My thoughts about dogs and nature reserves... and how the dogs shouldn't be there. Certainly not off the lead. My thoughts about the animal symposia where there is so much focus on feral cats and dogs. The issue of no kill policies at refuges, and pigeons in cages. The focus on the individual well-being of the animals we know to the exclusion of the many we don't know.
I found a book that explores the conflicts between pets and wild animals - Unnatural Companions by Peter Christie. Free on Audible. The narration is a little painful but it's interesting.
More I think about this, the more tangled I get. Of course I don't want stray cats to be killed. But I don't want rats to be killed either. Foxes, stoats and rats would probably have wreaked enough havoc in New Zealand, so how relevant are the cats? But why save cats not foxes, stoats and rats? Or do we just accept the changing, homogenising landscape of limited lifeforms that can withstand such predation? What about the diseases pets pass to wildlife? What about the 500,000 pythons in Florida causing a decimation of mammalian life - the pythons bred from escaped or released pets?
I try to imagine a world without the conflicts caused by the pet industry, pets and pet owners on one side and the wild ecosystems on the other. A landscape without released pheasants and, indeed, muntjacs, grey squirrels, fallow deer... hares? Rabbits? My God, it might be even worse.
I try to imagine a world where people cared and took responsibility. The released or free animals would go on doing what they do... for good or ill... but no more harm from humans... There isn't the space or the food to do no harm. The conflicts are escalating. And what about the harms of omission? Of failing to protect? How can we protect without enclosure and exclusion?
The whole thing gets me tangled in knots. I see no answer. But I do not see a cat as more important than a rat. Do I see a rare albatross as more important than the mice who eat her chicks? Maybe I do. If the mice aren't killed, where do they go? Do the albatrosses have to submit to caged, safe parenting? Somehow?
If we are to care about individual suffering, all sufferers count. Not just the ones we like or the ones we know. The crucial thing is that so much pet-related suffering is hidden: the Iberian lynxes with Feline Leukaemia caused by proximity to domestic cats; the birds killed or nests predated; the lions with Canine Distemper caused by proximity to pet dogs; the deer eaten by pythons; the Hawaiian birds dying of Avian flu brought to the islands by pet birds; the animals displaced from habitats because escaped deer have eaten all the vegetation. And on it goes.
In the US, they spend a king's ransom feeding horses rounded up from the wild. The horses' families are broken up and their social structures broken. They were domestic horses, but wildness was just a broken rope away. Do the horses in the wild do harm? Yes: they eat the habitat bare and out-compete others as they have no predators because there aren't enough mountain lions to prevent horse numbers escalating... to collapse only with slow painful death through starvation. Now the land used to house hundreds of thousands of horses is still land that cannot be used by anything else. The only winners are the land owners who rent the land to the agency.
So, should they kill horses?
With cats, the policy is to trap and neuter them, then release them. That doesn't decrease numbers at all as they don't catch all cats. And the released cats happily return to killing wildlife. A lot of money and effort, for what?
So, should they kill the cats?
We have fucked up so badly that we cannot do right for doing wrong. Yet we continue DOING at great effort and expense to little useful end. And the useful end? Killing? How good a taste does that leave in the moral mouth? [Ummmm... not great wording... - Ed.]
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