Welcome back! Last week, I introduced this problem of the feral cat cull in Australia. Today, I will be sharing the results that I obtained from a survey that I conducted with BES students. There were 14 responses in total.

The first question asked respondents whether they would prioritise animal welfare or species conservation. Being BES students, I anticipated responses to prioritise species as I thought that we mostly look at environmental concerns first. These were the results:

11 said they would prioritise species conservation, 1 was for animal welfare while the rest did not know. These results proved my earlier guess of having a greater number of people prioritising conservation.

I asked respondents how they derived at their answers. Some reasons that were cited:

1. From an ecological point of view, culling or removing domesticated animals that pose a threat to native wildlife seems like a logical thing to do.
2. Extinction is an irreversible process.
3. Species conservation covers a wider range of creatures, providing more benefits for biodiversity.
4. It seems more important to protect populations of species since many are endangered compared to animal welfare that is caring for individual domesticated animals.
5. We need to conserve species before we can have animals to give welfare to.

Most of the responses given suggested that we should take action if the species is going extinct while having the cull to be done as humanely as possible. The reasons seem to resonate with my original thinking that we should prioritise whichever would benefit the maximum number of species.

Next, I presented respondents with the same question posed by Dr Coleman to give some context, which is: By 2020, the Australian government wants to meet its target of culling 2 million feral cats in order to save its native wildlife. Is this strategy (culling cats) any different (ethically) from killing rats, as the government actively does in SG? The results for this were:

Reasons for this included:

1. Rats carry the risk of spreading infections among humans and other animals, and their populations need to be controlled in SG. of course killing them is not ideal, but if that’s the only way, it has to be done to safeguard our people.
2. Depends on the species of rat SG is trying to cull. If it is a feral species, I would not stop the programme.
3. Rats are disgusting, you really want to save rats?

It looks like most people acknowledge that rats are not in need of saving as with the cats. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that rats are pests and many people have bad impressions of them. Speciesism maybe? Which is kind of like why we eat pigs and chickens while we love dogs and cats.

It has been a great experience finding out what my peers think about this issue from carrying the first primary research on this blog. Sad to say that we only have one more post before we conclude this journey. See you in the next post!

– Amanda 🙂

Reference List:

Pie charts made using Canva

Featured image: “Feral Cat” by seabamirum is licensed under CC BY 2.0