The Cat.
There is no record as to the first introduction of cats into New Zealand; but no doubt they were brought here by the very first settlers—perhaps earlier even, by the crews of vessels which called at Kororareka and other parts of this county in the very early whaling days. They do not seem to have strayed far from the haunts of men until rabbits began to multiply. Then, when the sheep-farmers found that the capacity of the country for carrying sheep was being seriously reduced by the vast increase of rabbits, they resorted to all sorts of devices to cope with the pest. One method was to purchase cats in the towns, take them out to the back country, feed them for a time till they became somewhat habituated to the locality, and then turn them loose. No doubt some died, but most of them became more or less wild, and learned to subsist on the smaller animals of the neighbourhood. Probably native ground-birds suffered most from their presence. They certainly destroyed many young rabbits, but it is also true that they were frequently found living and rearing their young in burrows alongside families of rabbits. They cleared off the rats, which were formerly so common, and they also largely exterminated lizards. My son, Dr. Allan Thomson, tells me that in the Awatere Valley, in Marlborough, rabbit-hunting cats are greatly esteemed by the settlers, and are believed to be much more efficient than stoats and weasels. They are only partly wild, as frequently the domestic cats feed their young on rabbits and interbreed freely with wild cats living near the homesteads. He observed a cat at Awapiri teaching two kittens to kill. She would leave the house, and in about ten minutes’ time would return with a baby rabbit, evidently obtained from a stop. When the kittens were very young she killed the rabbit and skinned it. A week or two later she would give them the dead rabbit with the skin just partially turned back, and they quickly learned to complete the skinning. Still later she gave them the live rabbit, with which at first they played, but in a very short time they learned to approach the rabbit from behind and grip it by the neck, lying practically on top of it and pinching the gullet until the rabbit was strangled. Cats, in his opinion, become rabbit-killers only when they are thus taught by their mothers, but once they acquire the habit they feed on little else.
Dieffenbach, writing of the Piako district in Auckland Province in 1839, says, “The cats, which, on becoming wild, have assumed the streaky grey colour of the original animal while in a state of nature, form a great obstacle to the propagation of any new kinds of birds, and also tend to the destruction of many indigenous species.” This statement about the colour of wild cats has been made much of. It is true to only a very limited extent, and I have always felt that such statements—coming from a traveller who had only limited means of observing the facts, and apparently founded his conclusions on a few isolated observations of the settlers—are not always safe to generalize from. In the present instance they led Darwin (in “The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication”) to quote him, and to use the statement as a proof of the strong tendency to reversion shown by the cat when it escaped from domestication. At the time Dieffenbach wrote settlement was quite in its infancy, and cats had not long been introduced. It is probable, therefore, that his statement, whether the result of his own or other people’s observations, referred to cats which were themselves progeny of grey animals. It certainly is the case that in Central Otago, where cats were freely liberated to cope with the rabbit pest, animals of many and varied colours are now found wild. Mr. Robert Scott, formerly M.P. for Central Otago, who had exceptional opportunities for observing the facts, has recently given me most interesting information regarding this question. He says, “The wild cat was, no doubt, the descendant of the shepherd’s and miner’s tame cat. The predominating colour was grey-striped (or tiger-striped, as some people called them), occasionally yellow, and rarely black or black-and-white. The time I write of was the ‘seventies’—say, from 1870 on to the time when poisoning the rabbits with phosphorized grain came in. The cats, though not numerous, were fairly common, especially in districts where cover, such as fern and scrub, was plentiful. They grew to an immense size, and were game to the last if attacked; in fact, no dog would tackle one single-handed. They were always in the pink of condition, which may be accounted for by the abundance of feed available in the shape of wekas, ducks, and rats, with perhaps a dead sheep or bullock occasionally. When the rabbit-poisoning came in that class or variety of cat disappeared along with the wild pig and weka. The reason for the extermination of the cat is because it prefers the entrails to the flesh. Since that time, up to the present, cats have been turned out in considerable numbers, but the rabbit-trapping has effectually prevented their increase, and the survivors still retain their original colours—that is, black, black-and-white, grey, grey-and-white, &c.; but they are much smaller than the wild cat of forty years ago. My opinion is that had the original cat survived till to-day the colour would have invariably been grey, or, rather, grey-striped.”
Mr. H. C. Weir, of Ida Valley Station, Otago, states that on high country, where rabbit-traps are seldom if ever used, they grow to a very considerable size, and are most commonly of a grey colour; but yellow, grey-and-white, and black are also to be met with. He adds, “I cannot say I ever saw any approaching the tiger-like stripe of the Home-country wild cat, and I have seen a good few of them in the wilds of Sutherlandshire, Scotland.”
Some people consider that wild cats are responsible for much of the failure which has followed the constantly renewed attempts to naturalize game birds. At the annual meeting of the Wellington Acclimatization Society in 1898 a member said, “Cats are more destructive to game than all the hawks, weasels, and stoats in the colony. Most of the bush coverts are full of these cats, a fact which I myself proved near Feilding, where, with the assistance of traps baited with smoked fish, I caught many.” I think they may have contributed to some extent to this failure, but only in a few parts of the country, and then chiefly in the neighbourhood of settlements. Personally, I do not think that wild cats have had much to do with the extermination of introduced game. The whole question is a difficult one to get any definite knowledge upon, opinions differ so much. Thus Mr. Charles J. Peters, of Mount Somers, considers that wild cats are far more effective in keeping down rabbits than are stoats or weasels, and estimates that cats will kill more rabbits in a month than one of the others will in six months.
Mr. B. C. Aston, in a paper on the Kaikoura Mountains, speaks of the half-wild cats which are found about deserted fencers’ and musterers’ camps as retaining “all their love for man’s comradeship if encouraged, but they invariably refuse to eat anything that they have not killed themselves. They probably exist on rabbits, birds, and mice. As a result of their hunting habits their chest and forelegs are largely developed, and they have a look different from the ordinary cat, being leaner, and quicker in action.”
Wild cats, so my son Dr. Allan Thomson tells me, are the bane of the island sanctuaries of New Zealand, being present on Kapiti Island, Little Barrier Island, and Stephen Island, in which last they kill and eat the tuatara. They have been reduced to small numbers by shooting, but their complete extermination has not yet been accomplished.
When the Russian Commander Bellingshausen visited the Macquaries in 1820 he found numbers of wild cats hid among the foliage. There were at the time, however, two parties of traders (seal-hunters?) on the island, one of thirteen and the other of twenty-seven men, and these probably accounted for the cats.
Captain Musgrave, who was a castaway from the schooner “Grafton,” when she was wrecked on the Auckland Islands in 1864, found a cat in a trap more than a year after the date of the wreck. “She soon cleared the hut of mice, which were dreadfully common.”
In 1868 Mr. H. H. Travers, in his account of a visit to the Chatham Islands, states that wild cats were very abundant, and that they destroyed a great number of the indigenous birds.