North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>]

There's been a discussion on barn cats on the small ruminant 
practitioners e-list that dovetails to some degree with the one 
that's been going on here on the NAFEX list.  Received this response 
over the weekend - thought it might be of interest to some of you NAFEXers.
Lucky

> Again, I will apologize that this is a long post, as behavior and 
> domestication are special interests of mine.
>
> I would like to comment on the outdoor cats issue as well.  I 
> recognize that cats are predators and do at times take birds and at 
> times those birds are from struggling populations.  However, in my 
> experience, few people have the knowledge or desire to make an 
> indoor environment as enriched as a cat needs for optimum mental 
> health.  It is much like the zoos of yester-year, when wild cat 
> species were kept on boring, sterile cages.  Sure they lived longer 
> than their wild counterparts, but what kind of lives did they lead? 
> However now zoos undergo considerable design to provide more 
> enriched environments (decades back, prior to vet school, I worked a 
> summer with Hal Markowitz at the Portland zoo, who was an pioneer in 
> cognitive enrichment in the zoo setting). But the average cat owner 
> hasn't a clue how to evaluate and design an indoor environment for the
> behavioral needs of a cat.
>
> I think we also need to examine the issue of the prey that cats are 
> hunting and why humans domesticated cats in the first place.  In the 
> late 1990s, I lived for two years in Japan and got an English 
> language newspaper.  There I was reading about the serious crop 
> failure that was occurring in Vietnam, which was so severe that it 
> was feared it would cause widespread famine. The situation all came 
> back, it turns out, to cats.  What happened was the
> economy improved over the border in China, causing a proliferation 
> of specialty "Little Tiger Restaurants" in the border cities 
> surrounding Vietnam and in Saigon.  As the name implies, these 
> restaurants served up cooked domestic cat, which was considered a 
> delicacy.  This caused an economic draw for getting cats to supply 
> the restaurants, and a number of people started poaching the cats 
> from farm villages in Vietnam.  As the cats
> disappeared, the rat population exploded, moving out into the farms 
> fields and consuming all the staple crops.  I don't remember the 
> exact numbers, but it was billions of tons of human food being 
> lost.  I remember reading one story about a man who used a car 
> battery to electrify his rice paddy every night to kill thousands of 
> rats--woe to anyone else who accidentally stumbled off the path.  At 
> the time I left Japan and was no longer getting newspapers that ran 
> the story, the government had closed down all the Little Tiger 
> restaurants and were actively campaigning to the farmers to protect 
> their cats as a way of protecting their fields and food supply.
>
> The reason why humans, in this case the ancient Egyptians, 
> domesticated cats to begin with was because of their  hunting 
> prowess and their ability to protect our food supply from rodents 
> and pest species of small birds.  The domestication of the dog occurred while
> humans were still primarily hunter-gatherers.  Domestication of cats 
> followed the domestication of grains and plant agriculture and 
> storage and cats proved their value as small, effective predators 
> that could live on the edges of human civilization. Cats then 
> followed humanity everywhere we went, were of value to us because of 
> their hunting prowess.  They accompanied humans on sailing ships, 
> keeping our stores of food safe from rodents. Wherever there is 
> human agriculture, there cats have proved their value.  I think that 
> the current anti-cat movement fails to recognize the historical 
> perspective and fails to recognize that the value we humans  derive 
> from cats' hunting skills continues today.  We in our comfortable 
> domesticity haven't experienced the horseman of the Apocalypse that 
> was Pestilence.  But what if those millions of wildlife (mainly 
> rodents) killed now by outdoor and feral cats were instead allowed 
> to live and, as rodent populations are able to do, explosively 
> reproduce?  We are still creating and maintaining the habitats in 
> which rodents will flourish.  After all, if the feral cats didn't 
> have those rodents to hunt, there would not be a feral cat 
> population to begin with...the few people feeding these populations 
> are not maintaining them--the rodent population living in the 
> habitats we people have created is what is maintaining the feral cat 
> population.
>
> Cats have gone, hand in paw, along with human agriculture for 
> thousands of years, which is why many farmers tolerate, even 
> encourage, semi-feral populations of barn cats.
