not. In 2013, he published a data analysis with an academic named Scott Loss, comparing a lot of different ways that birds die.

29:05This analysis represented a pretty huge salvo in the cat advocates versus bird ecologists data war. We looked at relative to other causes of anthropogenic mortality, that is, mortality caused directly by humans. So think wind turbines or birds that fly into buildings or windows or, say, birds that are killed by cats. We collected all of the relevant data out there where people estimated, because there have been a bunch of studies globally, where they looked at the number of birds or mammals or reptiles that cats kill on a daily or weekly basis throughout the year. And when you look at the total number, then you look at the estimates for the total number of cats.

29:46And you can separate cats by cats that are owned, that are led outside, or unowned cats that are outside, or what we call truly feral cats that have no connection to humans whatsoever, which we have a very poor understanding of in terms of the numbers, you can estimate the population size, multiply that times the number of individual animals that that cat might kill, and you can come up with an estimate for how many birds or mammals or reptiles are likely killed by cats in a given year. And you can do the same thing for wind turbines. You can do the same thing for cars. We did this. And? And this was the shot heard around the world when our paper was published in Nature Communications.

30:27We estimated that cats kill somewhere between 1.3 billion and 4 billion birds a year in the United States. That's birds alone. Billion. Billion with a big old B. 1.3 to 4 billion. And the range is so high because the studies are all over the map. You know, they just are. I think the median was 2.7 billion per year. But even if it's the low number at 1.3 billion birds per year, that was higher than most other estimates out there, but it's still, the low estimate is still very, very high. Do we need more research? Well, I don't know if we really need, from a scientific perspective, to try to refine the estimate.

31:10Maybe we need more research just to try to get a finer point on that number, but in terms of the conservation solution, no. We don't need more research to know that cats outdoors are just a problem for all kinds of reasons. There are some problems that are genuinely quite confusing. There are other problems we convince ourselves are confusing, I suspect, because even though we could understand them, we don't want to. These are inconvenient truths that, rather than addressing head-on, we procrastinate about. We ask the scientists to go draw us another chart, to run the numbers one more time. It buys us time before we have to do something that might be very tedious, or in the case of some of these cats, very unpleasant.

31:53The federal government has declared war on feral cats, hoping to save thousands of native species from the brink of extinction. Countries like New Zealand and Australia are dealing with this. They're on the front lines of it, really, because they've got such a feral cat problem, outdoor cat problem. And Australia introduced a cat cull. This is the Felixer, a feral cat trap, which lures in feral cats using recorded mating calls or the sounds of distressed prey before... Because there are so many cats roaming free in wild areas, and so they've put out bounties for folks to go out and shoot cats.

32:37Pete Mara is saying if we don't control cat populations now, we could end up like Australia, where people are just shooting lots of cats. Ironically, Alley Cat Allies, the people who fight for the rights of cats to live outside, they also point to Australia. In fact, this video they made of a specific, very brutal cat call there is, at least for me, some of their most effective political messaging.

33:06She said she'd walked out onto the wall and there was these piles of food and blood. Something had happened. She thought perhaps they'd been poisoned. Injured cats. Cats missing. Trails of blood. More blood. At one point in the video, text appears on the screen saying that in 2020, a contractor for the port of Newcastle came to the cat colony at night, quote, shooting at any cat he saw. Billy had been shot a few times in the head. She had bullets through her skull. We were all in tears, you know. We love these cats, and just seeing that someone had deliberately hurt them. Becky Robinson of Alley Cat Allies appears in the video and explains there was never a reason to kill those poor cats.

33:54She says the situation was already humanely under control. There was non-lethal control in place. It had been carried out by people who had sterilized the cats. In Australia, it's referred to as desexed. The cats had been microchipped, they'd been vaccinated, and they were not breeding. The local advocates say that before the call, they were using the same practice Becky Robinson was promoting in her community cat video, TNR. We focus on TNR, which is trap neuter release. When we started here at the break wall just under two years ago, there were over 100 cats. In that time we've been here, we've reduced the numbers to 40.

34:36And that's when the cull happened. Cat advocates like Ellie Cat Allies believe TNR, neutering outdoor cats, is the right way to control these populations. If they can't reproduce, they'll gradually die out. It sounds like the kind of elegant, humane solution that everyone could get on board with. The problem is ecologists in general say TNR doesn't really work. Part of the problem is just cats reproduce very quickly. According to PETA, under the right set of conditions, in seven years, one female cat and her offspring can produce up to 370 ,000 cats. Which means for TNR to work, you need to catch, neuter, and release something like 75 % of a feral cat colony every single year.

