Then my husband dropped the bomb: “I heard there were cats.”

He had named the only phenomenon on Earth that could lure me out of bed before sunrise. That’s because cats are crepuscular or most active at dawn and dusk. The only spare time we had to glimpse the fabled street cats of Old San Juan in all their furry glory meant that I needed to get my ass out of bed.

Bolstered by my giant travel mug chock full of coffee, I was rewarded with a breezy tropical morning. We arrived at the Paseo del Morro just as the sun was peeking through the clouds, but the mile-long walkway that wove between Spanish city walls and turquoise waters sat nearly empty. As a landscape photographer, my husband was thrilled. As a cat lover, I was not. After 20 minutes of wandering and seeing a solitary tabby flick a disdainful tail in my direction, I began to wonder whether my husband had played a practical joke on me.

Then I heard the electric hum of a small golf cart puttering in my direction. It stopped 10 feet away from me. The motor generated a far more effective version of the pspspspsps that I had been trying for the last quarter-hour. Within seconds, the golf cart was swarmed by voracious, yodeling felines. Cats seemed to melt out of the rocks. I felt like I had been dropped into a scene that resulted from a Vulcan mind-meld of Salvador Dalí and T.S. Eliot. 

After filling bowls with kibble and water, the volunteer from Save a Gato, a local nonprofit helping the Paseo’s cats, tootled several hundred yards down the path, and the spectacle repeated itself. Some visitors had dubbed the mile-long trail the San Juan catwalk, and a quick perusal of the trail’s reviews revealed that I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed the feline spectacle.

So three years later, in October 2022, when I read an announcement by the National Park Service that they wanted community input on a cat management plan for the Paseo del Morro, I was confused. The cats almost seemed like they were part of the landscape. But it took only a few seconds for me to realize that no, they aren’t. Not really. I gulped hard. Was the spectacle I so enjoyed actually destroying our planet?

San Juan is filled with street cats, many of which are strays and dependent on resident ailurophiles for food. Yet to ecologists, these kitties are one of the world’s most dangerous invasive species. Félix López, cultural resources program manager at the San Juan National Historic Site, which includes the Paseo, told me the ongoing presence of more than 100 feral cats along the walkway prevents the park from conserving wildlife and the natural habitat there as it’s mandated to do.

“We should not be feeding animals in any national park site,” López says. “This is not right for the animal, not right for the environment and this is not right for us.”

For nearly 20 years, Save a Gato has been trying to reduce the Paseo’s cat population through the trap-neuter-return method, or TNR, as it’s known by the feline cognoscenti. This includes spaying and neutering feral and unowned cats, and returning them to their outdoor homes. Cat numbers will decline naturally, and the remaining felines will prevent other cats from elbowing their way into the colony’s land.

But López says the presence of Save a Gato also leads locals to abandon their unwanted kittens and cats at the Paseo. Many assume that the combination of kitty’s natural independence, and the extra food and water the nonprofit provides, will be adequate for their erstwhile pets. As a result, the Paseo’s cat population remains massive. Something, López says, must be done.

“This is an area where cats should not have been present from the beginning,” he says. “The cats just basically made the site their home.”

At community meetings in San Juan, the Park Service ran head-first into local cat lovers who objected to any efforts to manage the Paseo’s cats. Management, they knew, meant euthanasia for the animals they had come to cherish. (NPS said they will make their final decision based on public comments.)

Many environmentalists disagree, however. 

Forget the Hatfields and McCoys, or the Jets and the Sharks. One of the most vehement conflicts in modern America is between the Cat People and the Bird People. When Dara Wald held focus groups with various feline- and avian-focused nonprofits as part of her doctoral dissertation research at the University of Florida, she had to keep the wildlife organizations separate from the cat groups.

Those in cat rescue saw conservation groups as cat haters advocating for modern-day feline pogroms. Conservationists, in turn, painted rescue groups as full of crazy cat ladies whose brains were addled by Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite found in some cat feces. Addressing the cat’s impact on the environment, however, requires the two sides to work together.

