Cat rescuer Erica Messina was trapping stray kittens to get them out of the cold and into homes before winter, hoping the young cats would have better lives.
Instead, they died horribly shortly after she successfully trapped them from a lakeside colony in October.
“All of the 13 kittens that I had all passed the same way,” Messina told KBTV, a Fox affiliate in Beaumont, Texas. “They were foaming at the mouth, they were throwing up bright green and peeing bright green.”
Two weeks later, per KBTV, a dozen adult cats from the same colony died the same way the kittens did, “some with chemical burns on their noses.”
“I was upset. I was at work when I found out and I came out here and started asking people, you know, what the problem was,” Messina told the station. “I got no answers.”
Like others who have cared for large colonies of strays who were killed by overzealous birders, Messina says she now has PTSD as she’s trying to save the lives of the remaining cats. She’s managed to catch all but four of them with the help of other local cat lovers and rescue organizations.
They’re getting no help from the authorities. Police referred Messina to Beaumont Animal Care, who told her they can’t help unless she can prove the cats were intentionally harmed. Not only are they putting the burden of proof on the victims in this case, but the victims can’t speak for themselves.
‘A bird-watcher’s paradise’
The colony lived in Collier’s Ferry Park, a lakeside park that also borders marshes where migratory birds spend time alongside native species. Indeed, Beaumont, a coastal Texas city of 115,000, markets itself, and Collier’s Ferry Park in particular, as a prime bird-watching spot.
A 2013 story in the local newspaper, the Beaumont Enterprise, detailed how local officials and business owners were promoting the park as a bird-watching paradise, noting that “[b]irders in particular are a lucrative market” driving tourism in the city. The story explains how the park is ideal for birds and those who like to watch them, details prized species found there — including herons, the least grebe and cinnamon teal — and includes input from a zoologist with a focus on birds, along with a local businessman who leads guided bird tours on the lake.
Collier’s Ferry Park is also listed on a site for “birding hotspots” while Texas Monthly calls it “one of the country’s best bird-watching spots.”
It is precisely the sort of place misguided bird watchers, driven to rage by widespread junk science blaming cats for declines in bird population, tend to dispense what they believe is vigilante justice. It stretches credulity to imagine anyone but a self-styled conservationist who blames cats for bird extinctions would risk a criminal conviction to poison a colony of cats, especially in a well-known hotspot for bird watchers.
Junk science blames cats for declining bird populations
We’ve written our share about the disingenuous and agenda-driven activism that passes for research, most of it published by Peter Marra, a Georgetown avian ecologist who also authored the book Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences Of A Cuddly Killer. The book advocates a “war” on cats and says they must be extirpated “by any means necessary” to protect birds and small mammals.
It does not, notably, put the blame on human activity, including but not limited to habitat destruction, the widespread use of harmful pesticides, wind farms, sky scrapers and all the other man-made structures, chemicals and machines that have contributed to a 70 percent decline in wildlife in the last 50 years.
But don’t take our word for it. Vox Felina calls Marra “a post-truth pioneer” who has claimed cats “kill more birds than actually exist,” while Alley Cat Allies echoes our own criticism by pointing out that Marra’s studies are composites of “a variety of unrelated, older studies” which his team uses to concoct “a highly speculative conclusion that suits the researchers’ seemingly desperate anti-cat agenda.”
“This speculative research is highly dangerous—it is being used by opponents of outdoor cats and Trap-Neuter-Return (including the authors) to further an agenda to kill more cats and roll back
decades of progress on TNR. And it is being spread unchecked by the media.”
In an NPR piece criticizing the studies blaming cats, Barbara J. King shares many of our own criticisms, chiefly that Marra and company have done no original research, relying instead on older studies, most of which have nothing to do with feline predatory habits, and none of which actually measure bird deaths from cats. King also notes, as we have, that it’s impossible to arrive at anything resembling a precise figure for feline ecological impact when Marra et al admit they don’t know how many free-ranging cats there are in the US, offering a uselessly wide estimated of between 20 and 120 million.
She also points out that the research team conducted “statistical perturbations” to massage the data into something fitting their agenda, which is activism, not science.
The researchers are guilty of “violating basic tenets of scientific reasoning when making their claims about outdoor cats,” bioethicist and research scientist William Lynn wrote.
