Police say foxes are responsible for killing cats in London, but animal welfare activists insist there is indisputable evidence of human cruelty.
It’s difficult to know what to make of the Croydon cat killer story.
Initially, people from London-area cat rescues said they were looking for a person who had mutilated dozens of cats in the South London area. As the number increased to more than 100 and public outrage became palpable, police opened an investigation.
The story was wild. Newspapers bandied about disturbing figures, claiming hundreds of cats mutilated at the hands of a sick individual or several people. There were reports of feline remains artfully arranged in the driveways and on the front steps of victims’ homes to inflict maximum trauma on the people who discovered them, with allegedly clean cuts indicating a human with a blade was responsible.
Then in 2021, the Metropolitan Police announced they were closing their case after three years and almost $200,000 spent.
Foxes, not cruel humans, were responsible for the cat killings, they said. A study in the journal Veterinary Pathology found fox DNA on the corpses of 32 cats and said puncture wounds on the feline bodies were consistent with fox bites.
London-area animal rescues disputed the findings, saying the study couldn’t account for the mutilation of so many animals. The study’s authors blamed “badly behaved foxes” who were scavenging on the remains of strays and pets killed in traffic or by ingesting antifreeze.
Credit: Fajer u015eehirli/Pexels
Lots of other people refused to accept the Metropolitan Police conclusion, including people whose cats had been victimized. In some of those cases, veterinarians concluded the cats were killed by humans, not animals.
Which brings us to now.
The Mirror has teamed up with the South London Animal Rights Network (SLAIN) to create an interactive map showing the locations where more than 1,000 dead cats were found over the past several years.
“This map shows where incidents have occurred but also and perhaps just as important, where incidents have never happened,” SLAIN’s Boudicca Rising told the paper. “If you know of someone who made journeys to these locations on these dates please do get in touch with us. All information will be treated in the strictest of confidence.”
Documents obtained by journalists in London indicate there was internal tension at the Metropolitan Police over the resources that had been allocated to the cat case, and spokesperson for the force admitted that was a consideration. But the department stands by its assessment and says there’s no evidence a serial cat killer is on the loose.
It’s difficult to believe someone or a group of people could evade capture while allegedly killing more than 1,000 cats since 2015, especially in a city like London where CCTV cameras blanket most neighborhoods.
There are an estimated one million CCTV cameras covering 607 square miles of London, and the commonly-cited statistic claims Londoners are caught on CCTV cameras an average of 300 times per day. Other estimates claim that number is too high, and the average UK citizen is spotted on a municipal surveillance camera 70 times a day.
Notably, those figures do not include private cameras like Ring systems and surveillance operated by private businesses. The point is, it’s very difficult to avoid cameras in London, and if there are human feline killers out there, they must know an awful lot about where the cameras are.
If the phantom cat-killers are real, not only have they been able to avoid appearing on surveillance, they’ve evaded the watchful eyes of neighbors as the story circulated widely in the press. The theory that the killings were the work of animals, mostly under the cover of night and beneath the notice of people, sounded more plausible to many people.
Still, the theory doesn’t neatly fit the evidence.
Not all veterinarians agree that foxes are the culprit. While the veterinary pathologists who authored the study looked at photographs of the mutilated felines, some veterinarians who directly examined the bodies of slain cats concluded they were killed with blades. When experts are at odds over evidence, what can you do but gather more information and hope for the best?
London may have to do what Washington, D.C. did and deploy low-to-the-ground trail cameras and regular surveillance cameras around the city. In Washington, the goal was to get an accurate census on the number of strays and ferals living within city limits. In London, a census could be a bonus as they finally get an answer to the question of who’s been killing all those cats.
Mankind’s achievements in space came at the expense of dogs, cats and non-human primates, who were sent into orbit during the early days of the space race.
I’ve been watching Apple TV’s exceptional show, For All Mankind, which dramatizes the space race of the 1960s and beyond in a sort of alternate history where the Soviets, not Americans, first lay boots on the lunar regolith.
That loss lights a fire underneath the behinds of the people at NASA and convinces American politicians that the space race is the ultimate measure of our civilization. In real life, American ingenuity and the creativity fostered by a free society allowed the US to leap ahead and “win” the space race. Space missions were already becoming routine by the time the drama of Apollo 13 briefly rekindled public interest.
