Retorts

The Curate's Egg

Our article "The Cat's Breakfast" [April] prompted two contributions to the June issue. Their authors seemed in agreement that our offering was less of a hearty meal, and more akin to a curate's egg -- good in parts. But beyond that their views differed.

Drs John Flux and Bob Brockie defended their plan to use cats to control rabbits, but agreed with us that the real culprit is over-intensive farming. Geoffrey Thomson supported our criticism of the cat scheme, but said that we must be silly to think that farmers would degrade the source of their income by over-intensive grazing.

The conclusion that "high rabbit populations represent uncontrolled overgrazing" was one reached by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Two of the many possible remedies proposed by the Commissioner were introduction of myxomatosis and the use of cats. As far as the use of cats was concerned, neither the Commissioner's report nor the articles by Drs Brockie and Flux have convincingly addressed the question of collateral damage that we raised.

Scientists are now frequently being told that the key to credibility is effective communication. We are also being told that we must be more effective at marketing our skills. Drs Brockie and Flux are making a good attempt at both, but they have fallen a little short of the mark. By not providing a convincing assessment of risk, their case will continue to be questioned.

We too have failed as effective communicators. Despite seven years of work on the distribution, ecology, taxonomy and genetics of high country lizard communities, our advocacy for this fauna has been overlooked by all of the players in this debate. It is an oversight we are determined to redress.

Dr David Towns, Dept of Conservation
Dr Charles Daugherty, Victoria University