The Cuddly Killer (classic)

Hey everybody, it is July. We're going to have new episodes of Search Engine for you in August, but this month we're rebroadcasting some of our absolute favorite classic episodes. This episode was from pretty early in our show's run. And the story in particular was less listened to than at least we think it deserved. It's just a very weird, complicated, unintended consequences, no easy moral choice of the story. It's about animals, a topic which, if you've listened to Search Engine, you know we care deeply about animals. It also includes my favorite expert voice we've ever had on the show, a very surprising voice who I do not want to spoil for you in case this is your first time listening. My theory about this one is that it did not get listened to enough because we may have given it a slightly too anodyne title. It originally aired as, what are we going to do about all these cats? So we're giving it a slightly spicier title. Let's see if that more deeply pleases the gods of the internet. But other than the title, you are hearing the story as it originally aired. After these ads, our story. I recently learned that the Polish Academy of Sciences has declared that cats are an invasive alien species. Invasive species are foreign species who are introduced to an ecosystem and, rather than benignly adapting to it, cause damage and disruption. The Burmese pythons who terrorize the Florida Everglades, the feral hawks who wreak havoc through Texas. But there was something strange about hearing that cats had been added to the ranks. It wasn't just Polish scientists making that determination though. Globally, there appears to be some sort of cat backlash brewing. In Iceland, cats have been put under curfew. As opposed to an outright ban on outdoor cats. Well, controversy has erupted in Canterbury over a children's hunting competition. In New Zealand, a contest was announced where children would compete for a cash prize for killing feral cats. Hunters under 14 are being offered $250 for whoever can kill the most feral cats. Although the contest was shut down in the face of not terribly surprising criticism. Once you start paying attention though, this conversation about cats, it seems to be happening everywhere. There is a cat problem in Southeast Memphis. Feral cats are overrunning one neighborhood in Dainty Beach, the island home of Dainty and the cats by in Cherokee County, where neighbors are seeing not one, not two. People living in a central Baker Steel neighborhood are calling it a stray cat crisis in 23 ABCs John Dainty. Across the country, there's a growing recognition that cats are a problem for the ecosystems in which they find themselves. But nobody seems sure what to do about it. So this week on Search Engine, we're asking a question that has begun to bother us. What are we going to do about all these cats? And we're going to start with a person who's been wrestling with this question for years. Dr. Peter Mara, Dean of the Earth Commons, Georgetown University's Institute for Environment and Sustainability, and the co-author of the book Cat Wars, The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, which is a very good subtitle. Should I call you Pete, Peter, Dr. Mara? What's your preferred? Dr. Dean, I'm a new Dean, so you got to call me, I'm just kidding. I am a new Dean, but I like Pete. I hate when the students call me Professor here, I said, my name's Pete, my name's not Professor and I don't want to be called Doctor or Dean. It's like call me Pete. Okay. I pretty much prefer that. And just like what is your relationship as a human being? What is your relationship to cats? I've owned a cat. I've owned an indoor cat. Its name was Tukus. I had Tukus when I was in college. We adopted it from a shelter. I've never owned a cat since then, and I've got nothing against cats. I'm an ecologist and I love animals. I'm an animal advocate. You say there's like a person who perhaps has been accused of not being. Oh, yeah, 100%. 100%. Perhaps you can detect a frisson of tension here. Pete has in fact been accused of not being an animal advocate. Accusations like this are surfacing because there's an underlying war going on here. One of those small but hot wars that exist on the fringes of American life. A highly polarized debate that has its origins in a relationship that began 100 centuries ago. So, just to even go before the origin of the problem, can you just tell me how did the wild cats become house cats? How did that happen? So as the story goes, and it really is just a hypothesis, cats were domesticated around 10,000 years ago, and they were domesticated. It's thought somewhere in a place called the Fertile Crescent, which is sort of like around Egypt in that area. And 10,000 years ago was about the same time when we were building houses, starting to live in structures, starting to store grains and water. And when you start to create new ecosystems, in this case, human ecosystems, you start to attract other organisms like mice and birds that are attracted to that stored food and to that stored water. There are wild cats in those same areas that started to come into those areas because of food. It's not clear if they were captured and then bred, or if they were just sort of slowly domesticated over time, but over many, many generations, cats eventually became domesticated in the pets. What is the difference, do you know, between sort of cats and dogs to me feel like they are at different levels of domestication? Is that true, or is that even an answerable question? Oh, it is. So dogs have been domesticated, it's estimated 40,000 years ago, and cats were domesticated around 10,000 years ago. And in fact, when you look at the number of breeds of dogs versus the number of breeds of cats, there