A blog post by Virginia Thomas, author of the paper ‘Categorisation of cats: managing boundary felids in Aotearoa New Zealand and Britain’.

Read the full paper discussed here in our Open Access journal.

Read the Plain Language Summary for this paper at Relational Thinking.

Could you tell the difference between a European wildcat (Felis silvestris), a tabby domestic cat (Felis catus), and a hybrid of the two at twenty paces? What about distinguishing a feral cat from a stray or domestic cat that has been caught in a live capture trap? These are questions faced by those involved in cat management in Britain and Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) respectively, as is the question of what to do when the cat has been identified. The answer to this last question very much depends on how wildlife, particularly native wildlife, is valued, and how this value is weighed against the interests of, and human responsibilites to, domestic species.  

Our paper ‘Categorisation of cats: managing boundary felids in Aotearoa New Zealand and Britain’ examines how people distinguish and classify different categories of cats, highlighting contrasts between different geographical, sociocultural, and ecological contexts. The categorisation is linked not only to the practical issues involved in distinguishing between similar categories of cats, but also to how the different values that stakeholders hold affect their decisions. The overriding factor was whether a stakeholder’s priority was protecting cats themselves or  cats’ potential prey. In cases where cats themselves were prioritised, this was either because they were wildcats (valued for their nativeness and rarity) or domestic cats (valued for their relationship with humans and because human responsibilites to them were recognised and respected). In cases where cats’ potential prey was prioritised, this was either because the prey was native wildlife (whereas the cats in question were domestic and seen as introduced, invasive, and even pestilent), or because the prey was a game species – valued by humans for its economic and recreational value.

Additional complications arose where these values conflicted, leading to different approaches to management and classification. In Britain,  conservationists value the native and rare wildcat and seek to protect it from the threat of hybridisation with the domestic cat. On the other hand, they also respect the value attributed to feral domestic cats and recognise their responsibily to manage them humanely, both due to the moral obligation to do so and because of the need to maintain their social licence to operate. Conservationists therefore manage feral cats via non lethal control, so as to avoid the accidental killing of wildcats if lethal methods are adopted, and to maintain their social licence. They also err on the side of protection in ambiguous cases, the goal being to protect any cat that may potentially have wildcat genes. Other stakeholders such as gamekeepers, however, may be less cautious, seeing lethal control as the most suitable form of management to protect game birds from predation, and tending to treat all cats as a potential predator, even in ambiguous cases.

Meanwhile, in NZ, there are tensions related to attempts to protect native wildlife by lethally controlling feral cat populations, and attempts to protect cats with which humans have a relationship (owned or stray). Again, as a result of these different values, stakeholders take very different approaches to cat classification, with some conservationists treating any cat in a conservation reserve as if it is feral, even if the case is ambiguous. On the other hand, cat advocates tend to have a much stricter definition of feral and, in ambiguous cases, prefer to assume that cats are owned or stray.

Such differences are important, as they can mean that laws aiming to protect specific types of cats may not be implemented as intended. Furthermore, our research demonstrates that values affect not only people’s views about certain categories of animals (e.g., feral cats), but also how they define these categories in the first place; a ‘feral’ cat is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. We hope that our paper will be useful for both researchers and practitioners of cat management, and also for those working on or with other animals that fill more than one role in our socio-ecosystems, especially those such as feral and hybrid animals that resist the neat classification systems imposed by humans.

Read the full paper discussed here in our Open Access journal.

Read the Plain Language Summary for this paper at Relational Thinking.