Date published: 2011/05/13
The BBC says:
Should there be a limit on the number of cats you are allowed to keep?
...
And should this single cat be registered with the authorities, sterilised, and confined to home, or only let out under curfew?
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Legislating cat ownership this way sounds pretty heavy handed, draconian even. Would we even need a pet police to enforce the rules?But I mention them to raise an important issue - to what extent do our domestic pets impact other animals living wild? Is our pet predilection causing a conservation problem, one that we need to address?
The suggestion that it could be, and we should think about restricting or controlling the animals we bring into our homes, appears in a new research paper published by Australian scientists in the journal Biological Conservation.
Michael Calver and colleagues at Murdoch University in Western Australia, and the University of Sydney, argue for why we might consider using the precautionary principle when it comes to cat ownership.
They start by laying out the context.
There is now abundant evidence that feral cats can cause the decline or even elimination of local wildlife. A yet to be published review by ecologist Elsa Bonnaud at the Mediterranean Institute for Ecology and Palaeoecology in France and colleagues suggests they are responsible, at least in part, for 8% of global bird, mammal and reptile extinctions and pose a significant threat to almost 10% of critically endangered birds, mammals and reptiles.
But feral cats are pets no more - and you can't compare a ranging hungry street cat with a well fed pet that spends most of its time indoors or in its owner's back garden.
This is just a typical anti-cat rant by so-called conservation biologists. The problem is not cats, it is people. And the problem is certainly not pet cats. Indeed, they keep the rodent population down (as well as go after the odd bird).
Any paper that quotes the so-called precautionary principle as its main justification for doing anything should just be ignored. And funnily enough the authors here even have the point of the "principle" backwards. So Wikipedia says:
The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action.
Here it is these so-called conservation biologists who want to take an action (to persecute cats) and so it should be them who justifies their action, not the other way around, if they want to claim to believe in this "principle". (So, their proposal could well lead to an explosion in the rodent population, with all the attendant health problems.)
But in any case, the precautionary principle is junk. It is just used as an excuse by people who want to stop something they happen not to like (here, cats behaving like cats) without having any justification for doing so (other than hatred and prejudice). It is the antithesis of scientific reason.
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