are a lot more dog breeds than there are cat breeds, just because of the amount of time that people have had to domesticate and breed different types of dogs. I should probably tell you something about myself, which is just I've always had dogs, I've never had a cat. I have a severe cat allergy, I did once try to get my hands on an experimental cat allergy vaccine story for another time, but it didn't work out, and I've never had a cat as a pet. I appreciate cats, I like how they seem not completely tamable, sometimes even a little majestic. I actually asked Pete about this. The vibe I get even around domesticated house cats is just like they seem to have a, they just seem half wild, they seem to have like a less subservient relationship to the humans that they live with than the miniature golden noodle that I spend my life with. Like he just seems to have, the connection between him and a wolf just feels much further to me. Absolutely, and that independence that that cat brings to people's lives is in some ways what attracts people to them because they are actually seeing a certain type of behavior in that animal that they almost would see in the wild. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, there were dogs running around all over the place. And it was because of rabies that I think people started to realize that we needed to get dogs unleashes and get collared and get licenses for dogs. And we realized that we needed to take dog ownership much more seriously. People were being bit by dogs, dogs were carrying rabies, dogs were the number one domesticated species to transmit rabies. Now guess who is the number one domesticated species to transmit rabies? I'm going to guess that's Cass. That's right, because we've gotten dog ownership under control. And we took, prior to the 50s and 60s, it would have been normal in like an American suburb that you would just see like a wandering dog or a pack of wandering dogs. Yeah, I grew up on the coast of Connecticut, Narwalk, Connecticut. And we adopted several dogs that we just found on the streets, no owners. And then, you know, I think what's happened over time is after we got the dog thing under control where you had to have your dog licensed and you needed to demonstrate that it had a rabies vaccine, it's all registered now. You know, one of my things is like, we did it with dogs. Why aren't we doing it with cats? Why are cats allowed to roam free? Just to say, in most of America, owned cats are required to have rabies vaccines. And while cats may carry more rabies than any other domesticated animal, in absolute terms the number of rabies exposure cases by cats is actually quite low. Pete will also point to the fact that cats are a vector for toxoplasmosis, a fascinating parasite, can be dangerous to a fetus if you're pregnant, but it exists in society functions. I think Pete's driving concern here isn't so much the risks that too many free-ranging cats pose to humans. It's the risk these cats pose to a different animal. Birds. So, at what is the point where some people in America started to think like, hey, there's a problem with our relationship with cats? Like, I became aware of this very recently. I'm assuming this idea has more of an intellectual history than me noticing it. Like, when does it start? Yeah, it's interesting because it was actually in the late 1800s, early 1900s, when a guy by the name of Forbush started to write about and estimate the mortality the cats cause on wild birds. Forbush? Forbush, F-O-R-B-U-S-H from Massachusetts. So the first person to sound the alarm was a bird expert? Yeah. Presumably a bird lover? Yeah. He was an ecologist and an ornithologist was probably what he did mostly. And he's tried to sound the alarm multiple times. Edward Forbush wrote about cats with the same vivid, blood-spattered language that true crime podcasters use when they rewrite the Wikipedia pages of serial killers. In his book, The Domestic Cat, Bird Killer, Mouser, and Destroyer of Wildlife, Means of Utilizing and Controlling It, published in 1916, Forbush describes the cat's threat to wildlife thusly. Quote, no animal that it can reach and master is safe from its ravenous clutches. Back in 1916, Forbush estimated that cats were killing 700,000 birds per year in a single state, Massachusetts. And he considered that to be a conservative estimate. Since then, many ecologists have tried to estimate the number of birds killed by cats, both by outdoor house cats and by free-ranging unowned cats. Over the decades, they've come up with different numbers measured in different places. But more than that, they've gotten an increasingly different response, as the question itself has become more polarizing. Pete told me a story about what happened to an academic he knew, who published one of these surveys in the 1990s. His name is Dr. Stanley Temple. He's now retired from University of Wisconsin. He did a first estimate, and the number of animals, birds, and small mammals that he estimated were being killed by cats a year in Wisconsin shook everybody at their core. When Dr. Temple conducted his study, he estimated that there were, conservatively, around 1.4 million free-ranging cats in Wisconsin. And that each of those cats was killing on average an estimated 5.6 birds per year. This would mean that something on the order of 7.8 million birds are killed by free-ranging cats in Wisconsin per year. A number which elicited a very strong reaction from cat advocates. He received death threats. He was challenged. And it was really simple math. It really wasn't anything complicated. We saw he received death threats. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. As have I. Many. From cat owners? Cat advocates. And why do they want to kill you? Because they see people that are making a claim that cats are having a negative impact on the environment as something that's threatening cats. They see this as something that will actually get people to kill cats. They see it as an argument for removing cats in the landscape, and they recognize that there's not many solutions out there that are good for cats. When my book came out, there was definitely a campaign on Amazon to get as many people to attack my book as possible. I got written letters, lots of written letters from all over the world. I had phone messages. Wow. People, people threatening me. One cat advocacy organization showed up at my previous employer's main building with a box of signed petitions trying to convince them to get me fired. This is, you know, in many ways, it's all out war. And it has been for a long, long time. We're going to return to the story of the Wisconsin cats and the death threats. But first, I want to tell you about the other side, the cat advocates. It's after the break. Democracy under siege, Democrats treading water, and one outlet after another checking out. All the big media giants are willing to fold. Slate has never been afraid to tell it like it is, and hold powerful feet to the fire. We want to try to defend our communities, our families, our people. But what if you can't? That next asks tough questions without forgetting who's at the center of our work. You follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the show. The national cat advocacy movement is actually pretty recent. It really took off in the 90s. One of the movement's early battles was against animal shelters that euthanized cats they can't find homes for. Their shelters are much rarer today. Cat advocates are part of the reason for that. If the phrase, no kill shelter exists in your head, that's partly because of that movement. The biggest, most organized of the cat advocacy groups is Alley Cat Allies, founded in 1990 in Bethesda, Maryland by a woman named Becky Robinson, the longtime face of the organization. We reached out to Alley Cat Allies for an interview with Becky Robinson, but after a brief exchange, the PR person stopped replying. However, Alley Cat Allies is very active on social media and YouTube. There's tons of posted talks, so you can get a sense of where they're coming from. They're from the United States, and they've been in the US for thousands of years. They are the only domesticated species, domestic animal, that is self-domesticated. Becky Robinson is speaking here at the 2015 No Kill Conference in Austin, Texas. She's a middle-aged woman with short, operant hair. In photos, she's almost always smiling, usually petting a cat. You can see that this is just a timeline that I'm showing on the screen here, that they've lived around us even long before we knew that they were domestic cat in Egypt. They were actually thousands of years prior to we have now have researched to show that they lived around people and their domains. It's fascinating. In this talk, she's essentially telling a similar multi-century history of the human cat relationship that Pete Mara told me, although her version of the story ends with a different moral. So cats have always lived around us, and they're always going to live around us outside. That's a fact of life. It doesn't have to be a sad fact. It's just a fact. She says that cats living around us outside, whether they're pet cats or not, outdoor cats are just an inalienable law of the universe, something that has never changed, something that can never change. So here they are. There's millions of unowned cats. And so this is what we have to keep in mind, that what we're doing every day at Alley Cat Alley and what all of you doing are out in the field is that we're correcting a horrible myth. And this myth is that the only way a cat can live is indoors, and that's just not correct. So that's the idea. Cats have a right to live freely outside. And if you're sold on this vision, Alley Cat Allies has videos explaining how to make your neighborhood a nice place for unowned outdoor cats to live. This is from my personal favorite video, which explains how to have the talk with your neighbors. Neighbors who might come to you because they're upset about the new cat colony that's been pooping and peeing in their yards. It's pretty typical for people to have a concern that cats are going in their garden or using their yard as a litter box. If you are the person who's caring for the cats, there is going to be a time when someone might approach you in your neighborhood. And you should look upon that as a very good thing if they're expressing some concerns. The video is fairly elaborate. There's an actor demonstrating how to properly nod and listen as your neighbor expresses their concerns. Becky Robinson offers her playbook for best practices for caring for the cats. It starts normally enough. She suggests you get them on a regular feeding schedule. She says you should practice trap neuter return, meaning trap the cats and pay to have them neutered. You are getting those cats to a community cat veterinarian where they're going to be sterilized and vaccinated and air-tipped. You then return them to the neighborhood where they now permanently live. Once they're there, the video suggests you might go into your neighbor's garden and place deterrence there to keep the community cats from digging things up. You might have coffee grounds to put in the soil that distracts cats. As the train of friendly suggestions continues, it does gradually dawn on you, the viewer, that this all assumes you're willing to substantially reorient your life in your new role as self-appointed ambassador for a cat colony. Perhaps your neighbor owns a fancy sports car and you suspect the cats might be tempted to