Australian nativists are employing a new weapon in their war against cats. It is a laser-sighted device that sprays cats with a lethal gel that they lick off while cleaning themselves. The gel causes the cats to die from anoxia (oxygen deprivation). They suffocate. “All poisoned cats captured on video were initially lethargic, then had difficulty walking (ataxia) before lying down and remaining largely motionless.” It can take anywhere from a few hours to several days before they die.
In addition to this high-tech cruelty, nativists also employ traditional, but no less barbaric, methods to kill cats:
- “Long after midnight, as the truck turned back toward the farmhouses, and the men shot their fifth or sixth cat, Mark W. opened one up to find that it had been carrying five kittens that were close to term. Their skin was translucent and velvety, and when he took them out of the cat, they made their first noises. ‘Five little killers,’ he said.. he used a knife to cut their heads off.'”
- “[R]eleasing an arrow never felt so good,” one bowhunter wrote on Facebook next to a photo of a dead cat:”
- “They were the first feral cats he had ever killed, and when he took photos to commemorate the event, which he later posted on Instagram, he posed just as he did with his other hunting trophies: gripping his compound bow on one side, holding up the dead cats by their tails and grinning into the camera.”
It is morally repugnant and scientifically bankrupt.
Each species on Earth, writes Professor Ken Thompson, “has a characteristic distribution on the Earth’s land surface: But in every case, that distribution is in practice a single frame from a very long movie. Run the clock back only 10,000 years, less than a blink of an eye in geological time, and nearly all of those distributions would be different, in many cases very different. Go back only 10 million years, still a tiny fraction of the history of life on Earth, and any comparison with present-day distributions becomes impossible, since most of the species themselves would no longer be the same.” The geographic and fossil records tell us that there is but one constant to life on Earth, and that is change.
And not only does removing one species to allegedly help another not work as a meta-analysis of every published study concluded, but those calling for the removal of cats because they claim they are “non-native” are guilty of the most pernicious hypocrisy.
They, too, are “non-native” to Australia. They belong to a species that is the most “invasive” the planet has ever experienced, causing virtually all of the environmental destruction, including the tragic decline of birds. Yet for reasons based entirely on narrow self-interest, they do not hold their own actions to the same standards which they impose upon cats: they do not force themselves to live exclusively indoors, they do not pack up and move back to the continent where humans first evolved, and they do not stop killing and eating other creatures.
Moreover, “non-native” and “invasive species” are the language of intolerance, based on an idea most of us have rejected in our treatment of our fellow human beings — that the value of a living being can be reduced merely to its place of ancestral origin.
Proponents of the cat slaughter try to legitimize the mass killing under the false mantel of “environmentalism.” But the environmental movement was founded to protect animals and plants from chainsaws, traps, poisons, and guns. By contrast, Invasion Biology, which is the core belief system fueling the mass killing, turns that on its head: using those very things against animals and plants.
As much as it pretends to be, Invasion Biology is not science, it is philosophy — and a particularly violent one. In the neighborhood of bad ideas, it is one of the most ramshackle houses on the street.
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