Then the Soviet space program faded, the competition turned one-sided, and without an arch-enemy to show up, American politicians pulled back NASA’s funding to a fraction of what it once was, where it remains today. That’s why the rise of the private space industry — Elon Musks’s Space X, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, etc — will almost certainly be our ticket to Mars.
But in For All Mankind, NASA remains the budgetary behemoth and source of prestige it was in the 60s and 70s, leading to the development of a permanent moon base, lunar mining operations and a planned mission to the red planet.
There’s a quiet moment in the second season when a Soviet cosmonaut, visiting the US as part of a peacekeeping mission, shares a drink in a dive bar with an American astronaut.
“Do you like dog?” the cosmonaut asks.
“Dogs?” the astronaut replies. “Of course. Who doesn’t like dogs?”
The Soviet shakes his head.
“No, dog,” he tells her. “Laika.”
Laika was the first dog in space, or more accurately, the first dog the Soviets acknowledged sending into space. (The Soviets didn’t acknowledge their failures, and we can only guess at the number of lost cosmonauts and animals officially denied by the Russians, drifting in space for eternity or disintegrated in atmospheric re-entry.)
Laika, also nicknamed Muttnick, wanted to please the humans who had taken her in, and didn’t understand that her trip would be one way. (Historical photo)
The moment turns somber as the cosmonaut recalls the Moscow street dog who was selected because she was docile, fearless and could handle the incredible noise and g-forces of a rocket launch.
“I held her in my arms,” the cosmonaut tells his American counterpart, taking a sip of his Jack Daniel’s. “For only one or two minutes on the launchpad.”
Then he leans in and tells her the truth: Laika didn’t triumphantly orbit the Earth for seven days in 1957 as the Soviet Union told the world. She didn’t endure the mission.
She perished, alone and afraid, just hours after launch when her capsule overheated.
The Soviets never designed the Sputnik 2, Laika’s ship, to return to Earth safely. Her death was predetermined.
We laud astronauts and cosmonauts, the brave men and women who willingly strap themselves into tiny capsules attached to cylinders of rocket fuel the size of skyscrapers and depart this Earth via brute force, knowing something could go wrong and their lives could end before they realize what’s happening. We should admire them. Their accomplishments are all the more impressive when you consider the fact that the combined processing power of every computer at NASA’s disposal in the 1960s was but a fraction of what we each hold in our hands these days when we use our smartphones.
Those first astronauts and cosmonauts were extraordinarily brave — but only up to a point.
Unwilling to risk human lives in the early days of space exploration, space programs used dogs, cats and later monkeys and apes, strapping them into confined spaces, wiring their brains with electrodes for telemetry data, poring over the information they gleaned about their heart rates, blood pressure and breathing as they left our home planet.
The sad eyes of a stray dog, separated from everyone she loved, were the first to behold Earth from space. A few years later the eyes of a French street cat took in the same view before humans did.
Felicette couldn’t move when she was placed into the capsule that took her to space and back.
Felicette, the tuxedo cat who was launched into space by the French on Oct. 18, 1963, didn’t even have a name until the French recovered her capsule and took her back for examination.
The scientists and engineers in charge of the launch didn’t want to humanize her if she didn’t make it, which was a common practice in space programs. (Ham, the chimpanzee sent into space by NASA in January of 1961, was known as No. 65 until his successful recovery. NASA was worried that a name would make him more sympathetic and lead to bad press if the chimpanzee died during the mission.)
Ham the chimpanzee was little more than a baby. Credit: NASA archives
Despite Felicette’s endurance and successful return, French scientists repaid her bravery by euthanizing her a month later so they could study her brain and learn more about the effects of spaceflight on mammalian biology.
Felicette, like Laika and Ham, was never given a choice. Those animals, with their child-like mental capacity, endured their missions out of a desire to please their human caretakers as much as any natural stoicism they may have possessed.
Would we do the same thing today? Will we repeat those experiments as we set our eyes on Mars?
