The Hawaii Invasive Species Council Advises Not To Feed Stray Cats and Feral Pigs. Unfortunately, Sound Advice Doesn’t Go Far Enough To Stop People From Dumping 20-Pound Bags Of Cat Food On The Side Of The Road.
If you haven’t seen the movie Cocaine Bear, you need not look past the title to know what it’s about. A bear does cocaine in the woods and wreaks havoc on the residents of a nearby town. The craziest part is, the movie is actually based on a true story. Way back when in 1985, some drug smugglers air-dropped a shipment of booger sugar in the hills of Tennessee, and a bear got to the goods before its intended recipients could pick it up. Unfortunately, the bear overdosed and died after ingesting close to a whopping 75 pounds of the drug. Even Tony Montana couldn’t keep up with such a high level of neurosynaptic indulgence in a single session.
While the story is certainly unusual, there isn’t anything strange about wild animals developing a taste for items meant for human consumption. The fate of Cocaine Bear was yet another accidental consequence of the futile drug war, but this piece isn’t meant to discuss the merits of whether society should have access to powerful stimulant drugs displayed on an end-cap between the liquor aisle and the hunting rifles at Walmart. It’s meant to shed light on the various conflict points that arise out of an evolving suburban-wildlife interface, the gray zone between human civilization and nature’s wild abandon.
Hawaii doesn’t have any bears and probably never will thanks to the state’s stringent animal importation requirements and recent airline crackdowns on emotional support animals. But Hawaii does have more than its fair share of invasive species. From fire ants and feral cats to coqui frogs and cane grass, they all arrived here through some combination of deliberate human intervention and accidental introduction.
With no natural predators, Puerto Rican coqui frogs have flourished. Mongooses have multiplied, and so have the rats they were supposed to control, given their opposite diurnal and nocturnal habits. New albizia trees sprout almost as quickly as old branches snap during a storm. Human intervention has never been a very good friend to ecology, even if sometimes well intended. We’re just glad the plan to introduce hippos into the swamps of Louisiana to solve a meat shortage a hundred years ago never quite materialized.
But with cats and dogs doing equal or even greater damage to the local ecosystem than the aforementioned flora and fauna, residents are adamant to give them special preferential treatment, to the detriment of many native species, some of which are rapidly disappearing.
Just this year, a nene gosling died after ingesting cat feces infected with toxoplasmosis. On Oahu, a monk seal was mauled to death by a dog in an area where unleashed dogs are prohibited by law. And while no Hawaiian islands are known to have wild rabbit populations at this time, there have been reports of wild rabbit sightings on the Big Island, likely due to neglectful pet owners abandoning them when they no longer want to care for them. As cute as they are, just ask Australia how much damage they can do to ecosystems if left unchecked. With only a dozen rabbits to start when they were first brought to Britain’s penal colony down under, Australia’s rabbit population far exceeds that of people today, somewhere around 200 million compared to the continent’s paltry 26 million humans.
While feral cats don’t reproduce quite as quickly as their lagomorph mammalian brethren, Hawaii Island still has more feral cats than people. With a population of around 200,000 humans, there are at least 500,000 feral cats, with some estimates ranging closer to 1 million. Despite public information campaigns from the Big Island Invasive Species Committee, the Hawaii Invasive Species Council, creative applications of the law by the Department of Land and Natural Resources, and constant warnings about how feeding stray animals actually hurts animal welfare, the problem is getting worse, not better. Why? Because no one wants to be the bearer of bad news regarding how to fix the problem.
Even PETA, the prime authority on animal rights worldwide, opposes managed cat colonies and TNR (trap-neuter-release) as viable longterm solutions and argue, correctly, that these practices are ineffective and do more harm than good. But public support for these programs remains high, despite being almost as harmful as random people dumping bags of cat food on the side of the road, which they indeed do as well. While we can’t pin down the exact cause of why people support managed colonies and TNR, other than misinformation, we can take a wild guess. It allows people to consider themselves animal welfare activists, without having to do anything that challenges the sanctimony of their actions (or lack thereof) that need to be reexamined if any practical and effective solutions are to be sought in eventually bringing invasive species, including feral cats, to a manageable level. Any multi-pronged approach to addressing these problems in a meaningful way is going to need at the very least a discussion on the viability of culling and euthanasia. And this of course, is where the conversation stops and everyone loses their freaking minds.
No one likes the idea of euthanasia, especially when it comes to animals. But no one supports the idea of euthanasia for fun. They support it because if it is not at least considered, many other species will die out. Permanently. The feral cat problem is not so much a cat problem as it is a human one, perpetuated by arrogance and carelessness and maintained by collective apathetic indolence. Any comprehensive longterm solution to this one small part of the overarching ecological balance ought to include a more direct reduction in the feral cat population, rather than letting nature take its course… considering the latter has worked so well. Doing something is certainly better than doing nothing at all, even if doing nothing is the path of least resistance. The biggest hurdle in allowing state agencies to do their jobs more effectively is for residents to step aside, to stop feeding feral cat colonies that will inevitably get bigger with time, and to educate themselves on how detrimental their good intentions are in the name of pragmatism. If the community makes a concerted effort to stop many of its damaging behaviors, then there remains a chance to take euthanasia off the table altogether.
Short of taking these necessary steps, we might as well put cocaine in the cat feeders. At least it would make for an interesting behavioral study.
– HawaiiLocal.News