Natural Predation

One thing even ardent environmentalists don’t acknowledge is there is no natural order anymore.

The reason is that man has replaced all the other predators. There is hardly any natural predation anymore. We kill ’em all. As a result, it’s not the aged, the diseased, and the lame which are killed in the wild, but the beautiful, the 8-point bucks. We’ve decapitated nature. It does not exist as it once did, anywhere.

This is doing more to destroy our planet than even climate change. And the damage has already occurred. It seems irreversible.

Fortunately, I have someone in my house who wants to do something about it. My daughter Robin (above) is interested in wild cats — tigers, bobcats, panthers, lions, all kinds of wild cats. She wants to study them, she says, in the wild and in zoos.

So on her behalf I undertook a brief study of the literature.

The first thing I learned is it’s amazing what you can learn on the Internet in just a half hour! You can build a platform on which to base not only tentative conclusions, but a lifetime of learning, at a higher level than was ever possible before. Imagine how it was 30 years ago, in my day….if I wanted to learn about this kind of subject I’d spend all day in a library and not come up with half the resources I’m about to describe.

So shall we?

(Shown here are Kaledocat (the big one) and Nuisance (the little one), two cats I owned in Houston, in the late 1970s, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I thought this would be a good chance to see them again.)

1. The main predator of our urban, suburban and even rural ecosystems is the common
   house cat. The seminal study is this, the work of Stanley Temple at the University of Wisconsin. Taylor calls house cats "subsidized predators" in that, like NRA members, they don’t have to hunt, that their medical and physical needs are taken care of, and that they’re just doing this for fun. Yet the toll they take on other wildlife is massive.
2. Many countries are starting to recognize this threat and they’re trying to do something about it. But it’s difficult, and feral cats are destroying species worldwide at a rate unheard of for any other animal — save man.
3. Because larger cats are so rare, much of what we now learn about feline behavior we learn by tracking feral cats. They mimic the behaviors of larger cats and, while they take smaller game, they are the dominant predator in many places. Like your block.
4. Like other interest groups (like gun owners in fact) feral cats have their own advocates. I sometimes think it a pity that the tactics advocated by the friends of feral cats aren’t used on NRA members.  
5. There are people trying to study, and save, larger cats, like the good people at the University of Central Florida. (Their mascot is the Knights. Just like Robin’s old high school.) UCF has done in-depth studies of the bobcat and the endangered Florida panther.
6. There is a brilliant life to be made by people like Robin in applying the lessons of feline behavior, and feline preservation, to the city. Here’s a man I found right in my hometown. I hope my daughter gets to talk with him.
7. Studies of feline behavior are ongoing in many states, not just in the wild or in zoos but in labs, and this is in fact leading to new ideas for protecting and preserving big cat species in the wild.
8. A few years ago, while visiting the in-laws, we spent some time with a County Judge who said he knew a man studying ocelots and other cats in Kingsville, down near the Mexican border. I found his center online.

Besides demonstrating the incredible usefulness of the Internet resource, what I’ve tried to share with this blog post are an important point and some pride. We’re no longer trying to protect the natural world. It’s too late for that, on so many levels. What we need to work on now is restoring it, rebuilding it.

We are not the only predator on this planet, just the stupidest. We should try to bequeath our grandchildren a true natural world, natural working ecosystems with which man and his civilization might learn to live in harmony. This is just the kind of life I hope my daughter pursues. And if you have a daughter, or a son, it’s a goal they should work toward as well.

We have screwed up this planet most royally and it will take the work of many generations to undo the damage I have witnessed just in my lifetime. It’s humbling to think of all that damage, but twice as humbling to realize how many people there are, younger people, working hard to undo it.