Consider that the moon is a three day trip, and it’s close enough to Earth’s magnetic field to protect living beings from radiation. Mars is at least a seven month trip if the orbital conditions are right, and there will be no protection from radiation aside from what can be built into the craft. Take that trip without adequate protection and you’re guaranteed to get cancer.
It’s easy to say we wouldn’t make animals our test subjects for a Mars journey, and NASA now has decades of data on the effects of space and zero gravity thanks to the International Space Station.
And yet Neuralink, another company owned by Elon Musk, currently uses monkeys to test its brain interface technology, which allows the primates to operate computers with their thoughts. Those monkeys are forced to endure radical surgery to implant microchips in their brains. The teams working on the technology say suffering by those animals will be worth it as people with paralysis are able to do things with their thoughts and regain a measure of independence, increasing their quality of life.
Likewise, it will probably be an animal, or animals, who will be the test subjects on board craft that first venture beyond the Earth’s protective magnetosphere. Scientists and engineers will do their best to create a vessel that shields its occupants from harmful radiation, but they won’t know how successful they’ve been until the test subjects are returned to Earth and their dosimeters have been examined.
Will an astronaut volunteer for that kind of mission, knowing the “reward” could be a drastically shortened life?
Felicette pictured on commemorative stamps.
Felicette, left, was just one of several cats considered for the launch by French scientists.
To hear Musk and futurists tell it, pushing toward Mars is not just a matter of exploration or aspiration, but is necessary for the survival of our species. Earth becoming uninhabitable, they say, is an eventuality, not an if.
Others point out it’s much easier and wiser to pour our resources into preserving the paradise we do have, and the creatures who live in it, rather than banking on a miserable future existence on Mars where society will have to live underground and gravity, at 0.375 that of Earth, will change the human form in just a few generations.
To put it bluntly, while Musk and futurists look at life on Mars through the rose-colored glasses of science fiction fans, in reality living there is going to thoroughly suck.
If people do live on Mars they’ll never venture outside without a suit, never feel the sun on their skin, never swim in an ocean. They’ll never have another backyard barbecue, watch fireworks light up the sky on the fourth of July, or fall asleep to the gentle rain and crickets of warm summer nights. They’ll never hear birdsong or have the opportunity to see iconic animals like elephants and lions. Every gulp of air will be recycled, every glass of water will have passed through the kidneys of others. There will never be snow. Circadian rhythms will be untethered from the cycle that governed human biology for the 200,000 years our species has existed.
And while there could be a future — if you want to call it that — for people on Mars, there won’t be a future there for the rest of the living creatures on Earth.
As a lifelong fan of science fiction who devours SF novels, counts films like Alien and Bladerunner among my favorites, and is fascinated by shows like For All Mankind, The Peripheral and Star Trek, I understand the appeal of space and the indomitable human spirit that drives us to new frontiers. I just hope we can balance that with respect for the Earth and the animals we share it with. Let’s hope there is never another Laika, Felicette or Ham.
Correction: For All Mankind is the name of the Apple TV series about an alternate history space race. The first reference to the show’s name was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.
A close-up of Felicette’s face. Credit: French government archivesHam the Space Chimp waits for his apple reward. Credit: NASA archives
What does it mean to “own” a cat? If you believe a cat is neglected, can you take custody? As UK law changes, those questions need answers.
For the second time this week, two people are fighting over a cat after the original “owner” received a request from a microchip company to confirm another person’s claim on the feline.
Charlotte Sawyer of Swindon, a town in southwest England, told her local newspaper she was livid when she got the request to sign over her claim to one-year-old Oreo.
“I can’t believe the audacity of this person trying to steal our beautiful cat,” she told the Swindon Advertiser.
But Sawyer readily admitted Oreo was going out for days and sometimes weeks at a time before returning home, and she hasn’t seen him for four months now.
Charlotte Sawyer, left, with her cat Oreo and a pet rabbit. Sawyer’s daughter, right, with Oreo. Credit: Charlotte Sawyer via Swindon Advertiser
Like many cats in the UK, Oreo not only had access to the outdoors, he was accustomed to coming and going as he pleased. Other families were feeding him, and it’s likely he made the rounds among several houses before returning home. Because “home” is a nebulous concept in this instance, it’s not the first time someone has asked Sawyer to relinquish custody of Oreo.