35:18How do you know you have 75 %? I don't know. How do you stop new cats from migrating into the colony from outside? Who could say? I emailed Pete Mara about the TNR program in Newcastle. He hadn't heard about it, but found the numbers suspicious. This wasn't a scientific study. He wanted to know, why would neutering a colony have caused 60 of these 100 cats to just suddenly disappear in two years? He wrote, quote, I absolutely do not trust the data. Pete Mara believes the end result of these ineffective TNR programs is our status quo. Many cats living wild lives in human cities. And he says these cats, they're not okay.

35:59These cats that are outdoors are not doing well. These cats have injuries. These cats have diseases. These cats have leukemia. These cats have feline AIDS. These cats are hit by cars. Feline AIDS? Yeah. There's all sorts of diseases that these cats contract. Pathogens, worms. The way they're most commonly killed is by getting hit by a car. And that's not a good way for an animal to die. I mean, it's just any way you slice it, it's just not a good way for an animal to die.

36:35Pete Mara is not the only person who believes that unowned cats are living lives so bad that euthanizing them would be a superior option. His worldview is shared by PETA. From PETA, quote, allowing feral cats to continue their daily struggle for survival in a hostile environment is rarely a humane option, end quote. PETA says kill the cats. I mean, PETA would say euthanize, but still. It's tricky, though, because the word euthanize is very bland, and a bloody video like that one from Australia is very powerful. In the proxy war between cats and birds and the people who defend them, you could imagine a counter video shot from the perspective of an innocent, fluffy, adorable, piping plover chick looking up from its nest at the ferocious jaws and teeth of a bored, stray, killer cat.

37:29but I'm not sure the video would work. We just don't relate as much to birds. We certainly don't relate to the declining aggregate numbers of bird populations. We relate to cats. To Garfield, to Felix, to Vertute, to all the ones we've seen on the internet, all the ones we've pet in our homes and in the homes of our friends. We love cats. But we also need to protect the birds. Wars persist because neither side can see the other as reasonable. Wars end when people make space for competing truths.

38:06After a short break, we find someone who actually sits in the middle of this intractable war, who seems to think about it differently than anyone else. That's after some ads.

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40:32Welcome back to the show. I wanted to talk to someone who could hold this entire argument in their mind. Someone who could see this from both perspectives. One voice came to mind. This person who owned multiple pet cats, but I also knew to be the greatest bird lover I've ever met. When we spoke, and we spoke often, it was usually about the lives of birds. So I invited him to the studio. So normally, when we interview experts on the podcast, there are people who are like public intellectuals, like writers or professors. You know, there are people who have a lot of expertise in their field. So I just want to establish your bona fides.

41:15Can you tell me the highest level of education you've completed? I graduated fifth grade, now I'm in sixth grade. Pretty good grades though, right? Yeah. Okay. And what do you think is the subject that you know more about than anything else? Birds. How do you know so much about birds, Calden? When I was young, I just clicked on random videos on YouTube, and then I just saw these bird videos, and then I just started watching that. Also, what also influenced me a lot was because when I had chickens for like five years, that also influenced me a lot about birds. Calden, easily one of the most charming people I've ever met.

41:56Half Swiss, half Tibetan, raised in the ways of two peace-loving, neutrality-seeking cultures. We spent a lot of time on long drives where he would just talk about birds and offer bird facts. Some kids get into trains for a while or fire trucks or dinosaurs. But for Calden, it was birds. It had been birds for as long as I'd known him. And I really had begun to appreciate birds more through our conversations, a species that, unlike cats and dogs, have mostly resisted the cheap bribery of human domestication, who keep to the skies, who feel alien and strange and have never pretended to belong to us.

42:29I just want to, for someone, because one of the reasons I enjoy spending time with you so much is I like asking about birds because you know everything about birds. But I just want to establish that for other people. So do you mind if I ask you some bird trivia questions? Yeah. What species of bird slays blue eggs? American robin. What's the word for the study of birds? Ornithology. What's the fastest bird in the world? Perg and falcon. What's the biggest bird in the world? An ostrich. What about the biggest bird in the world who's extinct? I think it was either the mower or the elephant. Elephant bird is the heaviest.

43:06I know the mower is probably the tallest. I have elephant bird, but I have no doubt that you are more correct than this website that I found. What species of bird can only eat when its head is upside down? Flamingos? Yep. What species of bird can fly backwards? Hummingbirds? You're 7 for 7 so far. What species of bird can fly underwater? Penguins or puffins, technically, either of those. They don't technically fly underwater, but they look like they fly underwater. Again, you're doing better than my website. What was the website's answer? They just said the puffin, but I think you're right. I was like flying underwater.