go on it. Well, Becky Robinson has a solution for that too. It's easy to make fun of all this and I guess I am. There's just something about imagining someone opening the door to their neighbor, handing them a car cover for their yellow Mercedes, and explaining cats live outdoors for 10,000 years. It's never going to stop. But I went to the store and I bought you some River Rocks and this car cover. You can use it every time you park. It's just a lot. I also recognize that this is a very important part of the project. And that's being neighborly. Maybe asking calling alley cat allies to find that inner peace and those ways to communicate, because you really are the voice for the cats. They don't have anybody else. What you will not find on the Alley Cat Allies website is a video with suggestions about how to protect your neighborhood burns from your new home. And that's because the organization doesn't believe that cats are a serious threat to birds presented with numbers from ecologists like Pete Mara. Alley Cat Allies says those numbers are quote false data. This entire story of cats versus birds. It's really a fight about humans and data about people refusing to believe in the cat. And that's because the organization doesn't believe that cats are a serious threat to birds. It's not just cats versus birds. It's really a fight about humans and data about people refusing to believe each other's charts. And that fight took center stage in the story of Stanley Temple, the former colleague Pete Mara told us about. The one who got death threats. Remember Stanley Temple had published estimates about the amount of bird deaths in Wisconsin in the late 1990s. Here's Temple. This is from a 2008 documentary called Here Kitty Kitty about a fight in Wisconsin over a proposed measure that would allow for uncollared, unknown cats to be killed in the wild. Stanley Temple himself didn't personally endorse that measure, but he does appear in the documentary. Temple is a mild mannered, bespectacled academic with a vest and a beard. You're going to hear some of the death threats against him in a moment, but for now what I marvel at is how unlikely to inspire death threats this person seems. Grassland birds in Wisconsin were declining very significantly. They were becoming probably one of the most unaccounted and most unaccounted animals in the world. They were becoming one of the most significant groups of declining birds for conservationists to worry about in the state. And all of the dimensions, all of the reasons for those declines in Grassland birds were not fully understood. So the role of cats was perhaps a logical question. Alley cat allies is not in this documentary, though they have released a statement attacking Temple's research. In the film, the activist side is represented by a local pet store owner running a website called Don't Shoot the Cat.com. He also has a lot to say about Stanley Temple's research. Wow, I would certainly like to work on making sure that we correct some of the misimpressions that have been left out there, especially when it comes to those numbers. First of all, the feral cat is not a wild cat, it's just an unsocialized domestic cat, and our animal cruelty laws currently in Wisconsin protect those cats. And so what we want to do is really make sure that we had good science before we went into this. The advocate makes it clear that he does not trust Dr. Temple's research. He raises insinuations about the source of Temple's funding, about the pedigree of the journals who would publish this kind of work. The research that we make sure of those numbers, and those numbers you referred to, are the Dr. Stanley Temple study, are highly questionable. And as you said, those are estimates, and they're not at all scientific data. This is not published scientific data we're talking about. This is a study, not a study at all, in fact, a report that was published over 10 years ago. This is not new information. It's completely based on estimates that are wildly exaggerated. It's really based on the relationship between Dr. Stanley Temple and the American Bird Conservancy, which is probably the most rabidly anti-cat special interest lobby group in the United States. So I don't know that we can take Dr. Stanley Temple's science seriously. I want to pause to appreciate the American poetry of the phrase, probably the most rabidly anti-cat special interest lobby group. Also, one wonders if calling someone rabidly anything in this context is more loaded than in others. Anyway, the primary reason cat advocates had a problem with Temple's research was that it was serving as supporting evidence for this measure. The one that would have designated feral cats as unprotected, therefore allowing people to hunt, trap, or kill them in the Badger State. An unpleasant idea, which to some cat advocates sounded deeply repugnant. So much so that some of these advocates started calling Dr. Temple and leaving threatening voicemails. Monday 11.06 pm, line one. You cat murdering bastard. What goes around, covers around. I declare Stanley Temple season open. Just to be clear, there's no reason to believe these voicemails came from any official activist group. Every cause has its extremists. Ultimately, in the face of public backlash, the measure failed. After initial public hearings, the state declined to pursue the issue further. The governor expressed the idea that the whole Wisconsin shoots cat's thing was bad for the state's brand. The documentary was filmed in 2005. Nearly two decades later, the state estimates that a third of Wisconsin's native bird species are now in decline. The fight, though, over why that number keeps dropping, continues. Here's something I struggle with. I'm honestly not really a cat or a bird partisan. I'm the