“Advocates of a war against cats have carved out a predetermined conclusion,” Lynn noted, “then backfilled their assertions by cherry picking an accumulation of case studies.”
The war on cats
Across the world, people are using these studies and those of Marra’s acolytes to justify cruel cat-culling programs, like the recently-canceled cat hunt that would have rewarded children for shooting felines in New Zealand, and Australia’s widely-condemned mass culling that used poisoned sausages to kill millions of cats.
Stories of stray and feral cat poisonings in the US abound. Here at PITB we wrote a series of stories exposing how a government biologist in California took it upon himself to hunt cats under the cover of night, killing them with a shotgun and later celebrating in emails to colleagues, calling the dead cats’ bodies “party favors.”
Indeed, one of Marra’s own proteges, Nico Arcilla — formerly Nico Dauphine — went vigilante. Arcilla, who shares author credits with Marra on studies claiming free-ranging cats kill billions of birds, was a working for the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., when she was convicted in 2011 of attempted animal cruelty. The managers of a local colony, suspicious after strange substances began appearing in the feeders they’d set up for the strays, set up cameras which caught Arcilla placing poison on the food left out for the cats.
Back in Beaumont, Texas, a familiar story plays out: people who manage cat colonies out of love for the animals are working with local rescues, pooling together limited resources to save the remaining strays and hoping for justice.
“It’s terrible, you know? There are some people that just hate cats,” said Vyki Derrick, president of local rescue Friends of Ferals. “The rescuers have been trying to pull them out of the colony and it’s just sad that people want to interfere with that when the problem, ‘problem’ is being taken care of.”
Header image credit: Pexels
Pain In The Bud 
VILE GARBAGE. This is why we think 3 ferals disappeared all at once few years ago near me. Cats that we fixed.
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That’s terrible. Something similar happened to a small colony we were taking care of – TNR’d and fed cats.
When several were killed we removed the remaining cats and adopted them. Couldn’t do anything about the suspected killer though.
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How terrible? What can be done? Can anything be done?
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They likely have no funds to do autopsy. And wtf? Does law enforcement think green anything coming out of a cat makes them aliens?! Most likely antifreeze. Poison is a horrific way to die. THEY SUFFER.
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The suffering is the part the cat killers get off on, I think. Vile people!
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What can be done? DEMAND CAMERAS BE INSTALLED.
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Difficult to say if that’s possible without knowing exactly what the park looks like, where the cats are fed, etc.
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These stories are so grim, but I will do what I always do…
May the person(s) who worked this crime
Face justice in quick time.
May Karma come back to thee
Three times three times three times three.
As I will it, so mote it be.
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Sickeningly cruel, and appallingly stupid to put poison out in the environment. Yesterday I watched a Blue Jay chow down on food we’d left out for our ferals … Our yard is full of Jays, mockers, Cardinals, Brown Thrashers, a duck with ducklings, and two well-fed feral cats. I’ve probably said that before, and dissed the bogus studies, in a lot of places. I’m old enough to remember times when no one kept pet cats inside only, and there were so many more birds.
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I live in the country and have noticed a marked decrease in birds. When a neighbor cleared a tree line on his property the number of hedgerow birds plummeted. Insect numbers have also fallen over the years,
and I am very concerned about this. Growing pollinator plants hasn’t helped much. Sadly, most people here use horrible stuff like Round-Up and other weed/insect killer chemicals. The big box stores sell plants that are treated with neo-nics which kill insects indiscriminately.
What I’m trying to say is the decrease in birds is due to many factors. Predation by cats is not the main cause at all, but it’s a nifty excuse.
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I’m certainly no expert on pesticides, but it’s clear we’re only beginning to reckon with the consequences of their widespread use. There was just a new study tying the use of pesticides to drastic reductions in sperm count in humans and animals:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/15/health/sperm-damage-pesticides-wellness/index.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/global-decline-sperm-concentrations-linked-common-pesticides-rcna125164
As for the cat studies, I feel like a broken record, but if a lay person like me can read them and be shocked at how disingenuous they are, at how they’re shaped to support a pre-determined conclusion, I don’t understand how they were accepted in peer reviewed academic journals.
