ARIE TROUWBORST wasn’t expecting death threats when he published last November. An environmental law specialist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Trouwborst and Han Somsen, also at Tilburg University, had argued that cat owners across the European Union could be prosecuted under existing law for allowing their pets to hunt. “I routinely address controversial topics like wolf management and trophy hunting, but they all pale when compared to the vicious reactions this received,” he says.
It is the latest episode in the ongoing . From New Zealand and Australia to the US and Europe, cat owners and conservationists are pitted against each other as a growing body of research finds cats guilty of killing wildlife and squeezing out native rivals. One headline-grabbing report, for example, estimated that free-ranging domestic cats and 6.3 billion small mammals each year in the US alone. Another study found that pet cats in the Netherlands kill almost twice as many animals as their feral counterparts.
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Emotions are running high, and the angrier conservationists become, the more cat owners dig in. But there could be a better way. “I get quite sick of the conflict focus of some conservation biologists,” says Wayne Linklater at California State University, Sacramento. “The solutions lie with the people who care most about cats, not with the people who don’t care about them.” To that end, he and a few other social scientists are studying cat owners themselves to find out what would motivate them to change their – and their cats’ – behaviour.
Nobody doubts that cats kill wildlife: it is in their nature to hunt (see “Are cats really domesticated?“). Yet even experts can’t agree on how significant the problem is. The UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, for instance, says there is evidence that cats probably prioritise weak or sickly birds that . What is clear is the scale of the issue: cats are humanity’s , with 373 million kept worldwide. If their hunting is to be reduced, wildlife advocates need to persuade cat owners to curb their furry companions’ pursuit of prey.
The chasm between cat owners and conservationists becomes apparent when you ask for their views on measures to reduce hunting by cats. That is exactly what Linklater did in New Zealand, working with Edith MacDonald at the country’s Department of Conservation among others. They first asked conservationists to . Top of their list was keeping cats indoors 24/7, followed by other restrictions such as fencing in the garden. At the bottom was neutering, registration and, finally, microchipping. They then asked vets and owners to rank the same interventions based on cat welfare and acceptability, respectively. They placed them in almost the opposite order.
“Free-ranging pet cats kill almost twice as many animals as their feral counterparts”
These polarised views lie at the heart of the cat wars. For the researchers, exposing them was the first step in finding a solution. Social scientists know that if you want to change people’s behaviour, you need to understand your audience and the things they care about. Evidence from interventions in areas such as public health shows that people are more likely to change if they like the new idea, think it is feasible and think others already do it or should be doing it. With this in mind, MacDonald, Linklater and their colleagues decided to use a technique called behaviour prioritisation to identify the intervention most likely to be considered acceptable by cat owners and effective by conservationists.
Their calculations, based on the weighting that both groups assigned to each of the nine alternatives, revealed a nightly cat curfew to be the best compromise. However, in , the team found that only 14 per cent of people who implement a nightly curfew do so to safeguard wildlife. The vast majority cited reasons such as keeping their pets safe or comfortable or increasing family happiness. They also said they respected the opinions of vets and relatives but not MacDonald’s government department or even New Zealand’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Armed with these findings, the researchers designed two pamphlets. From one beams a pig-tailed girl clutching a luxurious cat. “I love it when Fluffy sleeps on my bed,” she says. “Bring your cat in at night.” There is no mention of macerated geckos or dwindling kiwi populations. A vet gazes out from the second pamphlet. “Keep Fluffy safe from cars. Bring your cat in at night,” he says. The team handed out the pamphlets at vet surgeries in four cities, including Wellington and Auckland, as part of a survey and gave a control group an unrelated brochure.
Six weeks later, the researchers spoke to the participants again. Spring had arrived and those in the control group were letting their cats out 10 per cent more at night than before. But the group that received the pamphlet featuring a vet hadn’t increased nightly forays, and those that received the one featuring a little girl had reduced night-time cat releases by 10 per cent. MacDonald is delighted by the findings, which haven’t yet been published, pointing out that behaviour is notoriously difficult to change. What’s more, the team’s insights have been used by several city councils in New Zealand and incorporated into the country’s National Cat Management Strategy. “Never demonise cat owners,” says Macdonald. “They love their animals and they love nature. But if you make them choose, they will most likely choose their cat.”