undecided voter both sides would like to reach. I am absolutely ready to trust the data saying a lot of birds have died since the early 2000s. But I'm also aware that human beings must be a giant part of this. Global warming, wind turbines. The addition my mom put on her kitchen where the birds are always flying in the windows. Cars, power lines, my cousin Kip in Texas who likes to hunt quail. Are we just treating cats as a scapegoat here? Piedmara says absolutely not. In 2013, he published a data analysis with an academic named Scott Loss comparing a lot of different ways that birds die. This analysis represented a pretty huge salvo in the cat advocates vs bird ecologists data war. We looked at relative to other causes of anthropogenic mortality. That is, mortality caused directly by humans. So think wind turbines or birds that fly into buildings or windows or say birds that are killed by cats. We collected all of the relevant data out there where people estimated because there have been a bunch of studies globally where they looked at the number of birds or mammals or reptiles that cats kill on a daily or weekly basis throughout the year. And when you look at the total number, then you look at the estimates for the total number of cats and you can separate cats by cats that are owned, that are let outside or unowned cats that are outside or what we call truly feral cats that have no connection to humans whatsoever, which we have a very poor understanding of in terms of the numbers. You can estimate the population size, multiply that times the number of individual animals that that cat might kill and you can come up with an estimate for how many birds or mammals or reptiles are likely killed by cats in a given year. And you can do the same thing for wind turbines, you can do the same thing for cars. We did this. And this was the shot heard around the world when our paper was published in Nature Communications. We estimated that cats kill somewhere between 1.3 billion and 4 billion birds a year in the United States. That's birds alone. Billion, billion with a big old B, 1.3 to 4 billion. And the range is so high because the studies are all over the map. They just are. I think the median was 2.7 billion per year. But even if it's the low number at 1.3 billion birds per year, that was higher than most other estimates out there. But it's still, the low estimate is still very, very high. Do we need more research? Well, I don't know if we really need, from a scientific perspective, to try to refine the estimate. Maybe we need more research just to try to get a finer point on that number. But in terms of the conservation solution, no. We don't need more research to know that cats outdoors are just a problem for all kinds of reasons. There are some problems that are genuinely quite confusing. There are other problems we convince ourselves are confusing. I suspect because even though we could understand them, we don't want to. These are inconvenient truths that rather than addressing head-on, we procrastinate about. We ask the scientists to go draw us another chart to run the numbers one more time. It buys us time before we have to do something that might be very tedious, or in the case of some of these cats, very unpleasant. The federal government has declared war on feral cats, hoping to save thousands of native species from the brink of extinction. Countries like New Zealand or Australia are dealing with this. They're on the front lines of it really because they've got such a feral cat problem, outdoor cat problem, and Australia introduced a catcull. This is the felixer, a feral cat trap, which lures in feral cats using recorded mating calls or the sounds of distressed prey before. Because there are so many cats roaming free in wild areas, and so they've put out bounties for folks to go out and shoot cats. Pete Mara is saying if we don't control cat populations now, we could end up like Australia, where people are just shooting lots of cats. Ironically, alley cat allies, the people who fight for the rights of cats to live outside, they also point to Australia. In fact, this video they made of a specific, very brutal catcull there is, at least for me, some of their most effective political messaging. At one point in the video, text appears on the screen saying that in 2020, a contractor for the Port of Newcastle came to the cat colony at night, quote, shooting at any cat he saw. Becky Robinson of Alley Cat Allies appears in the video and explains, there's never a reason to kill those poor cats. She says the situation was already humanely under control. There was non-lethal control in place. It had been carried out by people who had sterilized the cats. In Australia, it's referred to as desexed. The cats had been microchipped, they'd been vaccinated, and they were not breeding. The local advocates say that before the call, they were using the same practice Becky Robinson was promoting in her community cat video. TNR. Cat advocates like Alley Cat Allies believe TNR, neutering outdoor cats, is the right way to control these populations. If they can't reproduce, they'll gradually die out. It sounds like the kind of elegant, humane solution that everyone could get on board with. The problem is, ecologists in general say TNR doesn't really work. Part of the problem is just cats reproduce very quickly. According to PETA, under the right set of conditions, in seven years, one female cat and her offspring can produce up to 370,000 cats. Which means for TNR to work, you need to catch, neuter, and release something like 75% of a feral cat colony every single year. How do you know you have 75%? I don't know. How do you stop new cats from migrating into the colony from outside? Who could say? I emailed Pete Mara about the TNR program in