“It’s not black and white,” says Lynette McLeod, an environmental psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “It’s about sitting down with people and not demonizing the other. It’s trying to find solutions that can cater to all parties. There’s no easy answer.”

So what’s a cat lover to do? Until I stuck a tentative toe into this debate, I didn’t see an inherent conflict between my love of cats and my deep-seated beliefs in conservation. To a large extent, I still don’t. But with an estimated 3o to 80 million unowned cats roaming the outdoors in the United States plus an additional 30% of the country’s 60-80 million pet cats allowed outside and global bird numbers in free fall, we must all ask ourselves, which animals do we value, why, and are our cat problems instead human ones.

Sweet Kitty As Predator

I have shared my life with cats for 20 years. I love their sandpaper tongues, their commitment to the belief that they are starving and wasting away to nuffinks as soon as the bottom of their food bowl is visible. I love their conviction that not only are cats the best species, but they are also the epitome of what a cat should be. I love how my current cat — a mischievous six-year-old former mama cat named Ophelia — insists that her habit of following me from room to room like a brown- and orange-striped shadow, and curling up between my husband and me on the couch every evening is pure coincidence and most definitely not an indication that she loves us. Not at all.

I also know that Ophelia is a predator. As an indoor cat, her prey is limited to toes, pens and my hair. If she were outside, though, there would be carnage. But then this is why humans started keeping cats around. When humans began farming in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago, they found themselves storing grain surpluses. Lots of grain meant lots of rodents. Just as mice and rats were drawn to the smorgasbord of ready carbs, cats were drawn to the rodent buffet.

More courageous cats, who were able to cope with sharing space with other cats, benefitted from the easy access to rodents and whatever food scraps they could scavenge. As a bonus, they got shelter, some protection from predators and the occasional scratch behind the ears. Humans, for their part, got mobile rodent control and an adorable companion. While we encouraged this process, even helped facilitate it, it wasn’t done with the same deliberation and care of, say, dogs and livestock. Instead, in an on-brand move for the species, cats domesticated themselves. Well, mostly.

Until the invention of kitty litter after World War II, even the most pampered of pussycats were often let outside to do their business. Whether it’s due to less time living alongside humans or some other factor, cats retained a wildness that other house pets and so-called ‘domestic’ animals didn’t have. And they still do.

Many municipalities in the U.S. have leash laws for dogs, requiring them when off the owner’s property. Cat owners, however, often let their pets out by opening the door or installing a cat flap. Finding out where kitty spends their off-hours typically requires reconnaissance with neighbors or attaching a camera to their pet.

This autonomy is much of what makes cats so endearing, says researcher Lee Niel at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. The freedom to roam and ready access to the great outdoors is tied up in what many cat owners believe is fundamental to the very nature of cats. To have a good life — to reach the highest rung of cat-ness — cats need to go outside.

In a 2021 study of more than 5,100 cat owners from Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, researchers from the United Kingdom’s Nottingham Trent University and the University of Edinburgh found that nearly two-thirds of cat owners let their cat outside for the cat’s benefit.  Kitty’s benefit, however, comes at a cost to nature. 

One study found that within a one-week period, although 44% of cats successfully hunted outdoors, they only returned with 23% of their prey. 

“Because cats only bring a small proportion of their prey home, owners don’t really see that impact,” Niel says.

Arie Trouwborst, a nature conservation attorney at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, sees this issue as a major problem. Take, for example, many endangered species laws, which institute fines and other penalties for killing protected plants and animals. If you or your child did so, you would be fined. Same goes for your dog. But your cat? There, owners are often let off the hook.

“Many authorities will take the position that these rules do not actually apply, and that that it is okay to let these cats outdoors,” he says.

Many cat owners shrug off the issue, Trouwborst says. For some, it’s the same disconnect that Niel described in Guelph, a divide between what’s known about cat behavior and what some cat owners think about their own, specific cats. To Trouwborst, the bigger issue is our tolerance of unrestrained roaming. The idea of unfettered, al fresco freedom is so elemental to felines — it’s what makes a cat, a cat — that we don’t question it.

