For this Forum, Penelope Marshall led us through a work in progress on the current troubled importation of the Savannah Cat into Australia. This involved stepping back from the controversy to look at how this case depicts tangled webs of failing governance and deliberation, alongside the problematic consequences of humanities project of modernity and ethical dilemmas at the heart of how we think the world should be.

Savannah Cats are a relatively new (1980s) hybrid domestic cat, breed first in the USA. They are a cross between the Serval, Felis serval, an African wild cat of up to 20kg weight, and Felis catus, the Domestic Cat of up to 7kg in weight on average, topping out with certain breeds at 11kg. The Savannah Cat, dependent on generation, weighs up to 11kg (although unsubstantiated reports state to 18kg). It is further reported that the Savannah has some of the skills of Serval’s, including high intelligence and a strong jumping capability. In the USA, Savannah Cats are legal in some states and illegal in others. There is a proposal to import them into Australia and the Commonwealth Government produced a draft assessment on the importation of the Savannah Cat in June 2008. Against importation are groups like the Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). The CRC hold that Australia has a poor record controlling introduced animals and that escaped domestic cats are already a key threatening process to Australia’s wildlife (and so why further exacerbate that with yet another complication to the already difficult to manage domestic cat). For importation are groups like Savannah Cats Australia who hold that the Savannah has an outgoing, predictable personality that is somewhat doglike (eg., can be walked on a leash) and that when on sale the cats will be de-sexed, micro-chipped and only sold to reputable owners. Presiding over this is the (Australian) Vertebrate Pests Committee, a co-ordination body for vertebrate pest policy and planning drawing from a variety of expert bodies, state and commonwealth departments plus the New Zealand government.

Penelope used the Savannah Cat issue to interrogate at least three differing aspects to the complex world we live in: (1) the governance of wildlife-human interactions in Australia; (2) the institutional structure (and failures) of modernity; and, (3) the ethics of how we, deep in our towers of abstraction, manipulate other life without regard to the actual unfolding consequences (and potential pain) for all life of such manipulations. We were confronted in the Forum space with the difficulties of drawing boundaries in regards human-nature inter-relationships of which the Savannah Cat case is replete with examples. We looked into:

• how the debate around the cats resonated with a moral panic that disguises the real complexity, ambiguities and hypocrisies of our inter-relationships with animals;
• the way that the cat was the locus of goods/bads which distracted from how the debate was shaped in various ways by the actors involved;
• how the language used was often full of problematic imagery and ideas that where often irreconcilable and further detracted from opening up discussion;
• how the debate drew heavily on science but could not be settled by science;
• how the regulatory systems informing the debate (especially that embodied in the Vertebrate Pests Committee) were not readily transparent nor easily accountable; and,
• how our ability to overcome the systems level inhibitors on dealing with this and other difficult socio-natural conundrums were poor to non-existent.

Although Penelope is still working on finalising her ideas, the story of Savannah cats and our incapacity to reasonably determine what is right regarding what we can so manifestly do in and to the world is a further cautionary tale on other intractable problems we are currently sunk in.

“A need to protect water supply ‘life lines’ as well as ‘sites’”

Current drought conditions have graphically revealed, in the form of thousands of hectares of dead and dying red gums and other flood-dependent vegetation, the inadequacies of current pre-ecological policies, structures and institutions, to achieve an ecologically sustainable future for the lower Murrumbidgee floodplain. The massive destruction of natural capital, on behalf of Australian society, is attributable in a large way to maintaining processes informed by the knowledge and values of the first half of the twentieth century, when catchment conditions and scientific understanding were very different from today i.e. protecting ‘sites’ rather than whole ‘systems’ and water regimes. Kingsford and Thomas (2001: 74)* provide the following illustration:

The Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain illustrates a problem for protection of wetland areas under [current] conservation legislation and policy. Conservation legislation is primarily designed to protect areas of significance as reserves (e.g. National Parks and Nature Reserves). Two examples from the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain illustrate how this can fail. Yanga Nature Reserve lies in the
Fiddlers-Uara stratum and was primarily conserved for its Black Box woodland vegetation community. Similarly 23,800 ha of the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain was protected in the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain from clearing by legislation … Legislation and policy measures usually protect actual sites of wetlands from development but do not control threatening processes upstream … To protect wetland areas, policies and legislation for wetland conservation need to be applied to flow regimes. This necessitates the interaction of policies applied to the floodplain with legislation that governs the management of water. Until there is protection of the flow regimes that define wetlands and their biota, their long-term future, even if they have reserve status, cannot be guaranteed.

Approximately 65 000 hectares of historically inundated flood-dependent land on the floodplain has become ‘stranded’. A considerable part of the stranded landscapes now receives water only during rare major flood events (the last being in the mid-1970s). In a country with notoriously poor soils, a relatively large area of rich alluvial soils has virtually been taken out of ecological and agricultural production.

Floodplain-saltbush-red gum resilience cycle

A feature of traditional European land-use and natural resources management in the lower Murrumbidgee landscape was that landholders did not confine themselves to one ecosystem. They practiced annual stock movement between floodplain and saltbush ecosystems (similar to Swiss transhumance). Stock was moved to graze on the saltbush plains in winter and back to the floodplain vegetation in summer, after flooding had receded, so that both ecosystems could be ‘rested’. Many properties still retain frontage (floodplain) and back (saltbush) blocks in their ecosystem mix. This is a vestige of the pastoral era that dominated land-use in the region until the early 1980s and is being revisited in the light of climate change and a decline in the availability of oil.

During periods of difficult economic conditions, such as droughts or economic depressions, community members can, to this day, make a living from red gum forest products. This means that they do not have to leave their community to find work and the local economy is sustained during ‘hard times’. The red gum forests are looked upon as a source ‘exceptional circumstance’ community income. While there is a small amount of continuous forest product extraction in the district, red gum generally provides a major input to the local economy approximately once in a generation (25 years).

* Kingsford, R.T. & Thomas, R.F. 2001. Changing Water Regimes and
Wetland Habitat on the Lower Murrumbidgee Floodplain of the Murrumbidgee
River. NSW NPWS, Hurstville.