43:42I guess puffin because puffins fly above water and underwater, so I guess that's what they mean. But I think you're being a bit more precise than they are. I think you're more correct than they are. How many different bird species are there in the world? Over 10 ,000, I'm pretty sure. There's some debate, but the most widely accepted number seems to be around 10 ,000. Okay, that's perfect. When I first wanted to talk to Calden, I just assumed he'd be a voice speaking for the birds. But then I saw this school project he did, and I realized he actually had feelings in both directions. So I want to ask you about an experiment you did involving chickens.

44:16Oh, you mean when I hatched those eggs? Tell me about it. We did it for a science experiment. Not hatched, I don't know why. We're going to try next year with duck eggs. Well, so I became aware of your science experiment because I had stopped by your school during the science fair and I saw the experiments, and I was very impressed with yours. Not to disparage your classmates, but I found yours impressive.

44:39And in your display for the experiment, it included a little biography of you. Yeah. And there was a part of it that surprised me that I wanted to ask you about, if that's okay. Yeah. Okay, can I read it to you? Yeah. Hi, my name's Calden. Yeah. I'm 11 years old. Yeah. I'm in fifth grade, and I have two cats. Yeah. I loved fishing, skiing, and animals. Yeah. Ever since I was three, I was fascinated by birds. Yeah. I've owned four chickens here in New York. Sadly, they all died. Exactly. Now I want to hatch... It's so funny that you're agreeing with yourself. Now I want to hatch new ones. Yeah.

45:14Chickens are way smarter and social than people think. Yeah. My chickens, for example, were always trying to escape. Yeah. With cats, they do what they want, and you can't change what they do. But with chickens, you have to stop the issue. And the rush of stopping them is so nice. What did you mean when you said the rush of stopping them was so nice? Having to change the way of them escaping all the time was fun because they always found a new way to escape. So then you have to try and solve the issue. Like when they were young, you have to bring them outside, and that's fun to always move them.

45:47With cats, they just do what they want, and you can't only stop them because they can run around, they know the neighborhood. Chickens, you can interfere because if you don't interfere, they're not used to the city. They're smart, but they're not that smart. They might get run over by a car if they escape the whole time. It sounds like for you, raising chickens was kind of like having a young child, whereas having cats was like you were raising a teenager. Kind of. Can we talk about cats? Okay. Do you have cats? You have one cat shadow. No, I had. Oh, I'm sorry. He died like a year, two years ago.

46:17Now I have three cats. One was dragon fruit. That's the one in June. Those two are living inside, and the one that's outside is his mama cat. Mama cat. Because she just gave birth to dragon fruit. So have your cats ever killed a bird that you know of? Oh, yeah, many times. Many times. Just many sparrows. Once this weird, like, swallow-looking bird. You love birds. Yeah. Does it bother you? I mean, I'm upset about it, but it's no different when they bring in a mouse. It's not different. And I also found in the corner of this garage at her house, there was, like, a dead blue jake corpse. There was like a body, and then the head was detached, and then there was like a wing detached.

46:58But I was impressed, but also sad, because blue geys are very big birds. How long did you feel sad for him? I mean, not that. I didn't cry. I was just like upset and like, oh, come on, like that feeling. Calden said he couldn't imagine forcing his cat to live entirely inside. It'd be boring. It'd be unfair. But he also believes birds have rights that need balancing. I suggested cats might be killing more birds than he realizes, but of course he said he was familiar with the literature. Calden's feeling was that to solve this problem, you'd actually need to think outside of the box. What's your vision for the future of how cats and birds in America can get along?

47:37Because people who have house cats everywhere want them to be able to roam free, but there are places where it's a real problem. Places where it's a real problem, the easiest thing to do is just give the cats a bell on the collar So when the cats move and try to creep up on the birds, it makes like a sound so the birds can hear it. And then they can just fly away, walk scary away. Do you have any other ideas? I think that's a good one. Let me think. Yeah. Maybe having like your cats either less outside, not outside at all, or that's all my ideas. I think those are good ideas.

48:21I had not expected to find myself taking an 11-year-old's ideas back to an academic like Pete Mara, but I found Calden's perspective refreshing. I know human culture changes slowly, stubbornly, but I also know technology can accelerate those changes. It actually felt easier to imagine popularizing bells on cat collars than it did convincing people with outdoor cats to just start keeping them inside. Pete Mara is a bit skeptical about bells, but he is a believer in this idea that technology can help birds and cats and people coexist on our planet. And he sees some of those technologies taking off.

