Michael Calver

I’m best described as a frustrated entomologist. After completing a PhD on grasshopper ecology in 1985, my early jobs as a research scientist (vertebrate pests), a secondary school teacher (a background in vertebrate pests was useful for this) and a Lecturer in Distance Education provided little opportunity for entomological research. I thought things were looking up when I accepted a position in the School of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology at Murdoch University, Western Australia, in 1994, but I soon discovered that the prospective research students mostly wanted to work on mammals, although birds were accepted grudgingly as a second choice. I thus became a de facto vertebrate wildlife biologist, with insects only entering the picture as food for ‘real animals’. With the exception of some brief flirtations with plant pathology and bibliometrics, terrestrial vertebrate wildlife remain, by default, my main area of research.

Fortunately, working with wildlife allows me to indulge my affection for cats. Pet cats have a bad press in relation to wildlife because some of them are proficient hunters. One owner explained that her cat caught a bird at dawn and another at dusk every day – on the day of a solar eclipse, it caught 4. Of course, this doesn't mean that cats should be prohibited pets! Instead, as a society we should be promoting responsible cat ownership to reduce the numbers of abandoned cats and managing cats to prevent damaging interactions with wildlife. The idea of investigating the welfare of cats adopted without payment from shelters is a part of this view, because if more cats can be rehomed to responsible owners there should be better cat welfare and fewer problems.

April 2016