tasmania – Pain In The Bud

Earlier this week we noted an Australian celebrity chef’s enthusiasm for eating a “pussycat sandwhich,” but Maggie Beer isn’t the only famous Aussie who has raved about eating cats.

An Australian football (soccer) player, Tony Armstrong, spoke in glowing terms about eating cat meat in an interview with The Guardian a year ago, enthusing that it was “the yummiest.”

“We had it in the Western Desert and cooked it in a fire, wrapped in foil,” Armstrong told the newspaper. “It was like the most delicious rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had.”

Armstrong’s interviewer, Sian Cain, the Guardian’s deputy culture editor for Australia, didn’t bat an eye or consider the answer worthy of a follow-up question. She just moved on, asking him if rising early for “breakfast telly” was as difficult as keeping in shape for football.

Armstrong consumed the cat meat for his television show, Eat The Invaders, which casts it as an attempt to “turn our unwanted ecological trash into desirable culinary gold.”

That’s what the life of a cat is casually referred to in certain mainstream segments of Australian culture: “unwanted ecological trash.”

Armstrong and his castmates say they’re on a noble quest to eradicate invasive species by eating them.

As we noted in our post about Beer’s “pussycat sandwich,” the casual way this is talked about in Australia provides a window into the way some people there think about animal life in general and felines in particular.

Not all of them, of course. There are lots of people for whom the idea of eating intelligent companion animals is extremely disturbing. But the idea is widespread enough to make it onto mainstream Australian television without much of an uproar, undoubtedly because Australians are constantly told felines — not industrialization, pollution, pesticides, traffic collisions, man-made environmental hazards, and habitat loss — are almost solely responsible for declining populations of native fauna.

When the choice is between modifying our own behavior or blaming animals who cannot speak for themselves, it’s always easier to shift the blame than to, say, derail development projects or outlaw the use of harmful chemicals.

Just look at the decades-long controversy involving the weedkiller Roundup despite the damage it does to other plants, animals and the people working directly with the substance. Despite successful lawsuits on behalf of cancer patients and evidence that chemicals in the herbicide cause cancer, the EPA says it’s safe. Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides are widely used in Australia as well, but that fact is rarely raised in discussions about protecting native fauna and flora.

In a promo for Eating the Invaders, after blaming “colonial ancestors” for introducing non-native species and repeating the claim that cats kill 3 billion animals per year in Australia (an assertion for which there is no evidence), Armstrong casts himself as a crusader righting ecological wrongs.

“But what if we could help,” he asks in a voiceover, “by reimagining this problem as a tasty solution?”

In the series, Armstrong works with chef Vince Trim and “artist and curator” Kirsha Kaechele, who credits herself with staging “immersive feasts [that] transform invasive species into art.”

Armstrong, Kaechele and Trim. Credit: Eat The Invaders

Kaechele says she has no qualms about eating intelligent domesticated animals.

“In some cases you should and could eat it into eradication,” Kaechele says.

Just as there is no hard evidence that cats are the primary force behind species extinction, there is no data to support the idea that randomly killing and eating cats has any positive impact on species survival.

But eating cats isn’t just about saving the world, Kaechele explains. It’s about aesthetics as well.

“In these feasts,” she says, “every element has to be art.”

By that she means she fashions cutlery, centerpieces and containers from the deceased animals.

Kaechele is no stranger to controversy. As an amateur troll, she’s known for attention-grabbing stunts. She’s faced legal complaints for opening an Australian lounge/art gallery that admitted women only, “so men feel as excluded as possible,” and attended one of her subsequent hearings with 20 female supporters who dressed like her and moved in sync with her.

The appearance was “performance art,” she claimed. The judge disagreed, calling it a disrespectful display. Kaechele was also blamed for gentrifying a New Orleans neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina, snapping up and later allegedly abandoning five properties and allowing them to decay. They were subsequently taken over by squatters while Kaechele was MIA, presumably globetrotting and enlivening people’s drab existences by “transforming them into art.”

“Women are better than men in every respect,” Kaechele says in one video, echoing the provocateur Dick Masterson’s assertion that “men are better than women.”

The difference is that Masterson is a character created by a comedian. Whether individual people find his act amusing or not, Masterson performs for an audience of men and women who are well aware his schtick is tongue in cheek. Kaechele may or may not believe what she’s saying, but one thing she’s not doing is comedy. No one’s laughing.

She’s a deeply unserious person who shouldn’t be anywhere near any conversations about conservation.

As for Trim, he can’t bring himself to admit he’s cooking cats. To him, they’re no different than anything else in his fridge or pantry.

“It’s really exciting to be using a lot of these invasive ingredients that we have,” he said.

It’s one thing to consider the possibility that species like cats are signficant drivers of native species extinction, and another to prove they are measurable contributors compared to the hundreds of ways human behavior impacts animal life.

But you have to be really far up your own ass to keep a straight face while claiming you’re saving the world by eating cats, and even more divorced from reality to characterize it as a form of artistic expression.

