S5E4 - European Wildcat

In this Animal Highlight, fellow Virginia Thomas discusses the European Wild Cat and their entangled relationships with domesticated cats. She notes how the interbreeding between these two species has conservationists worried and has resulted in a range of, oftentimes, violent interventions into their animals’ lives.

Recorded: 12 October 2023 

 Featured: 

• S5E3: Feral and Invasive Species with Lauren van Patter on The Animal Turn.
• S6E4: Violence with Dinesh Wadiwel on The Animal Turn. 
• Scottish ‘Highland Tiger’ wildcat more endangered than Asian cousin on the BBC.
• Giraffe Marius slaughtered in Copenhagen Zoo, fed to lions on Euronews. 
• The Violent Conservation of the European Wildcat by Virginia Thomas

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects, BBC, Euronews. 
• Learn more about the team here. 

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A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Animal Highlights Series
• 1:20 Understanding European Wildcats
• 2:40 Hybridization Threat and Conservation Crisis
• 4:46 Violence in Conservation Practices
• 7:28 Ethics of Species Preservation
• 9:56 Questioning Species Boundaries
• 13:47 Episode Closing and Credits

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

This is another iRaw podcast. We podcast to make the world a better place for animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 0:16

Welcome back to season five of the Animal Highlights, where we're focused on animals and politics. All the content from this season has been extracted from season six of the Animal Turn podcast, which is a season of the same name Animals and Politics. This season, my co-host will be Virginia Thomas, who's an environmental social scientist. She was previously also a research fellow with the Wellcome Trust funded project from Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals. In this episode, Virginia Thomas talks all about the European wild cat and their entangled relationships with domesticated cats. She notes how the interbreeding between these two species has conservationists worried and has resulted in a range of oftentimes violent interventions into these animals' lives. These animals' lives. Hello Virginia, we are now doing the fourth animal highlight. I can't believe it. We're almost halfway through the season. It's been fascinating so far and I've been enjoying your highlights. So who are we going to be focusing on today?

Virginia Thomas: 1:20

Well, this highlight is on cats. Really, I want to highlight the European wildcat in Britain, but when you talk about the European wildcat in Britain, it's hard not to talk about the domestic cat as well. As the name suggests, the European wildcat is a wildcat native to Europe. Big wildcats include lions, tigers and leopards, whereas small wildcats include ocelots, the jungle cat, the African wildcat, which is where our pet cats come from, and the European wildcat. The European wildcat lives across Europe and they look a lot like a domestic tabby cat. They have black and brown tabby-like markings and they're only a little bit bigger than your average domestic cat. A lot of work has been done by people like Andrew Kitchener to reliably distinguish European wildcats from domestic cats, including genetic testing and pelage scoring, a technique used to identify cats by looking at their coat markings.

Virginia Thomas: 2:28

Even though the European wildcat and the domestic cat are different species, they can and do interbreed because they've lived in close proximity for thousands of years.

Virginia Thomas: 2:40

Now, often when different species breed, their offspring are infertile, but this isn't true for the European wildcats and domestic cats. Their hybrid offspring are fertile and capable of breeding with each other or with wild or domestic cats, and this is why the difference between wildcats and domestic cats is important. Wildcats are threatened across Europe, but in Britain they're critically endangered, and this is both a cause and an effect of hybridisation. Because there are so few wild cats, they have trouble finding other wild cats to mate with. They're much more likely to find a domestic cat. And then, of course, if they do mate, instead of producing wild cat kittens to reinforce the population, they produce hybrid kittens which, from a conservation point of view at least, are a problem for wildcat conservation, because they dilute the wildcat gene pool, pose a further threat in terms of hybridization and don't contribute to wildcat conservation. Now the European wildcat used to be found across Britain, but now they only really survive in small parts of Scotland.

Speaker 4: 3:48

This is not a domestic cat that has gone wild. This is a truly wild animal that moved in here shortly after the glaciers left Britain. Unfortunately, it really is in trouble. Its range has contracted massively, from once having covered the whole of Britain to just parts of the Scottish Highlands.

Virginia Thomas: 4:08

So there's a major drive to conserve and restore the population, but this is where we get onto the violence that you've been discussing in this episode. According to the conservation practice involved, restoring wild cats requires two things Captive breeding of wild cats to produce kittens to release into the wild and control in scare. Quotes quotes of feral domestic cats, which are the domestic cats most likely to breathe as wild cats. Let me talk about control of feral cats first. As you discussed with lauren van patter on a previous episode of the animal turn, the concept of feral is not value neutral. So even the categorization of cats as feral is a form of phylum, since feral has negative connotations. John Sarkastor identifies these negative connotations as pestilent undertones. Jacqueline Johnston describes them as creating I quote exclusionary narratives that with feral animals, we don't view them as domestic and therefore entitled to our protection, but nor do we view them as wild and worthy of consolation. In fact, we view them as a threat to consolation, especially when they present what we see as a threat to wild species. Now in Britain killing domestic cats is extremely unpopular, but feral cats are still managed in violent ways via trap, neuter, vaccinate, release programs. These programs might be familiar to listeners. Feral cats are lured into traps with food, taken to veterinary clinics where they're neutered and vaccinated, and then released back where they were caught. Not only is the whole process highly stressful for the cats, but it's also an example of the kind of forced medical and surgical interventions which Dinesh was talking about. This could be argued through the fact that cats don't consent to the procedure, given that a trap is used as an instrument of violence to orchestrate the whole process. We can also identify the three types of violence which you and Dinesh discussed. So the use of traps and the non-consensual neutering and vaccination of these cats is intersubjective violence, violence against the cats as individuals. The Trap, mute and Vaccinate Release Programme is a form of institutional, structural violence against feral cats collectively. And then the classification of cats as feral is a form of ecostemic violence which excludes certain kinds of cats from being rights-bearing individuals. Let's compare this with the violence which was perpetrated on wild cats.

