This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Last Sunday I looked across the lane from a small cottage I’m renovating and saw something both horrifying and very sweet. Two little children were standing outside a wooden stable, looking in at five kittens that weren’t much more than a couple of weeks old.

The children were delighted by the furry creatures and were fascinated to hear, from the lady who rents the stable, that nobody really knows where the kittens’ mother came from — she just appeared one evening, heavily pregnant, and settled down for the night. “Like Mary?” the little girl asked? “I suppose so,” the child’s mother replied.

Over the days that followed, I found myself watching the little creatures as they rolled around playfully in the late autumn sun. They are sweet, but I really wish they weren’t there.

In the meadow next to the stable, there are still some lapwings and some curlew that nest in spring, and when those kittens grow up they will inevitably hunt them. It’s estimated, in Britain, that cats kill up to 270 million animals each year, and birds make up a quarter of that figure.

It’s a shocking statistic. A lot of pheasants get shot every season and a fair few ducks, but all of that pales into complete insignificance when stacked up against the collective lethality of the nation’s felines.

To set things in context, I recently started renting that small meadow, next to the stable, for rabbit and muntjac shooting. It is surrounded by large arable fields and it has a chalkstream running through it.

There are those lapwings, there are woodcock in the winter months, and I’ve recently been watching a roe deer and her fawn who inhabit the far end of the meadow.

One of my reasons for renting the meadow is that I want to breathe more life into it — I want to put feed down for wild birds, I want to dig scrapes for waders, and there’s even some talk of “re-meandering” the chalkstream, of setting the river back three or four hundred years, to a time before it was canalised.

Part of the challenge, and it’s a task that the local gamekeeper goes at hard, is predator control. All spring he traps the likes of crows and magpies, and he’s often out in the small hours waiting for the foxes that slip amongst the reeds on the riverbank. But, to a degree, I often wonder if there’s much point.

It was very rare previously that the meadow was without a pussycat somewhere beneath a thorn bush, and now there will be another six of them — new recruits in the battle that our cats are constantly waging against endangered British wildlife.

Hardly a week goes by without an environmental protest, but cats are never mentioned

We constantly hear about extinction and biodiversity loss, and hardly a week seems to go by without an environmental protest outside parliament, but cats are never mentioned.

The RSPB won’t touch the topic (some say it’s because many of its members are cat owners), and I can’t recall the likes of Springwatch, for example, ever putting the boot into our deadly feline friends.

It’s a concerning example of how we, as humans, insist on turning conservation into something that serves our sensitivities.

Deer, it’s now felt, are far too abundant in Scotland and those numbers are held to have been maintained by wealthy landowners, so the consensus is that they should be culled ruthlessly. As for badgers, their population is soaring, it’s perfectly clear they destroy local hedgehog populations, but they were endangered once, and they are cute (in storybooks anyway) so they’re off the menu.

How about we dare to actually follow the science? There are too many buzzards in places, there are far too many rats, it’s clear that cats are a problem, and I met a man recently who watched a badger, in spring, eat wild partridge chicks “like they were popcorn”.

Nobody wants to see every fox or every badger culled and by all means, keep a cat at home, but what if we did conservation not in a way that made us feel warm about ourselves but in a way that actually ensured a future for creatures we claim to love?

If we want curlew, black grouse and lapwings still to be here in five decades’ time, it will take the right sort of habitat, enough food, and some pretty challenging decisions to be made about the British countryside’s overabundance of the red in tooth and claw.