From the April 15 edition of The Week’s Morning Report, we have learned that feral cats living at Mexico’s National Palace will not be evicted when President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s term ends later this year. López Obrador has designated the 19 cats as “living fixed assets” a term that “usually applies to furniture or buildings,” according to The Associated Press. Mexico’s treasury is now obligated to feed and take care of the animals for the rest of their lives. “The cats make their presence known in the palace, sometimes even walking into presidential meetings.” We hope those cats have been sterilized.
The New York Times (April 16) reports that in Australia feral cats have become such unwelcome pests, destroying endangered native animals, that they are being hunted to protect vulnerable wildlife. Cats were introduced to Australia by European settlers in the 18th century, and since then at least 34 species of native mammals have gone extinct. According to an Australian wildlife ecologist, cats are “a major contributor to the worst mammalian extinction rate in the modern world.”