Newcastle. He hadn't heard about it, but found the numbers suspicious. This wasn't a scientific study. He wanted to know, why would neutering a colony have caused 60 of these 100 cats to just suddenly disappear in two years? He wrote, quote, I absolutely do not trust the data. Pete Mara believes the end result of these ineffective TNR programs is our status quo. Many cats living wild lives in human cities. And he says these cats, they're not okay. These cats that are outdoors are not doing well. These cats have injuries. These cats have diseases. These cats have leukemia. These cats have feline aids. These cats are hit by cars. Feline aids? Yeah. There's all sorts of diseases that these cats contract. Pathogens, worms. The way they're most commonly killed is by getting hit by a car. And that's not a good way for an animal to die. I mean, it's just, anyway, you slice it. It's just not a good way for an animal to die. Pete Mara is not the only person who believes that unowned cats are living lives so bad that euthanizing them would be a superior option. His worldview is shared by PETA. From PETA, quote, allowing feral cats to continue their daily struggle for survival in a hostile environment is rarely a humane option. End quote. PETA says kill the cats. I mean, PETA would say euthanize, but still. It's tricky, though, because the word euthanize is very bland and a bloody video like that one from Australia is very powerful. In the proxy war between cats and birds and the people who defend them, you could imagine a counter video shot from the perspective of an innocent, fluffy, adorable piping plover chick looking out from its nest at the ferocious jaws and teeth of a bored, stray, killer cat. But I'm not sure the video would work. We just don't relate as much to birds. We certainly don't relate to the declining aggregate numbers of bird populations. We relate to cats, to Garfield, to Felix, to Virtute, to all the ones we've seen on the internet, all the ones we've had in our homes and in the homes of our friends. We love cats, but we also need to protect the birds. Wars persist because neither side can see the other as reasonable. Wars end when people make space for competing truths. After a short break, we find someone who actually sits in the middle of this intractable war, who seems to think about it differently than anyone else. That's after some ads. Welcome back to the show. I wanted to talk to someone who could hold this entire argument in their mind. Someone who could see this from both perspectives. One voice came to mind. This person who owned multiple pet cats, but I also knew to be the greatest bird lover I've ever met. When we spoke, we were all talking about the same thing. We were talking about the same thing. We were talking about the same thing. I also knew to be the greatest bird lover I've ever met. When we spoke, and we spoke often, it was usually about the lives of birds. So I invited him to the studio. So normally when we interview experts on the podcast, there are people who are like public intellectuals, like writers or professors. There are people who have a lot of expertise in their field. So I just want to establish your bona fides. Can you tell me the highest level of education you've completed? I graduated fifth grade now. I'm in sixth grade. Pretty good grades though, right? Yeah. Okay. And what do you think is the subject that you know more about than anything else? Birds. How do you know so much about birds, Colin? When I was young, I just clicked on random videos on YouTube, and then I just saw these bird videos, and then I just started watching that. Also, what also influenced me a lot was because when I had chickens for like five years, that also influenced me a lot about birds. Calden, easily one of the most charming people I've ever met. Half Swiss, half Tibetan, raised in the ways of two peace-loving, neutrality-seeking cultures. We spent a lot of time on long drives where he would just talk about birds and offer bird facts. Some kids get into trains for a while, or fire trucks or dinosaurs, but for Calden, it was birds. It had been birds for as long as I'd known him. And I really had begun to appreciate birds more through our conversations, as species that, unlike cats and dogs, have mostly resisted the cheap bribery of human domestication, who keep to the skies, who feel alien and strange and have never pretended to belong to us. I just want to, for someone, because one of the reasons I enjoy spending time with you so much is I like asking about birds because you know everything about birds. But I just want to establish that for other people. So, do you mind if I ask you some bird trivia questions? Yeah. What species of birds lay its blue eggs? American Robin. What's the word for the study of birds? Ornithology. What's the fastest bird in the world? Perg and Falcon. What's the biggest bird in the world? Nostridge. What about the biggest bird in the world who's extinct? I think it's either the Moa or the Elephant Bird is the heaviest. I know the Moa is probably the tallest. I have the Elephant Bird, but I have no doubt that you are more correct than this website that I found. What species of bird can only eat when its head is upside down? Flamingos. Yep. What species of bird can fly backwards? Hummingbirds. You're 7% so far. What species of bird can fly underwater? Penguins or puffins, technically, either of those. They don't technically fly underwater, but they look like they fly underwater. Again, you're doing better than my website. What was the website's answer? They just said the puffin, but I think you're right. I was flying underwater. I guess puffin because puffins fly above water and underwater, so I guess that's what they mean. But I think you're being a bit more precise