Tucker is certainly right to suggest that the current cat predicament is rooted in peculiarly fraught power relations between these cuddly yet opaque creatures and Homo sapiens. History reveals felines as the ultimate opportunists, biologically primed to exploit their human enablers—among many other creatures. As both books reveal, cats travel well, reproduce quickly, and are savage and omnivorous predators. When Mark Twain arrived in Hawaii in 1866, some 90 years after cats had strolled down the gangplanks of Captain Cook’s fleet and conquered the hearts of the natives, he observed “platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats.”
The bloody takeover was well under way, and has continued. Those felines, who have since multiplied in feral-cat colonies throughout the archipelago, prey on endangered birds such as the petrel, the nene, and the Laysan albatross, and have helped decimate the Hawaiian crow. In Australia, with its 3 million pet cats and 20 million feral cats (and about 23 million people), cats have contributed to wiping out several mouse, rat, and bandicoot species. They currently threaten the much-beloved greater bilby. Cats are implicated, according to one study, in 14 percent of all reptile, mammal, and bird extinctions on islands—33 animal species in all.
And the feline menace isn’t limited to islands. Cats imperil species around the world, including our own, with which their relations have become—at least on the surface—more symbiotic. A century ago, when they were still viewed as a quasi-domesticated form of vermin control, cats were also regularly deemed vermin themselves—a germ-carrying danger to be treated as such. The New York SPCA, for instance, gassed 300,000 strays during a 1911 polio scare. The invention of kitty litter in 1947 heralded the thoroughly housebound cat, and a new identity, or rather, disguise: The pampered pet had arrived, but the semi-pest still lurked.
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