“A woman claiming to be someone who looks for missing cats once knocked on my door and handed me a form asking for permission to change Oreo’s microchip,” Sawyer said. “I wanted to rip it up, I was furious, and told her he was my cat. Now it’s happened again. At least it’s provided some reassurance that he’s still alive.”
While I feel for anyone who loses a pet, I don’t know how someone who truly loves a cat can accept the kitty being gone for days or weeks at a time, not knowing if he’s in danger, hurt or still breathing. That kind of arrangement isn’t in the cat’s best interests, and it’s not compatible with our responsibility to ensure the welfare of our four-legged friends, an obligation all of us take on when we adopt our pets.
The people who encountered Oreo likely thought he was a stray or an abandoned former pet. If they’re requesting a change to microchip registration, it probably means they spent their own money to take the little guy to the vet, where the chip was discovered and scanned.
This is emphatically not a blanket criticism of UK norms regarding outdoor access, by the way. Americans cannot claim moral superiority. In the past week or so we’ve had a Pennsylvania man kill a cat with a blow dart because the feline “was trying to kill my birds,” a vulgar approximation of a human being in New Jersey “repeatedly raped” his pet cat before torturing her to death, and some deranged lunatic in Florida used a cat as target practice, leaving 30 pellets lodged in the innocent animal’s little body.
That represents a tiny fraction of the cat abuse stories from the last 10 days and I’ve omitted the worsted examples because I know we have readers who can’t handle this stuff. (I can’t either, which is why I paused my Google News alerts for most of the past two weeks.)
My point here is not to shock. It’s to underscore the fact that we have absolutely no moral authority when it comes to telling people in other countries how to care for animals.
A cat exploring outdoors. Credit: Openverse
Moral authority concerns aside, the two examples of ownership claims by microchip this week raise important questions about the definition of “ownership” and what it means to properly care for a cat.
Like many cat lovers I don’t like the term “owner” and I describe myself as a caretaker, but where the law is concerned, ownership is important concept because it determines who has claim over the animal. The law views cats and dogs as property, whether we like it or not. That’s why animal welfare statutes fall under agriculture and markets law in many US states instead of the criminal code, and it’s why so many of those laws need updating.
Cat culture across the Atlantic is different in that the majority of people who have cats believe our furry friends must have access to the outdoors to live a complete, fulfilled life. In the US, 63 percent of cat caretakers keep their felines strictly indoors, while in the UK it’s virtually the opposite, with 70 percent allowing cats to roam outdoors. Not all definitions of outdoor access are equal: Some people allow only supervised outdoor time in the backyard (or “garden”), some make sure their kitties are safely indoors by nightfall, while others have cats who return at their own whim.
There are also differences regarding geography, traffic density, the prevalence of natural predators and the nature of city life that account for how much outdoor access they allow their cats.
As the UK sets a June 2024 date for the mandatory microchipping of pet cats, disputes like this are going to become more common, which means people would be wise to make sure their cats’ microchips have up-to-date information and have readily available proof that they own their felines. If cat owners don’t establish the criteria for what it means to “own” a feline, the government will.
Cat hatred is driven in large part by bunk science authored by researchers who approach their work with predetermined conclusions.
After news of a now-canceled children’s cat hunting contest made international headlines this week, the usual suspects came out of the woodwork with wild, unsupported claims that cats — not humans, not human industrial processes, not human-driven habitat loss, wind farms or agricultural pesticides — are singlehandedly responsible for wiping out New Zealand’s native birds and the extinction of an arbitrary number of avian species.
One of the people leading the charge is Helen Blackie, a “biosecurity expert” who told the BBC that cats are responsible for the extinction of six native bird species in New Zealand.
Blackie doesn’t say where she got that information, but noted cat-hating Kiwi Gareth Morgan’s site claims that cats have killed nine native bird species, and attributes the information to a study, “A global review of the impacts of invasive cats on island endangered vertebrates.”
The “study” was published by academics in Spain and California without boots on the ground in New Zealand and is not actually a study at all. It’s a meta-analysis of prior studies, none of which count the number of feral, stray and pet cats in New Zealand, nor do they offer anything resembling a measure of how many birds are actually killed by cats.