Perhaps most concerning, telling people that cats are “yummy” could inspire others to try it for themselves, and turning it into a trend would be an entirely new level of barbarism.

Say what you will about people who participate in China’s infamous Yulin dog meat festival. At least they plainly admit they eat dogs and cats because they like the taste without clinging to any pretense that they’re creating high art or saving the planet.

Seventy nine cats.

That’s how many felines stood in for the entirely of the UK in a 2022 study, which is the genesis for the claim that cats kill 270 million birds and small animals in that country.

Using GPS collars, owner questionnaires and samples of prey brought home by those 79 outdoor cats, a research team from the University of Reading applied data from a mix of studies dating as far back as 23 years ago, extrapolated and massaged numbers using things like “kernel density estimates” and “generalized mixed models,” and came up with that 270 million figure, which is cited routinely and credulously by UK media.

Actually, their estimate was between 140 and 270 million. An earlier study put the number at 92 million, and a 2016 study estimated UK cats kill 55 million birds and small animals. That’s a range of 215 million!

The Reading team even quotes the infamous US meta-analysis that claims domestic cats kill as many as 4 billion birds and 22.3 billion mammals a year here. That paper, as skeptics in the science community have noted, has virtually no relationship with reality, involves no original research, and relies on data from unrelated studies and surveys in which cat owners were asked to rate their pets’ hunting prowess on a point scale while imagining what the little ones get up to when they’re outside.

All of this is to say that aside from the thorough, labor-intensive and expensive D.C. Cat Count, which brought together cat lovers, birders and scientists to work cooperatively, the 2022 UK study and its counterparts in the US and Australia are exercises in pushing an agenda masquerading as honest academic research.

That’s how we get editorials like The Spectator’s “We need a cat lockdown now” by Zoe Strimpel. Though the tone isn’t tongue in cheek, I can’t imagine Strimpel dislikes cats nearly as much as she claims, and the post was probably written with wry anticipation for the click-generating fury of cat lovers indignantly sharing it on Facebook and X.

Still, it quotes the Reading study without skepticism and portrays cats as furry little wretches who abuse their human caretakers with their claws and their disdain while gleefully eating their way through endangered birds.

A cat stares down a mouse. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Cats are predators, that much we can agree on, and outdoor cats are much more likely to negatively impact local wildlife, for obvious reasons.

Likewise, I can understand the concern with cat culture in the UK, where allowing pet cats to roam outside is the norm.

But every time the media cites the above-mentioned studies, more people are given an inaccurate impression of feline ecological impact, and more lawmakers at the local and national level consider “solutions” ranging from prohibiting people from keeping pet cats, as a government commission in Scotland recently proposed, or exterminating them outright, as some Australian states and municipalities in New Zealand have tried to do.

It’s worth pointing out that there is no data, not even a single study, showing that air-dropping poisoned sausages or arbitrarily shooting cats actually has any positive impact on birds and small mammals. All it does is terrorize sentient, intelligent domestic animals who have real emotions and experience real fear and pain.

The primary drivers of declining bird and small mammal populations — including habitat loss, environmental destruction, wind turbines and glass buildings — have nothing to do with cats. We have killed off 73 percent of the planet’s wildlife since 1970 and every species of iconic megafauna — from orangutans and gorillas to tigers and pangolins — is headed toward extinction. Are domestic cats responsible for that too, or can we be adults and fess up to our role as the main antagonist here?

An orange tabby and a mouse. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Strimpel actually goes even further, claiming cats don’t have real affection for their caretakers and are more like psychopaths, faking love because it gets them what they want, primarily food and shelter.

Dogs have true affection for their humans but cats do not, she additionally claims, while adding that cat people are undateable because they share qualities with the “loutish and numerous creatures” they care for.

There was a time when I would have been ambivalent about Strimpel’s attitude toward cats, if not her cavalier treatment of basic facts. But then a drool-happy, friendly tuxedo cat showed me I could interact with his species without my allergies going haywire, and a tiny gray tabby kitten became my animal cognition teacher while blindsiding me with love.

Now every time I hear about some psychopath abusing cats, or terribly misguided politicians advocating a plan to kill millions of domestic felines, I think about my Bud. I think about how he cries for his Big Buddy when he’s hurt or stuck, how he meows and trills with excitement when he experiences something new, and how he began shaking, then threw up from overwhelming relief and happiness the first time I returned from a vacation after adopting him.

Buddy the Cat chillin’ on the balcony in the summer. Credit: PITB

He’s got a vibrant mind in his little head, with strong opinions and emotions. So does every cat on the street, in a shelter cage, and in the cross hairs of a birder or biologist playing God by “culling” or “harvesting” cats to protect another species.

Real science, not activism packaged as science, has proven that many times over in recent years. If people want to do harm to cats because they think birds and other animals will benefit, the burden of proof is on them to show not only that their methods work, but that the results could somehow justify the fear and misery they would inflict on innocent animals to achieve their goals.

Cats are obligate carnivores who don’t have a choice. We do.