>
> I choose to have several outdoor cats in my barn because I prefer 
> that to trapping and poisoning rodents.  A decade ago we had a woman 
> killed by Hantavirus in my community, so I know that this is in my 
> resident deer mouse population. Trapping rodents puts me at 
> increased risk and poisoning them puts raptors at risk.  Leaving 
> them to reproduce and run amok in my barn and pastures is not a good 
> sustainable agricultural practice. There are snakes in my pastures, 
> but being cold blooded, they aren't much help in the winter and
> don't consume prey species as much as a warm blooded species with 
> higher energy demands.  I have, on occasions had skunks also living 
> in the barn, also eating the rodent population.  But I prefer the 
> cats to the skunks because the skunks kill my laying hens and the 
> cats do not.  My cats do kill the occasional bird--but in keeping 
> with the adage that common things happen commonly, the birds killed 
> are generally species that are in overabundance like starlings.  I 
> *don't* put out a bird feeder, which I think may be a
> detriment to wild bird populations by creating static, abnormally 
> concentrated wild bird feeding locations that brings birds into 
> close proximity and puts them at a higher risk of  social stress, 
> disease transmission and predatory risk (from more than just 
> cats).   (I wonder how many of the people who damn the cats also 
> create these abnormal feeding stations without questioning whether 
> they are potentially creating risk for the bird populations)?
>
> Most of the prey that are killed by cats are not any more "wild" 
> than the cats themselves.  They are species of animals who have 
> either invaded into new territories because of their ability to 
> exploit the niches we create (like the Norway rat), were 
> deliberately introduced (like the starling, which is no more native 
> than the cats) or are  native populations that are living at higher 
> densities because of the habitat we have created (like the deer mouse).
>
> Rare populations are also impacted by the hunting skills of the 
> cats, but not to the degree that these potentially damaging pest 
> species are impacted. I think we need to find another way to protect 
> the rare species from all the things that are challenging them (like 
> habitat destruction, competition from pest species, loss of nesting 
> habitat, pollution and pesticides) and leave the cats doing what the 
> cats have been doing the last 5 centuries....using their spectacular 
> hunting prowess to protect our food supply.  And for those of us who 
> also make our living from agriculture, we need to recognize that the 
> health of the outdoor cat population is related to the health and 
> sustainability of agriculture and extend our hand at keeping them 
> healthy and able to do their jobs (an example would be on-farm 
> vaccination and worming when we are there seeing to the 
> ruminants).  Part of our jobs when we go on a farm, could be to see 
> what the farmer needs to keep his outdoor cat population stable and 
> healthy.  As the Toxo case pointed out, a rapidly turning over 
> population with a lot of kittens and influx of new cats is not as 
> beneficial as a stable population.  We could teach farmers how to 
> better care for their barn cats. That is a niche we could explore.
>
> I think that those of us in agriculture need to appreciate what cats 
> do for agriculture and add our perspective to the outdoor cat debate.
>
> I also don't think you can always buy the argument that outdoor cats 
> necessarily live short, miserable lives.  They do certainly have 
> more challenges to their safety, like coyotes and cars.  But I have 
> a 20 year old retired barn cat who started living in my house a 
> while back, after having been born and raised and spending over a 
> decade as my primary barn cat.  She is mearowing to be fed, so I'd 
> better stop writing now.......
>
> Again I apologize for the length of this post.  It is a topic about 
> which I have given a lot of thought and I don't see this perspective 
> addressed much in the debates about this.
>
> Janice
>
> Janice Willard, DVM, MS
> Moscow, ID
>
>
> > Peri;
> > Well said; you make some good points, and I'm sure we all value wildlife.
> > I have no doubt that in certain situations, especially where habitat loss
> > has already threatened certain populations, cats may have an impact. It
> > behooves us all to try to minimze our ecologic footprint and manage our
> > own habitat responsibly. We do see plenty of what our cats kill and bring
> > home (or barf up), and birds are a very small part. The cats do a lot to
> > keep mice, squirrels and chipmunks out of the houses as well as the barns.
> > I stand corrected on the issue of older cats potentially shedding toxo, as
> > well, but still a resident adult population is likely to be healthier than
> > a transient one.