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I lived in a rural area from the 80s until recently and I watched those insect numbers plunge over the decades. No one in the immediate households used pesticides as it was an area of like-minded people, but use did occur close by. Like when they tried to kill the kudzu along the highway, but it came back.
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That’s something we can meet bird conservationists halfway on as cat caretakers, although it doesn’t change the fact that there are significant stray and feral populations.
When I read this stuff, I keep coming back to the same thought: There is no evidence, none whatsoever, that arbitrarily killing cats does anything to protect birds, and plenty of evidence that extirpating cats from an area just clears the way for other cats to move in. (In addition to overwhelming evidence that human meddling always creates problems.)
You would think that if conservationists are going to call for a “war on cats” and inflict widespread suffering on sentient animals who feel pain, anxiety and fear the same way we do, they would have evidence that killing cats has a measurable impact on bird populations. I mean, shouldn’t that be the absolute minimum when proposing an international effort to kill hundreds of millions of animals?
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Absolutely, I agree! Estimates and extrapolations aren’t evidence to me … Anyhoo about 2016 I did a post on these issues “Analysis of …” and there are lots of related links there and in comments. Many aren’t working or are now behind paywalls, but a few are. One that’s not there now (!) is about government poisoning of starlings in MA. Now behind a paywall, a NYT article about government killings of wildlife, and other related links.
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I get upset when my garden cat kills birds. Very rarely but it is called nature. And pesticides are also to blame. And what about the lakes of dead fish, ducks, etc? Are ferals to blame for this? It is the crap that people pour into the waters. There was a movie i saw with Mark Ruffalo. I think it was Dark Waters. No fish. Rarely any birds. True story. People were getting sick.
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Every year the WWF puts out a heartbreaking report about record wildlife loss and every year people ignore it, preferring to have the same old ideological arguments about climate change.
Are the comments displaying correctly for you? I’m not seeing them all display on my end and I got a message from someone who said the same thing.
WordPress is driving me crazy lately. I had to use two different browsers just to write and publish this post because the CMS won’t accept links in Firefox and won’t give me the option to select categories and tags in Opera.
I might have to bite the bullet and redesign the site since the template I used and modified for PITB hasn’t been updated in a long time, which may be part of the reason I’ve been having so many problems lately.
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Yes. My end is fine. Getting posts.
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Thanks
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The hysterical cat hate is terrifying. Poor cats, by no fault of their own, are being slaughtered due to overzealous cat haters. It’s humans that dump these cats and it’s humans that don’t spay or neuter them. There are articles written on a regular basis about all the supposed damage caused by cats which creates more hatred. The environmentalists and conservationists are not so virtuous afterall, are they? They ignore humans’ devastating habitats of wildlife by cutting down forests and paving over the land. It’s despicable that they treat animals so poorly when they are supposed to be protectors of animals.
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There’s definitely a weird idea in certain wildlife biology circles that nature can somehow be rebalanced by killing animals that aren’t “supposed to” live in a certain area or reach some arbitrary population figure.
There’s no data to support the idea that vigilantism solves any problems, and indeed, it doesn’t help with the direct results of construction, expansion, resultant habitat loss, etc.
I guess it’s easier to blame animals who can’t speak for themselves.
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It’s completely ridiculous to think that the loss in bird species can be attributed to cats. If cats could fly, maybe this argument would hold water. Otherwise it’s empty-headed BS that is going to go a long way toward what cats do kill – vermin, mostly – greatly proliferating.
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If they really think cats are responsible, they should do a real study, as in do the actual leg work and take on the difficult task of getting an accurate census. They won’t do that, and they don’t seem to be interested in cooperative measures like the D.C. Cat Count, which brought bird and cat lovers together to get an accurate idea of how many cats there are in the city and how to keep them from preying on birds.
Funny thing about that…the census they did in D.C., which was meticulously done with trail cameras, AI, human observation and other methods, concluded a very small number of cats were truly feral and were not pets or part of managed colonies. So the idea that ferals are running rampant and slaughtering birds, in D.C. at least, is not true.
If this is going to guide public policy and decide the fates of millions of animals, the least we can do is demand real science and census efforts.
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Perhaps it wasn’t a bird aficionado poisoning the cats. Maybe a local merchant who benefits from the tourism?
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