‘No observant friend of birds keeps a cat’: Cats and Native Bird Preservation in Interwar New Zealand

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, the negative impact of cats on native flora and fauna, especially birds, has received increasing attention in Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2018, for example, the Southland Regional Council proposed ‘a ban on all new domestic cats’ in Omaui, a small village located on the south coast of the South Island, to protect the area’s biodiversity, avifauna in particular.² According to the local biosecurity manager, hearing and seeing tūī (Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae) ‘would more than make up for not being able to own a cat’.³ The majority of the inhabitants did not agree. One resident argued that cats played an integral role in combating the high number of rats and compared the proposed ban to the actions of ‘a police state’.⁴ Five years earlier, in 2013, economist and philanthropist Gareth Morgan suggested a nationwide eradication of domestic cats, causing public outcry.⁵

While proponents of cat bans or even nationwide eradication of the species have met with strong resistance, having even been portrayed as cat-hating fanatics, neither the Southland Regional Council nor Morgan are amongst the first to label cats as a menace to native birds. On the contrary, as this article demonstrates, the notion of killing cats to safeguard native birds is deeply rooted in the New Zealand conservation movement that emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century, in particular within the Native Bird Protection Society (NBPS), founded in 1923 and today commonly known as Forest & Bird.⁶ This article examines propaganda efforts by leading bird preservationists and the NBPS in the interwar period to convince the public of the menace that cats posed to native birds and that cats ought to be destroyed in the name of native bird preservation. This article does not take a position whether cats should be killed to protect indigenous avifauna. Rather, it seeks to highlight the necessity of a historical perspective when discussing the complex relationships between humans, cats and native birds in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Some 80 million years ago, present-day Aotearoa New Zealand broke away from the continent Gondwana. As a consequence of its long isolation, a unique flora and fauna developed, the latter dominated by birds. Indeed, the only mammals on the islands were two species of bats. The lack of mammalian predators resulted in many birds losing the ability to fly in order to save energy.⁷ Māori settlement in the thirteenth century radically changed the living conditions for birds. In addition to hunting birds, Māori burned tracts of forests.⁸ Māori also introduced kiore (Rattus exulanus) and kurī (Canis familiaris), which raided bird nests and preyed on birds.⁹ The arrival of navigator James Cook in 1769, and subsequent British colonization in the nineteenth century, affected native bird life even further. Eager to transform New Zealand into ‘a Britain of the South’ or even ‘a better Britain’, settlers converted large tracts of native forests to farmland, drained swamps and introduced plenty of flora and fauna, both intentionally and accidentally.¹⁰ These drastic environmental changes – reduced natural habitats and new predators – resulted in a severe depletion of native birds; in some instances, even their extinction.

Cats were amongst the first animals introduced by Europeans to Aotearoa. On his first journey (1768–1771), Cook reportedly gifted two cats to local Māori at Uawa on the eastern coast of the North Island.¹¹ Cats’ appetite for native birds was recorded on Cook’s second voyage (1772–1775), when naturalist George Forster observed the ship’s cat regularly jumping ashore for a meal.¹² Yet, despite being one of the first European animals to set their paw onto Aotearoa soil, cats have been largely overlooked in the environmental historiography of Aotearoa New Zealand. In fact, cats have received limited attention amongst scholars of biological invasions in general. Historical geographer Alfred W. Crosby, for example, in his highly influential work Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, in which New Zealand serves as a case study, gives merely an overview of the...