than they are. I think you're more correct than they are. How many different bird species are there in the world? Over 10,000, I'm pretty sure. There's some debate, but the most widely accepted number seems to be around 10,000. Okay, that's perfect. I first wanted to talk to Calden. I just assumed he'd be a voice speaking for the birds, but then I saw this school project he did, and I realized he actually had feelings in both directions. So, I want to ask you about an experiment you did involving chickens. Oh, you mean when I hatched those eggs? Tell me about it. We did it for a science experiment, not hatched, I don't know why. We're going to try next year with duck eggs. Well, so I became aware of your science experiment because I had stopped by your school during the science fair, and I saw the experiments, and I was very impressed with yours, not to disparage your classmates, but I found yours impressive. And in your display for the experiment, it included a little biography of you. And there's a part of it that surprised me that I wanted to ask you about, if that's okay. Yeah. Okay, can I read it to you? Yeah. Hi, my name's Calden. Yeah. I'm 11 years old. I'm in fifth grade and I have two cats. Yeah. I love fishing, skiing, and animals. Yeah. Ever since I was three, I was fascinated by birds. Yeah. I've owned four chickens here in New York. Sadly, they all died. Exactly. Now I want to hatch... It's so funny that you're agreeing with yourself. Now I want to hatch new ones. Yeah. Chickens are way smarter and social than people think. Yeah. My chickens, for example, were always trying to escape. Yeah. With cats, they do what they want, and you can't change what they do. But with chickens, you have to stop the issue, and the rush of stopping them is so nice. What did you mean when you said the rush of stopping them was so nice? Having to change the way of them escaping all the time was fun because they always found it a new way to escape. So then you have to try and solve the issue. Like when they were young, you have to bring them outside, and that's when they always move them. With cats, they just do what they want, and you can't only stop them because they can run around and they know the neighborhood. Chickens, you can interfere because if you don't interfere, they're not used to the city. They're smart, but they're not that smart that they might get run over by a car if they escape the whole time. It sounds like for you, raising chickens was kind of like having a young child, whereas having cats was like you were raising a teenager. Kind of. Can we talk about cats? Okay. Do you have cats? You have one cat shadow. No, I had. Oh, I'm sorry. It was two years ago. Now I have three cats. One was dragon food. That's the one in June. Those two are living inside, and the one that's outside is mama cat. Mama cat. Because she just gave birth to dragon food. So have your cats ever killed a bird that you know of? Oh yeah, many times. Many times. Many sparrows. Once this weir like swallow looking bird. You love birds. Yeah. Does it bother you? I mean, I'm upset about it, but it's no different when they bring in a mouse. It's not different. And I also found in the corner of this garage at the house, there was like a dead bluejay corpse. There was like a body and then the head was detached and then there was like a wing detached. But I was impressed, but also sad because bluejays are my big birds. How long did you feel sad for him? I mean, not that. I didn't cry. I was just like upset and like, oh, come on. Like that feeling. Calden said he couldn't imagine forcing his cat to live entirely inside. It'd be boring. It'd be unfair. But he also believes birds have rights that need balancing. I suggested cats might be killing more birds than he realizes, but of course he said he was familiar with the literature. Calden's feeling was that to solve this problem, you'd actually need to think outside of the box. What's your vision for the future of how cats and birds in America can get along? Because people have house cats everywhere wanting to be able to roam free, but there are places where it's a real problem. The easiest thing to do is just give your cats a bell on like the collar so that when the cats move and try to creep up on the birds, it makes like a sound so the birds can hear it and then they can just fly away or just go away. Do you have any other ideas? I think that's a good one. Let me think. Yeah. Maybe having like your cats either less outside, not outside at all or that's all my ideas. I think those are good ideas. I had not expected to find myself taking an 11 year old's ideas back to an academic like Pete Mara, but I found Calden's perspective refreshing. I know human culture changes slowly, stubbornly, but I also know technology can accelerate those changes. It actually felt easier to imagine popularizing bells on cat collars than it did convincing people with outdoor cats to just start keeping them inside. Pete Mara is a bit skeptical about bells, but he is a believer in this idea that technology can help birds and cats and people coexist on our planet. And he sees some of those technologies taking off. Since I've started to work on this issue, I've seen no question an increase in the number of folks that are walking their cats on leashes. I see more people that are aware of this issue at all and they just say, yeah, we're cat owners, but we're indoor cat owners, which is totally, totally fine. That's great. And we also see a growth in something called catios, which are... Catios. Catios, which are screened in cat enclosures. So your cat can go outside, enjoy outdoors, can watch and get stimulated by nature, just like, you know, we get stimulated by nature because it's in their best interest to be stimulated by