When we see an unleashed dog running free, many of us call the owner or animal control. There’s a tacit understanding that a dog must always be restrained, confined or supervised. A wandering kitty, on the other hand, typically elicits a shrug or a pspspspsps. It’s reflected in how we hold dog owners responsible for the actions of their pets but more frequently let cat owners off the hook, Trouwborst says. What results, he writes in a 2020 paper in the journal People and Nature, is a giant loophole in endangered species legislation.

“We didn’t come up with anything that might constitute a valid justification for not applying the law. So the hypothesis that’s left is that this is just politically unattractive for government bodies to engage with,” Trouborst says. Their solution? They simply ignore it, he says.

The problem, however, isn’t just the occasional feline snacking on one of our feathered friends. Most parts of the environment are so disturbed by humans that a one-off predation wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar. The problem is the sheer number of cats roaming the outdoors. Collectively, these house pets have an impact even if each individual cat isn’t always a lean, mean, furry killing machine. Although I can’t quantify the positive impact my cats have had on my life, their impact on the environment can be. And it’s not pretty.

Each year, cats collectively kill billions of birds, rodents, insects, reptiles and amphibians. They routinely make lists of the world’s worst invasive species. Free-ranging cats have been implicated in the extinction of Lyall’s wren in New Zealand and contributed to the extinction of 33 other species , and are considered a major threat to others, especially on an island like New Zealand — where birds, otherwise, have no natural land predators. To conservationists, it’s a major crisis.

What’s In A Name?

Pet cats aren’t the only ones causing this murder and mayhem. A major issue that’s far more challenging than merely deciding to keep Fluffy inside is the large number of unowned cats roaming our streets and wilderness. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out what the heck to call them.

The most common term is feral cat. Unlike a stray cat that may be fearful but has had some contact with humans, feral cats have limited to no contact with humans and remain highly fearful. Even the friendliest housecat can have kittens that grow up to be feral if they don’t become comfortable around humans in their early development, between three to 12 weeks. 

“It’s not a descriptor with positive connotations,” says Kris Hill, a doctoral student in anthrozoology at England’s University of Exeter. “It’s not an endearment or a good word.”

The definition of feral has life-or-death implications. Being labeled as “feral” is often grounds for being euthanized at many animal shelters. Even so-called “no-kill” shelters can euthanize animals with “severe or untreatable illnesses or behavior issues,” according to the American Humane Society.  In Australia, legislation classifies feral cats as pests and permits communities to poison, trap and shoot the cats under certain circumstances. Some U.S. municipalities have laws banning people from feeding feral cats while simultaneously requiring owners of pet cats to provide them with adequate food and shelter. Same animal, different rules.

Using the word “feral” is a way for us to mentally distance ourselves from the cat — to “other” it, Hill says. As I speak with Hill, I realize that many of us have a disconnect about feral cats that’s the flip side of our attitude toward outdoor cats. We think of the feral cat as a cold-blooded killer unlike the beloved sweet kitty — as capable of similar assault — that curls up on our cat tree at home and later, purrs us into a deep slumber.

Feral cats have gained the reputation of being disease-ridden, aggressive and anti-social. There’s some truth to this. Unfixed cats fight and yowl at all hours of the day. Cats spray urine to mark their territory, tomcats to signal their reproductive availability, which can leave a musky, pungent smell. Cat intestines are also required for the single-celled parasite Toxoplasma to complete its life cycle, and can cause disease in humans and other mammals. Scientists have identified devastating Toxoplasma outbreaks in marine mammals, infected when contaminated water made its way to the sea. But this doesn’t mean that feral cats don’t have rich social lives with other cats or that they should be universally reviled, Hill says. 

It’s a view that’s shared by many who advocate for TNR as a humane, compassionate way to reduce the number of unowned cats. Hard evidence on whether TNR works is scarce and inconclusive. So, for that matter, is evidence of the efficacy of euthanizing feral cats. But not everyone believes that TNR is humane or appropriate.

Bird conservation organizations like the National Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy condemn TNR as ineffective and inappropriate. Spayed and neutered cats still hunt, after all. Even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals objects, arguing that “although altering feral cats prevents future generations from suffering, it does not protect cats from the litany of other problems that they may encounter.