Natural order
Another way to coax people to change their behaviour is to better understand what motivates it in the first place. In Australia, Lynette McLeod at the University of New England and her colleagues successfully used behavioural science to help implement campaigns to curtail or remove domestic cats from islands. They found that a , perceived norms and practical constraints led people to let their cats out of the house. Solutions, therefore, needed to be tailored. For example, if cat owners believed their pets must roam to be happy – as many did – they were shown videos of happy cats thriving indoors. Those who “just didn’t know how to do it”, meanwhile, were given the know-how and kit to contain their cats and to enrich their home. It is a question of finding the right button to push, says McLeod. “Just giving people information is not going to make them change their mind.”
“Cat owners love their animals and nature. But if you make them choose, they will probably choose the cat”
Researchers in the UK are also trying to get inside the brains of cat owners, in an attempt to head off cat wars before they become acrimonious. Working with the UK charity SongBird Survival, social scientist Sarah Crowley at the University of Exeter and her colleagues have carried out numerous consultations with cat owners. The same beliefs keep coming to the fore: hunting is natural, preventing it is wrong and not much can be done to stop it anyhow. Yet the ambiguity in these ideas can be highlighted with deeper discussion, says Crowley. Even the word “natural” can have two different meanings when applied to cats . As innate behaviour, hunting is natural – but as part of the local ecosystem, domestic cats can be seen as an unnatural introduction, whose large numbers distort the “natural” balance.
Crowley’s team is also exploring potential ways to decrease hunting with cat owners. These include the use of brightly coloured ruffs, meatier cat food, prey-mimicking puzzle balls and owners playing indoors with their cats to relieve domestic tedium. Crucially, it isn’t just the cats being studied – the owners’ views on the workability of different options will influence what the scientists finally recommend.
Linklater acknowledges that these sorts of approaches are slow and only achieve a modest intervention for a small percentage of owners. The power lies in incrementalism, he says. “Once you have cat owners engaged, then they are more likely to want to do the next thing, and then the next thing.” In parts of Australia, he points out, night curfews are increasingly accepted and the conversation has moved on to 24-hour confinement.
Another believer in incrementalism is Grant Sizemore, who runs the Cats Indoors programme for the American Bird Conservancy. The campaign aims to “create a social norm that can be reinforced over the years”, he says. The main tool is asking owners to sign a . Sizemore admits that he doesn’t know whether the 5000 owners who have signed up so far are complying. However, MacDonald’s research shows that owners who make a public commitment are more likely to carry it out.
Sizemore encourages pledgers with regular emails and interviews with cat influencers, such as The American Bird Conservancy also promotes kit such as , called catios, backpacks and leashes.
Cat owners are starting to change their behaviour, but Trouwborst worries that change is too slow. Governments are legally obliged to achieve results, he says, not just demonstrate effort, so they may need to take a different route. “Ultimately, all interventions [to change behaviour] involve national legislation at some stage,” he says.
Are cats really domesticated?
The cat family evolved from other carnivores about 11 million years ago and, apart from size and coat patterns, cats haven’t altered much since then. In 2017, Claudio Ottoni and his team at KU Leuven in Belgium and the Institute Jacques Monod in France analysed the mitochondrial
DNA of some 200 cats that lived from 9000 years ago to today. . They first emerged about 11,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, when wildcats started to frequent human settlements to hunt for rodents feeding on the surplus grain produced by early farmers. These spread to Europe at least 6500 years ago. Then, during the Greek and Roman periods, African cats from Egypt made their way to Europe. By the 8th century, their reach extended to the Baltic Sea in the north and Iran in the east.
But that wasn’t domestication – it was a sort of symbiosis, in which cats and humans came to live together for their mutual benefit. Ottoni’s team found no genetic evidence of humans breeding cats until the Middle Ages, less than a millennium ago. In fact, the average house cat (Felis silvestris catus) is almost indistinguishable, genetically, from the European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris). Cats may have close associations with humans, but they can survive on their own. They are still hunters – which is increasingly problematic today (see main story).