49:01Since I've started to work on this issue, I've seen, no question, an increase in the number of folks that are walking their cats on leashes. I see more people that are aware of this issue at all, and they just say, yeah, we're cat owners, but we're indoor cat owners, which is totally, totally fine. That's great. And we also see a growth in something called catios, which are... Catios. Catios, which are screened in cat enclosures. So your cat can go outside, enjoy outdoors, can watch and get stimulated by nature, just like we get stimulated by nature because it's in their best interest to be stimulated by nature, so they're happy, but not cause any damage to birds.

49:44birds, but they can watch a bird fly by without actually killing the bird. So you see people changing the architecture of their homes because they're trying to find a balance between their love for their pet and their desire to conserve nature? Absolutely. Yep. It's happening in lots of places. I had no idea that was happening. Yeah. Just Google catio and you'll see more and more folks putting up catios in their houses to accommodate their cat. Oh yeah. I'm looking at some gorgeous catios. I think I was just picturing a covered patio, but it's real small for some reason. And this is more like, it's sort of like a cage, but it doesn't look particularly, it's somewhere between a cage and a jungle gym.

50:24Yeah. And there's all kinds of versions out there. But the point is, is that it allows your cat to have controlled access to the outdoors where there aren't native wildlife that will be injured by the cat.

50:40So, what are we going to do about all these cats? If you believe the ecologists, our house cats are looking at a future of bells, cat leashes, and catios. And this is the harder part. Some unowned cats need to be humanely killed, particularly in places like the islands of Hawaii and Australia, where they're wiping out endangered species. Cats, Pete Mara says, have already contributed to the execution of 63 species on this planet, he thinks we should try to prevent the 64th. I look at these natural areas. When I see a bird, that to me is like going into a museum and seeing a Monet or a Picasso.

51:19It's our natural history that we're losing. It's like losing a Monet on the wall when you lose a species. And we know that species loss is a massive problem. And we almost lost species like the bald eagle. Could you imagine if we didn't have the bald eagle in the United States, our national bird. And now, thankfully, we got rid of DDT and the bald eagle came back. And future generations can now appreciate species like the bald eagle and the brown pelican and the osprey because we protected them. And we have a responsibility to maintain the integrity of the earth. I mean, I don't know if that's convincing to you or not, but it's convincing to me.

51:57I feel like a general sense of like we should conserve species. I just feel like, I feel like who cares about the birds is probably, it's a taboo thing to say. You know, nobody's going to advocate for the extinction of a species. But if you, while nobody would say that, if you look at people's behavior, clearly people believe that, you know? Yeah, I think there are some people that are thinking that. But I, you know, at the end of the day, I also think that a lot of folks on the other side of the aisle that are cat advocates are also animal advocates. And they're in a quandary, honestly, because they love wildlife.

52:34They love nature. They love cats. And they want to believe that cats are not having the impact that they're having because the solution here is just not great. It's a difficult situation. Any way you slice it. And I think that many of them really appreciate birds and like birds, but they don't know what to do within the short time frame that they're present on this planet and don't think that their single cat or their five cats really matter. But they do. But they do. They have a hard time scaling it up. And I see it because I think about things at much larger scales.

53:14Today, more than 100 million American cats live mostly outdoor lives. If Dr. Pete Mara and people like him are able to convince people to see the world how they see it, that'll change. They'll have to do something that seems impossible. Convince people that their individual choices add up to something larger. But that impossible thing has been done before. We don't smoke inside. We don't litter. Our dogs in America rarely roam free. Pete Mara says it's important that we change all this because there's a generation after us that'll inherit the earth we leave behind.

53:48Calden, are you 11 right now or 12? 11. I interview a lot of people who know more than me, but they're usually not 11. Mm-hmm. Just saying. What do you want to do when you grow up? Be an onothologist. We'll go to college. And then I want to go to the, what college is it called? The bird college. There's a bird college. Not bird college, but it's like you can study onnithology there.

54:16It's Cornell. Cornell University, I think that's what it's called. I've heard of Cornell University. And they have a good ornithology program? I think so. I'm pretty sure. And so after Cornell, would you want to be a professional ornithologist? Yes. Do you think you'll ever be less interested in birds than you are right now?

54:36Probably not. Maybe when I'm like in the teenage years. Yeah. Because then I'm not going to care about that much. Then I'm just going to care about like Fortnite with friends or like something like that. Like Cod or something. So boring. Exactly. Thank you. You're welcome.

54:59Thank you.

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56:21Thank you.

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