Allowing feral cats to continue their daily struggle for survival in a hostile environment is rarely a humane option.” Often the best option, PETA says, is euthanizing the cats. What’s more, the presence of cared-for feral cat colonies encourages people to dump their unwanted cats. The TNR challenges faced by Save a Gato in San Juan are echoed across the United States and around the world.

If humans can’t agree on what a feral cat is and what it means to live your life as a feral animal, then it’s probably not surprising that we also can’t agree on how to approach the problem of feral cats. As Wald spoke to wildlife advocates and cat rescues across Florida, she found that nearly everyone recognized that the state had far too many unowned cats and that communities needed to bring those numbers down. But even this agreement on the fundamentals of an issue isn’t enough to convince both sides to work together. Different values and priorities make that seemingly impossible.

Both sides, Wald says, value animal life. Cat advocates told her that their beloved four-legged felines have as much right to life as other animals, and are only one of many species that kill birds and rodents. (After all, bird populations are in decline for many reasons, including habitat loss largely from agriculture, climate change, pesticides and toxins, other invasive species, and their deaths from collisions with glass and other industrial infrastructure.)

Birders and wildlife lovers say that the value of a wild species far outweighs that of feral and pet cats. Whereas nearly half of all global bird species are in decline, according to a 2022 State of the Birds report by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, Felis catus isn’t going anywhere.

The point of Wald’s research isn’t to tell communities what species to value, but to figure out how they can come together to address the problem. Officials in Canberra, Australia, for example, created a rule that all newly-adopted cats must be kept indoors, allowing older cats to continue to roam in most neighborhoods. Within a few years, the city’s cat population will be exclusively inside-only (or leashed when outside). Miami-Dade Animal Services in Florida has started paying volunteers $15 for every adult feral cat that they trap and spay or neuter. 

What made these programs work is the recognition that the problem with cats has nothing to do with cats at all. The issue is a fundamentally human problem. Even basic veterinary care can be inaccessible to some pet owners. We let our cats roam instead of keeping them inside or taking a page from the social media hashtag, #adventurecats, and walking them on a leash. We provide food but don’t spay and neuter them. And when we move, we don’t or can’t always take our cats with us. 

Even I, knowing all this, played a part by relishing the presence of the cats along Old San Juan’s walkway. While the chances that I will ever turn down the chance to pet a cat are minimal, I also can’t deny that everyone — residents, tourists, local wildlife, even the cats themselves — would be better off if all cats had indoor homes and the Paseo was magically feline-free.  The presence of so many unowned felines is a human failing, and we owe it to ourselves and the animals we love to do better.

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My goal was simply to anesthetize them and then search their wrinkled, vellum wings and bulging eyes for mutations. It was a classic introductory genetics experiment, one taught to countless aspiring biologists for a century. I doused a cotton ball with ether, the fruity-smelling liquid that would render the flies temporarily unconscious (and easier to count). The instructor warned us to make sure the flies were completely knocked out, so they didn’t wake up mid-experiment. So I left the ether-soaked cotton on the vial an extra minute or two. Just to be safe.

It wasn’t the first time I killed an animal in the name of science. I dissected a fetal pig in a high school biology class. I massacred bacteria by the billions as a student research technician and budding microbiologist. The only twinge of guilt I felt when dissecting worms as a 12-year-old was when my mom served spaghetti with meat sauce for dinner, and the noodles on my plate looked all too similar to the slimy earthworms I had earlier dispatched to Valhalla with a scalpel. 

And so I told myself that the flies had lived a good life, with plenty of overripe bananas and opportunities to swipe right on Drosophila Tinder. They died for a good cause. 

I’m not heartless. Had I accidentally gassed several dozen kittens, I would have yeeted myself off the nearest building, overcome with guilt. These were flies. It was no big deal.

Most biologists would agree with me. “When I started studying bees in the late 1980s, the prevailing view was not just that they’re not conscious, but that they are just incapable of any kind of emotion,” Lars Chittka, a sensory and behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, told me recently. “The whole notion would have seemed just absurd.”