nature, so they're happy, but not cause any damage to birds, but they can watch a bird fly by without actually killing the bird. So you see people changing the architecture of their homes because they're trying to find a balance between their love for their pet and their desire to conserve nature? Absolutely. Yep, it's happening in lots of places. I had no idea that was happening. Yeah, just Google catio and you'll see more and more folks putting up catios in their houses to accommodate their cat. Oh yeah, I'm looking at some gorgeous catios. I think I was just picturing a covered patio, but it's real small for some reason. And this is more like, it's sort of like a cage, but it doesn't look particularly. It's somewhere between a cage and a jungle gym. Yeah, and there's all kinds of versions out there. But the point is, is that it allows your cat to have controlled access to the outdoors where there aren't native wildlife that will be injured by the cat. So what are we going to do about all these cats? If you believe the ecologists, our house cats are looking at a future of bells, cat leashes and catios. And this is the harder part. Some unowned cats need to be humanely killed, particularly in places like the islands of Hawaii and Australia where they're wiping out endangered species. Cats, Pete Mara says, have already contributed to the execution of 63 species on this planet. He thinks we should try to prevent the 64th. I look at these natural areas. When I see a bird, that to me is like going into a museum and seeing a Monet or a Picasso. It's our natural history that we're losing. It's like losing a Monet on the wall when you lose a species. And we know that species loss is a massive problem. And we almost lost species like the bald eagle. Could you imagine if we didn't have the bald eagle in the United States, our national bird? And now, thankfully, we got rid of DDT and the bald eagle came back. And future generations can now appreciate species like the bald eagle and the brown pelican and the osprey because we protected them. And we have a responsibility to maintain the integrity of the earth. I mean, I don't know if that's convincing to you or not, but it's convincing to me. I feel like a general sense of like we should conserve species. I just feel like I feel like who cares about the birds is probably it's a taboo thing to say. You know, nobody's going to advocate for the extinction of a species. But if you, while nobody would say that, if you look at people's behavior, clearly people believe that, you know? Yeah. I think there are some people that are thinking that, but I, you know, at the end of the day, I also think that a lot of folks on the other side of the aisle that are cat advocates are also animal advocates. And they're in a quandary, honestly, because they love wildlife. They love nature. They love cats. And they want to believe that cats are not having the impact that they're having because the solution here is just not great. It's a difficult situation. Anyway, you slice it. And I think that many of them really appreciate birds and like birds, but they don't know what to do within the short time frame that they're present on this planet and don't think that their single cat or their five cats really matter. Yeah. But they do. But they do. They have a hard time scaling it up. And I see it because I think about things at much larger scales. Today, more than a hundred million American cats live mostly outdoor lives. If Dr. Pete Mora and people like him are able to convince people to see the world how they see it, that'll change. They'll have to do something that seems impossible, convince people that their individual choices add up to something larger. But that impossible thing has been done before. We don't smoke inside. We don't litter. Our dogs in America rarely roam free. Pete Mora says it's important that we change all this because there's a generation after us that'll inherit the earth we leave behind. Call them a U-11 right now or 12? 11. I interview a lot of people who know more than me, but they're usually not 11. Uh-huh. Just saying. What do you want to do when you grow up? Being on a college. Well, go to college. And then I want to go to the, what college is it called? The bird college. There's a bird college. Not bird college, but it's like you can study on a theology there. It's Cornell. Cornell University. I've heard of Cornell University. And they have a good ornithology program. I think so. I'm pretty sure. And so after Cornell, would you want to be a professional ornithologist? Yes. Do you think you'll ever be less interested in birds than you are right now? Probably not. Maybe when I'm like in the teenage years. Yeah. Because then I'm not going to care about it that much. Then I'm just going to care about like Fortnite with friends or like something like that, like cars or something. So boring. Exactly. Thank you. You're welcome. Search engine is a presentation of Odyssey. This created by me, PJ vote and truthy pinnaman any. This episode was produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John theme original composition and mixing by Armand Bazar in fact checking by Diane Kelly special thanks this week to Kim, native in Patursa and to may Abdullah Holu at Odyssey. Our executive producers, Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey Rob Miranda, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, more current Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hillary Our agent is Oran Rosenbaum at UTA. If you would like to support our show, get ad free episodes, zero reruns and some additional audio, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at search engine dot show. Follow and listen to search engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. .