Virginia Thomas: 6:58

I mentioned earlier that wild cats in Scotland were involved in captive breeding programs to produce kittens for release. This involves their mating and reproduction being entirely dominated and controlled, you could even say coerced by people. Now conservationists might argue that these breeding programs are for the benefit of cats, both individually and as a collective. But what Dinesh was saying was that care and coercion or violence, can look very similar, depending on your perspective. So we might look at the relations, especially the power relations perspective. So we might look at the relations, especially the power relations, between humans and wild cats. In this situation, could we consider the cats to be consensually participating in the captive breeding program? Do they have control over the program, over their own bodies and reproduction, or even over their own future? The fact that these cats are in captivity is a form of violence in itself, but, like the traps in trap muta vaccinate release programs, the enclosures they're in also show us that they're not consenting to participation in the breeding program, since if the enclosures were opened, they would undoubtedly leave. They would undoubtedly leave.

Virginia Thomas: 8:12

European wildcats, unlike the African wildcat, which was the ancestor of our domestic cat, are famously undomesticatable. They're highly anthropophobic and avoid humans as much as possible. It's unlikely that we'd see them voluntarily entering into contact or cooperation with people to undertake this sort of breeding program, even if it's in their interest as a species. So, while conservationists are deeply concerned with species survival and with the welfare of animals in captive breeding programs, the story of the European wildcat illustrates how conservation can sometimes sit at odds with a rights-based framework that privileges the experience of individuals. We can stop and ask what or who the conservation program is serving Genetics, species, individuals and what are the ethical implications of all this?

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 9:07

Yeah, those are really really important questions. I think, yeah, conservation is tricky, because I have no doubt that people who are doing conservation care deeply about animals and want to save entire species and can be frustrated by some of these questions about the ethics of individuals, but they are really important. Was it Marty? I think it was Marty. Oh, I'm confusing this with the film Madagascar, but there was a giraffe in a zoo who was killed not too long ago.

Speaker 5: 9:34

Marius, marius, it was Marius. He was 18 months old. But Marius, the young giraffe at Copenhagen Zoo, had to go. Despite a campaign to save him, he was shot in the head. Officials outlined the reasons as a lack of space and the need to comply with European rules on inbreeding. The animal had to be put down to ensure a healthy giraffe population.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 9:56

Yeah, and he was killed. It was a perfectly healthy giraffe but was killed because the genetic pool was not appropriate. And I think that really raises some ethical questions. Right, and people always think that conservation is through and through an ethical practice, like it's got a veneer of being. And again, I think it's tricky and it's complicated. But when you start to put intention, the kind of experiences of an individual being trapped and yeah, I'm happy you brought up lauren van patten's episode there as well, because you know, I don't know it's somehow like we're trying to suspend evolution. What if feral cats and european wild cats do interbreed and you've got a different species emerging, like, is it this big travesty? Maybe, maybe it is, I don't know, I don't know enough about it. But do we really need to be so protective of species?

Virginia Thomas: 10:44

boundaries, just a human construct. But a hybridization is how new species emerge and in some cases we're really happy to embrace those species, like the bison. The european bison is a hybrid of, I believe, another bison and the aurochs, which is now extinct, but might need to double check on that. But it's definitely a hybrid.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 11:18

No, no, I don't think. Okay, yeah, I don't know if it's got the auroch in it, because the aurochs, I think if I'm not mistaken aurochs went extinct in 1627 in Poland, so I think. But maybe there was interbreeding prior to their extinction, which would still make?

Virginia Thomas: 11:33

I don't think so. It's definitely a hybrid, but we're quite happy to embrace that one. But we're very concerned about other hybridizations particularly. Actually, I think where it comes in is where we get hybridizations of a wild species and a domestic species and the. The reason that people are particularly concerned about wildcat domestic cat hybridization in britain is that they think, instead of leading to what they call a stable hybrid like the European bison and the formation of a new species, eventually it will just lead to the sort of complete extinction of the wildcat genes because there are so few left. They'll just be bred out and out and out and you end up with a really diluted wildcat gene and basically another wildcat gene and basically another wildcat, a domestic cat.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 12:24

Yeah, I mean I've guaranteed there are complexities here and concerns that I'm just not that I'm not trained to see, but it does feel like there is sometimes an anxiety and a panic over species boundaries. That is perhaps a bit overstated. So you know, like it's interesting because we also foster some hybridization, right like we'll, we'll allow and think it's totally fine for people to go ahead and breed tigers and lions and try to create their own different types of species of plants and stuff.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 12:51

I'm not, I'm not sure we think, but the cross breeding tigers and lions is ideal people no, but some people are like allowed to do it, or I mean, I don't know, I don't know. I just I think I think we sometimes have double standards when it comes to this, and when it comes to at least the bison. I wonder if the reason that hybridized species is more accepted than the emergence of a new hybridized species is because of time but, like you say, there are probably will this just dilute the European cat population so much so that the whole population goes extinct? Or is this a very unique kind of survival strategy that they're busy employing to continue their genes in some shape or form? Yeah, definitely interesting and challenging.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 13:35

Anyway, thank you so much, virginia, for joining me again. Thank you, nice to see you again. Anyway, thank you so much, virginia for joining me again. Thank you, nice to see you again. Thank you so much to Virginia Thomas for being an incredible co-host and to Rebecca Shen for her work on the logo and all the artwork done with the animal highlight. The show was edited and produced by myself. This is the Animal Highlight, with me, claudia Hüttenfelder.

Speaker 1: 14:19

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