However, a growing collection of new experiments is challenging the old consensus. Far from being six-legged automatons, they can experience feelings akin to pain and suffering, joy and desire. When Chittka gave bumblebees an extra jolt of sucrose, their favorite food, the bees buzzed with delight. Agitated, anxious honeybees, on the other hand, responded with pessimism when researchers shook them to simulate a predatory attack. Other researchers found that they “scream” when under threat. Ants display rudimentary counting abilities, can understand the concept of zero and make tools. Fruit flies learn from their peers. Cockroaches have complex social lives. Fruit flies drown themselves in booze when deprived of mating opportunities. Some earwigs and other insects play dead when threatened by a predator.

In other words, insects have thoughts and feelings. The next question for philosophers and scientists alike is: Do they have consciousness?

Nearly 400 years ago, the French philosopher and polymath René Descartes formulated a devastatingly simple answer to the question, “What is consciousness?” Cogito, ergo sum —I think, therefore I am. Hidden in that three-word Latin phrase is the assumption that humans are the only thinking animals. No matter how emphatically you ask a monkey or a snail whether they are alive and conscious, they will never answer. As the only species endowed by God with a soul and rational mind, humans, Descartes believed, sat at the summit of all life on Earth.

Cutting-edge research over the last few years has begun to shift this view. 

“Humans are no longer seen as at the pinnacle of creation,” Catherine Wilson, a philosophy fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, told me. “There’s a greater modesty and awareness in which we are just one species — and maybe not even the most important species.”

To Wilson, the biological basis of consciousness arises from the separation of self from the world. “Animals need to know what their movements are and what is happening in the world,” she said. That gives rise to an experience, which is the fundamental building block of consciousness. It’s an idea that builds on a 1974 essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who tried to answer the question of consciousness by asking: “What is it like to be a bat?” Unlike most humans, who move through the world guided mostly by sight, many bats are nearly blind and navigate by sound. And while many of us may have imagined life as a bat, only bats can know what it’s like to be a bat.

“Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task,” Nagel wrote. “I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions and modifications.”

If any creature has a sense of what it’s like to be that creature, Nagel’s argument goes, it’s conscious. Whether we humans can understand what it’s like is beside the point. As I was re-reading Nagel’s essay recently, a group of cardinals alit on the bird feeder outside my office window. My cat perched on the sill, ears forward like furry satellite dishes, her tail swishing in preparation for a pounce. She even called out to them, a raspy chirp of eckeckeckeckeck.

My cat almost certainly has a sense of what it’s like to be a cat, and a bat has that same sense for itself, but do flies and other insects? And if they do have this sense, where does it come from? 

Whereas Descartes could claim that human consciousness was a gift of the divine, modern scientists and philosophers don’t treat consciousness as if it were miraculously bestowed upon the world, all neatly tied up with a big red bow. Consciousness, then, is a natural phenomenon, not a religious one. 

That meant consciousness had to have a biological explanation. That explanation immediately focused on the brain. To Descartes and like-minded philosophers, consciousness is inextricably linked to the human mind. 

“It’s all about the cortex,” Christopher Hill, a philosopher at Brown University, told me. The cortex is the brain’s folded, wrinkly cap — what science communicator Ze Frank calls “the thinky thinky parts.” The swollen cortex of a person controls many of the features that we typically consider make us human: things like rational thought, awareness and language. If consciousness were a purely human phenomenon, then its origination in the cortex makes sense. The human cortex is so much bigger than other species’ that it’s part of what makes Homo sapiens neurologically special. 

Despite their reputation as mindless automatons, insects have three blobs of neural tissue that, taken together, form a brain. What insects don’t have is a cortex — nothing that even resembles one. To Hill, this means they can’t have consciousness. Without this dense, gray lid of neurons, consciousness is just not possible.

Other researchers aren’t so sure. They have begun to question whether consciousness originates from a place at all, spurring a rethinking of why it exists in the first place. However overgrown it might be in humans, the cerebral cortex didn’t emerge fully formed out of nowhere. It evolved over time, as did other neural structures. And if consciousness also evolved, then maybe the cortex isn’t the be-all, end-all of consciousness. Maybe consciousness is far more primitive. 

