Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.Lee@cnc3.co.tt

Stake­hold­ers who oc­cu­py the Ca­roni Bird Sanc­tu­ary are call­ing for some­thing to be done to ad­dress a cat in­fes­ta­tion at the na­tion­al park, as over 100 of the an­i­mals are now roam­ing the en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly pro­tect­ed site.

When Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the Bird Sanc­tu­ary ear­li­er this month, dozens of cats were spot­ted on the com­pound, and tour op­er­a­tors said they were hunt­ing birds and oth­er an­i­mals at the site.

Nanan Tours di­rec­tor Al­lis­ter Nanan said the num­bers start­ed get­ting out of con­trol ap­prox­i­mate­ly three years ago. He said they had done every­thing in their pow­er to curb the prob­lem, but peo­ple kept dump­ing them.

“What peo­ple do­ing is that they know that the cats are be­ing fed there ten times a day. I saw a la­dy come and dump a whole box of cats here,” he said.

This was con­firmed by T&T So­ci­ety for the Pre­ven­tion of Cru­el­ty Against An­i­mals (TTSP­CA) chair­man Si­ta Ku­ruvil­la. She said cats were nat­ur­al hunters, adding that the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture had ap­proached her non-gov­ern­ment or­gan­i­sa­tion to as­sist but they de­clined be­cause peo­ple did not gen­er­al­ly adopt cats.

Apart from that, Ku­ruvil­la said they did not have the means, man­pow­er, and equip­ment to do what was need­ed to re­duce the pop­u­la­tion.

“Once you get fer­al cats, you can’t re-home them,” she said.

The chair­man sug­gest­ed that the min­istry start a trap­ping pro­gramme to re­move the cats from the com­pound.

Oth­er than the min­istry, Nanan said, they reached out to the San Juan Laven­tille Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion for as­sis­tance but no ac­tion had been tak­en yet. Guardian Me­dia’s at­tempt to con­tact cor­po­ra­tion chair­man Richard Wal­cott was un­suc­cess­ful.

Wildlife con­ser­va­tion­ist Ri­car­do Meade, who re­cent­ly re­ha­bil­i­tat­ed a flamin­go that was shot at the site by hunters, said deal­ing with the cats at the sanc­tu­ary was a touchy sub­ject be­cause peo­ple tend to put their “emo­tions be­fore the sense of it all.”

“Cats are not from this part of the world, not those cats, so they were brought here; they’re a tremen­dous in­va­sive species, and then now we have just re­leased them on­to our wildlife. That is very wrong,” he stat­ed.

He said the peo­ple who put the cats there were cut­ting their life span of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 15 years in half, as they ran the risk of catch­ing dis­eases, be­ing run over by cars, and be­ing mauled by oth­er an­i­mals. He said if they could not find homes for the cats at the sanc­tu­ary, they would have to take more dras­tic ac­tions.

“I’ve seen the birds that they’ve mauled so far would have in­clud­ed trop­i­cal screech owls, which we have re­leased here, the silky anteater, car­di­nals, king­fish­ers, and of course re­ports of them maul­ing the Ibis and that is the ones that we love,” he said.

The wildlife con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist said some­one tried to get rid of the cats by poi­son­ing them, but in­stead, rac­coons con­sumed the poi­son.

In Oc­to­ber last year, T&T In­com­ing Tour Op­er­a­tors As­so­ci­a­tion (T&TITOA) vice pres­i­dent Stephen Broad­bridge high­light­ed the cat in­fes­ta­tion. In a re­lease, Broad­bridge said this un­con­trolled cat pop­u­la­tion had be­come a sig­nif­i­cant en­vi­ron­men­tal threat that Gov­ern­ment agen­cies ap­peared un­will­ing to ad­dress.

“De­spite Ca­roni Swamp be­ing one of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s most valu­able tourist sites with strong ap­peal for in­ter­na­tion­al vis­i­tors and great po­ten­tial as a for­eign ex­change earn­er, the fer­al cat is­sue re­mains ne­glect­ed,” the re­lease said.

T&TITOA called for pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures, in­clud­ing signs dis­cour­ag­ing cat dump­ing and pos­si­bly cam­eras to iden­ti­fy of­fend­ers.

“Leav­ing the cats in Ca­roni Swamp is not a vi­able op­tion. Years ago, an in­di­vid­ual reck­less­ly and in­hu­mane­ly poi­soned some of the cats, caus­ing a painful death for the an­i­mals and an en­vi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter, as poi­soned car­cass­es like­ly con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed the food chain. Such harm­ful out­comes un­der­score the risks of ig­nor­ing the is­sue and the im­por­tance of man­aged in­ter­ven­tion,” the re­lease said.

Ques­tions sent to the Agri­cul­ture Min­istry were unan­swered up to press time.