Jane Clifton: Scotland’s peculiar perverse cat problem
Even by the maddening contrarian standards cats have set themselves since their domestication, Scotland has a peculiarly perverse cat problem. Not only are too many domestic Scottish cats behaving like cats – as in, killing endangered wildlife – but some wild cats have been found to be completely incompetent at cat-ness – as in, being incapable of killing anything, even when their lives depend on it.
Scotland is also contemplating the return of native beavers, only to find that the ungrateful chompers can behave in an infuriatingly cat-like manner, unilaterally relocating themselves from their designated homes to live wherever they (damn well) please. At the height of this inter-species perversity, First Minister John Swinney was forced to deny that Scotland was considering banning cats. This followed a wildlife agency’s report urging “cat containment” which caused such outrage that Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to issue a denial.
The Scottish Animal Welfare Commission told the Scottish government that cats destroyed too much wildlife, and it should consider emulating other countries’ restrictive policies, such as cat bans near areas of precarious wildlife habitat.
This was widely misunderstood as portending house-arrest, licensed cat-catching and impounding – a regime to which those inferior beings known as dogs and their staff submit, but which is surely fathoms beneath the household deities descended from Egypt’s Bastet.
At the same time, conservationists campaigning to re-introduce the lynx, thought extinct there for several hundred years or more, suffered the mortification of a total feline outage on the part of four of the tufty-eared specimens.
Illegally released in the highlands, the four strapping creatures could secure nothing to eat but the food left in the humane traps put out to catch them. As their liberators should have known, not all animals born in captivity can reprise their ancestors’ wild culture.
Again, this is confoundingly cattish. The most waited-upon moggy needlessly retains the knack of pitiless predation, while its superbly designed killing-machine wild cousin can lose all survival clues in a generation. The lynxes, swiftly recaptured, were starving. One later died.
The government remains opposed to their reintroduction, partly because of farmers’ fears that even a useless big cat could eventually figure out how to catch lambs and calves.
As for the cattily ungrateful beavers, they’ve sparked surely the year’s oddest neighbours’ dispute. A Cornish conservationist went through the exacting legal process of bringing beavers into his wildlife retreat, only to see them naff off to a neighbour’s Bodmin Moor wetland.
The new beaver host refuses to return the gnawing squatters, saying they’ve chosen their preferred digs, and the law forbids him from uplifting or interfering with them anyway.