Kill the Feral Cats

I love my cat Torvald more than anything. He looks a lot like the cat pictured above. But let’s not beat around the bush–cats are incredibly destructive creatures. Feral cats are not our lost potential pets. They are a wildlife management problem. And the best way to deal with them is to kill them. Not in some torturous horrible way. But they must be eliminated for the sake of ecosystems. Take Kauai for example, where areas overrun by excess cats defecating on the beach are seeing seal deaths.

Barbieri and Littnan had no evidence that toxo was zombifying monk seal brains. Rather, the seals seemed to be collateral damage in an evolutionary death match among cats, rats, and T. gondii. But that was another mysterious thing about toxo—plenty of insect, bird, fish, and mammal species could acquire and carry toxo oocysts without manifesting any symptoms whatsoever. Why toxo killed monk seals nobody really knew. Nor did they know why, beyond Hawaii, toxo killed sea otters, spinner dolphins, kangaroos, and even humans. An estimated 23 percent of Americans have had toxo, and in some countries that figure reaches 95 percent. Occasionally, it produces muscle aches and other flu-like symptoms, and even more occasionally it can cause blindness and epilepsy in newborns, behavioral changes in adults, and increased miscarriages in pregnant women. For people with compromised immune systems, toxo can be fatal.

When I meet Barbieri and Littnan in Honolulu after Uilani’s death, we discuss the fact that Hawaii has no native felids. What Hawaii does have is feral house cats, lots of them. By some calculations, Oahu alone has 350,000, but Littnan calls that a “gross underestimate.” His program struggles to accurately count 400-pound seals on the beach. “Cats are small, elusive predators living in the forest,” he says. “And there’s been no systematic effort to count them.” Whatever their number, they produce billions of oocysts, and these wash down watersheds and into the ocean, where seals consume them through the food chain. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” says Littnan. “What we do know is that cats poop and monk seals die. You’re only going to reduce toxo by reducing the definitive hosts—cats.”

Of course people are totally irrational when it comes to cats. And it’s not just the seals, it’s every species on Kauai, many of whom, especially the birds, are endangered. This is not an acceptable situation. But cat people just don’t care. They would rather see every other animal die than hurt little fluffy. And I get that to some point. But there are far larger issues at stake. Kill the cats.