Notably, the study does not say cats are responsible for the extinction of nine bird species.
Credit: Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz/Pexels
Much like their US bird-conservationist counterparts, the authors of the study cannot say how many cats actually live in New Zealand and have no observational data about feline predatory habits.
They rely on the same methods the US studies do, which is to say they collect data from unrelated research — including a paper measuring the impact of all predators on wildlife in the aftermath of wild fires in urban environments, a report on the way pet cat personalities impact how their owners view them, and a study on cat behavior in Culver City, California — stir the data into a pot of numbers, and massage the numbers until they get the desired results.
In this case, the “desired results” are any suitably impressive-sounding figure for the total number of native birds killed by cats in New Zealand. The authors aren’t conducting a scientific investigation to find out how those native birds died, they’ve already decided that cats are the reason and they’re misrepresenting data from unrelated studies to support that conclusion. That is not science.
Of course their conclusion has no basis in reality. How is it possible that a bunch of researchers on entirely different continents are able to come up with accurate figures on cat predation in New Zealand without any actual data about cats in New Zealand, without a population count of cats in New Zealand, and without a single observational study to draw information from?
How does a study of coyote and cat interactions in Culver City, California have any bearing on cats killing birds in New Zealand, an island country 6,700 miles away with habitats that bear little or no resemblance to California? Coyotes don’t even exist in New Zealand!
How does a self-reported questionnaire about the personalities of pet cats by American cat owners tell researchers anything about the behavior of feral cats in rural New Zealand?
How does a study about the Persian squirrel on Greek island ecosystems tell a research team anything about the impact of cats on flightless birds in a completely different environment, in a different part of the world, with different types of trees and cover, different native fauna and weather systems?
How does a study of alpine ecosystems inform estimates of cat predation in the temperate and subtropical ecosystems of Aotearoa?
Credit: Boys in Bristol Photography/Pexels
This is not science
This sort of buffet-style, cherry-picking nonsense wouldn’t pass muster in an undergraduate class in the hard sciences, yet somehow it’s not only published in peer-reviewed conservation journals, it’s reported breathlessly and credulously by reporters at outlets like NPR, the BBC and the Guardian, who don’t even bother to read beyond the abstract.
The claims are further undermined by their inexplicable assertion that feral cats and domestic cats are not the same thing, when in fact they are the same species: felis catus. Advocates of cat hunting in New Zealand fret that it’s impossible to tell if cats are feral or pets, not understanding that they are indistinguishable because they are the same. The only difference is that house cats have homes and ferals do not.
No one is claiming that cats don’t have an impact on the environment. It would be foolish to think they don’t.
But if anyone — especially journalists with influential platforms and researchers cloaked in authority thanks to the veneer of real science — wants to make the case that cats are the primary force leading to declining numbers of native bird populations, then the burden of proof is on them, and it’s a high one.
We’re talking about life here, the lives of fully sentient animals with their own rich internal thoughts and feelings. You don’t just casually call for their extirpation or send children off with rifles to arbitrarily shoot them like little serial killers in training.
If you want to make the case, do the work. Get the grants. Hire the personnel. Do it right. The Washington, D.C. Cat Count even has a free toolkit for other communities to conduct their own feline census, so they can make informed decisions. But if you’re unwilling or unable to do the work, then stop spreading misinformation, because it has tragic consequences for real-world animals, and their blood is on your hands.
Cats are blamed, to the exclusion of almost all other factors, for the decline in native bird populations in New Zealand.
A New Zealand group canceled a cat-hunting competition for kids after receiving massive backlash for the plan, but one Kiwi journalist told a national audience he thinks the cat hunt is a great idea and doesn’t go far enough.
“When it comes to feeral kets, I’m on the soide of the kea, the kākāpō and the kiwi ivery sangle doy of the week and my missige to [the organizers] is ‘Git the competition back on, git the keds back out thea,'” said the vowel-desecrating morning show host Patrick Gower. “If thea gonna hunt and thea’s feeral kets in the way, then we hif to woipe them out. Feeral kets need to be shot, they need to be run ovah, they need to be trepped, they need to be woiped off the foice of Aotearoa and I imploah the school to git it back on, and look, I’ll put up some rewoade as well foah any kets these kids git down theah as well.”