Insects might lack the hardware called a cerebral cortex, but they have plenty of other neural real estate. Could their brains perhaps contain the basis of consciousness? 

Like most good collaborations, it began over beer. Colin Klein, a philosopher, and Andy Barron, who studies the neural mechanisms of animals, then both working at Macquarie University in Sydney, met at a science pub night. They had a pint and struck up a conversation on what researchers call the neural correlates of consciousness. 

In the beginning, they agreed that insects were not conscious. But as they talked, they started to punch holes in their assumptions. They remembered that, in 2007, the Swedish neuroscientist Björn Merker argued that consciousness didn’t originate in the highly advanced cortex, but in a more primitive section of the brain at the top of the brain stem. Klein and Barron honed in on one part of that area, the tongue-shaped segment of neurons about an inch long called the midbrain, which controls a variety of involuntary functions, such as vision and motor control, as well as processing some sensory input. It was this latter task that attracted Merker’s attention for its potential role in consciousness. 

Klein and Barron found Merker’s argument compelling — and if it was true, insects might very well be conscious. In a 2016 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they argued that insects do have the functional equivalent of the human midbrain, which means they could very likely have some form of consciousness. 

Not many people believed the conclusion, Klein told me. A big mistake, he pointed out, is thinking that insect consciousness is like human consciousness. Humans tend to think of consciousness as the ability to worry ourselves into knots about future events that have an infinitesimal chance of happening — or to question whether other species have consciousness. But consciousness itself, Klein says, is much deeper and more primitive. It’s a sense of yourself in the world. It’s suffering. It’s bliss.

It’s hard to get more primitive than pain and pleasure. Even bacteria know kinds of pain and pleasure — they are hardwired to swim toward some signals but away from others. So do fish. And insects.

But so what? If insects have consciousness, what does that even mean?

A moral philosopher who has pondered this question is Peter Singer. Singer stopped eating meat in the late 1960s as a student at Oxford University, after a friend told him about the abuse of animals in the meat industry. Singer’s 1975 book “Animal Liberation” — widely considered to be the founding philosophy of the animal rights movement — laid bare the problems of overlooking suffering in everything from scientific research to food. 

But at first, insects weren’t on his radar. “I was always unsure about invertebrates, such as cephalopods and crustaceans,” he told me. “I wasn’t thinking very much about it. I was just hoping that they weren’t sentient and there wasn’t an issue there.”

Over the years, however, Singer has continued to ask himself about the nature of animal suffering and what enables it, biologically. He has come to the same conclusion as Klein and Chittka: that insects do have some sort of consciousness. 

But Singer takes it one step further: If insects are conscious, how should humans treat them? Take agricultural pesticides. Anything that causes mass suffering and death in its intended victims is problematic, he said, because whether or not those victims are conscious, they can feel pain. Thus, farmers should use whichever one causes insects to immediately lose consciousness — “the equivalent of a humane slaughter law.” 

I asked Singer if there was some sort of suffering math that could be calculated. If, say, a cricket is one-tenth as conscious as a chicken and can thus only suffer one-tenth as much, but it requires 100 crickets to get the same protein as a chicken, would we then be increasing the suffering in the universe by an order of magnitude? 

Singer paused for a minute, then nodded. “Maybe,” he said. It’s not that simple, he went on, but it’s something most governments should be thinking about, and they aren’t.

Most, but not all. Last November, the British government recognized crustaceans and cephalopods (octopi and squid) as sentient, and proposed legislation would make it illegal to boil lobsters alive. There are already laws barring the same cooking method in Switzerland and elsewhere.

In the end, I don’t know whether insects have consciousness or not. Nobody else can say for sure, either. I do, however, think the question is worth asking: What is it like to be a bee or an ant? We lose little by elbowing humans out of the center of every decision-making process, instead asking how our actions impact other animals, even small ones we think are dumb and gross. As Wilson put it: “We are living, suffering and enjoying beings in a whole world of other living, suffering and enjoying beings. And we should not be depriving them unnecessarily of their experiences.”

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