English translation: “I think the cat-killing contest is a wonderful idea, cats need to be shot, run over and exterminated from New Zealand, and I hate cats so much that I’ll put up some of my own money as prizes for the children who bag the most kills.”
You’ve got to wonder what cats have done to Patrick Gower for him to hate them so much, and fortunately dear readers, PITB has the answer!
Gower lost the New Zealander of the Year competition of 2020 to a cute orange tabby named Mittens.
Think about that: All those years of doing Pulitzer-worthy breakfast show kitchen demonstrations, of slaving away at the anchor desk bringing viewers important news about reality TV stars and parroting former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration that New Zealand’s government is “the single source of truth” on COVID, and Gower loses the honor to a damn cat. Mittens even has the key to the City of Wellington, and Gower does not.
So sad.
Mittens receiving honors that have eluded morning show host Patrick Gower. Credit: Wellington City Council
It’s unfortunate when a man in influential position, small country or not, enthusiastically encourages children to practice being future serial killers by slaughtering innocent animals because he thinks — despite the complete absence of evidence — that arbitrarily gunning down and running over sentient animals will save birds.
Really, you’d think before calling for the extirpation of an entire species of animal that these people would have something, even a single bogus research study, claiming that bird populations would recover if only people started killing cats on sight.
But no such proof exists, and the burden of proof rests with Gower, fellow Kiwi cat-hater Gareth Morgan and others who harbor an irrational and ill-advised hatred of tiny animals who are simply behaving the way nature designed them to behave.
What we do know is that managing cat populations can be done, but it’s difficult, time-consuming work that requires dedication and patience.
Cities like Washington, D.C., with its exhaustive cat count, and communities across the US have provided the blueprint with TNR efforts and a mass push for all pet owners to spay and neuter their cats. The results have been remarkable, and shelters save more than a million felines a year compared to just a decade ago. There’s still work to be done to bring the number of euthanizations down to zero.
Gower
It’s also worth noting that the organizers of the North Canterbury Hunting Competition and supporters like Gower are coming from a place of ignorance. In their original, now-deleted announcement, the organizers offered a “guide” to telling the difference between feral and pet cats, unaware that they are the same species. The only difference is that pet cats are fortunate enough to have homes, and strays and ferals do not.
The group said it was offering its “guide” as a way to prevent children from killing pet cats, but how exactly would they do that when a pet is indistinguishable from a colony stray or a feral? Would they find a microchip on the corpse of a cat they killed and say “Oops, guess that one doesn’t count!”?
Does a cat somehow feel less if it doesn’t have a home? Is its life worth less if it doesn’t have a collar and eat from a bowl?
It’s barbaric and so poorly thought-out, it really boggles the mind that the idea of a cat-killing competition for kids was voiced, let alone approved, planned and promoted by supposed adults.
As for the contest itself, we’re very glad it’s been called off, even if the organizers want to play victim and say their feelings have been hurt by the response to their murderous event.
That, however, doesn’t solve the problem. The fact that the organizers thought this was a good idea in the first place, and the increasingly pitched rhetoric from the likes of Gower and Morgan, are normalizing the idea of slaughtering innocent animals who have their own minds, thoughts and feelings, and who have been shaped by 10,000 years of history to live with and depend on humans.
Instead of calling for blood and whipping people into a frenzy, influential New Zealanders should read about cats and animal cognition in general, so they’re aware that felines experience the full range of primary and secondary emotions and are very much capable of suffering the same way we do when we’re injured, stressed and our lives are in danger.
That, unlike claims that cats are primarily responsible for the decline in bird populations, is hard scientific fact. We can peer into the brains of felines, watch their neurons fire, see different brain regions light up as they think specific thoughts and respond to specific smells and sights.
Maybe if people who hate cats understand what they are, they’ll feel some empathy for a beautiful species, animals who have been companions and literal life savers to humans since before deepest antiquity, animals whose lives have intrinsic value regardless of what they mean to us. At the very least, we owe them that.
Pain In The Bud 