I live with a murderer.

Hi friend,

I live with a murderer.

Over the space of two weeks, Skittles (our cat) has:

• Terrorised a field mouse (who somehow managed to get away),

• Smacked a giant lizard around (who played dead until we released him in a reserve down the road),

• Mauled a parrot (who we rescued and took to a vet),

• Killed two other birds (that we know of), and

• Ripped a possum in half (which we only found out about when our dog brought the bottom half inside 😱🤮).

And that’s just what we know about.

Once, he ran THROUGH A GLASS WINDOW trying to get to a koala in the garden. The sounds of the glass shattering made them both shit themselves and run away, but he probably would have come off second-best in a standoff with a koala anyway.

His reputation precedes him in the neighbourhood. If the magpies start squawking, swooping, and freaking out, there’s a 99% chance that Skittles is close by.

We’ve tried everything, from slapping him with a curfew, to adding more meat to his diet, to overfeeding him so that he’ll be too full to hunt and too fat to run. We put bells on his collars, which he either rips off, loses, or uses as a lasso to catch his unsuspecting victims.

He’s on his third collar (the dude isn’t even a year old yet) with not one, but TWO bells and no safety clasp. Now, we can hear him coming from a mile away. Once, I was convinced that Santa had parked his sleigh in the living room because, when a cat with two bells on his collar starts scratching said collar at 3am, it’s LOUD.

When I learnt that cats are killing machines, preying on over 2,000 species globally, I seriously considered de-clawing him.

In Australia alone, cats are estimated to kill more than 300 million animals every year. What’s on the menu? Birds, mammals, insects, reptiles… anything that moves, really. And they don’t care how endangered the creature is; everything is fair game.

In fact, cats are such arseholes that researchers say they’re amongst the “most problematic invasive species in the world”.

I’ve never thought of my cat as an invasive species, but it makes total sense.

* No animals were injured in the creation of this post. Except Skittles’ victims. RIP 🪦. 

— Tarryn ✌️

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This week's climate and sustainability news worth noting

⏰ The Doomsday Clock has been set to 90 seconds to midnight – the closest to the hour it has ever been. The clock has been ticking for 77 years, showing how close humanity is to destroying the world. Midnight represents the moment at which people will have made Earth uninhabitable. From 2020 to 2022, the clock was set at 100 seconds to midnight.

🌱 Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is using drones to disperse seeds and speed up reforestation efforts and seed local native species in hard-to-reach areas that would be more difficult using traditional methods. One drone can disperse 180 seed capsules a minute – about 100 times faster than doing it manually.

🔥 The devastating drought in the Amazon would have been highly unlikely without climate change, scientists say. Other research found that the West’s recent heat-driven mega-droughts are unprecedented in at least 500 years.

🇺🇸 The US is delaying a decision on a new natural gas mega-project, to more fully consider its climate impact. The Calcasieu Pass 2 project, known as CP2, would allow the US — already the world’s biggest natural gas exporter — to ship much more liquefied natural gas overseas.

👏 The EU’s carbon emissions fell 8% in 2023, pushing emissions down to their lowest levels in 60 years.

🦏 Scientists in Berlin have performed the first successful embryo transfer in a white rhinoceros. The procedure, which produced a successful pregnancy of 70 days, with a well-developed 6.4cm-long male embryo, offers hope for saving the endangered northern white rhino from extinction.

🪸 Scientists have mapped the largest deep coral reef in the world. The reef is nearly three times the size of Yellowstone National Park, stretching 500km from Florida to South Carolina at depths of 200 to 1,000km. It’s home to sharks, swordfish, sea stars, octopus, shrimp, and other species.

🌳 Over 80% of the more than 2,000 species of trees found only in the Atlantic Rainforest biome are threatened with extinction to some degree, while 65% of all 4,950 tree species present in the biome, including non-endemics, are endangered, according to a new study.

🇦🇺 Australia added 144 animals, plants, and ecological communities to the national list of threatened wildlife last year, the highest number since the list was established in 1999, and five times more than the yearly average. 

🐧 Four new emperor penguin colonies have been discovered in Antarctica after their poo was detected from space. The discoveries lifted the number of known colonies to 66, although the species remains under threat.

🐝 A four-year study has found that solar PV farms can provide key habitats for insects and other pollinators. When solar farms are planted with native plants, they can attract large numbers of insects, which improve the biodiversity of the area. Every metric the researchers used to assess environmental health improved over the period – including species richness, insect diversity, and insect abundance. Insect abundance tripled over time, while native bee abundance saw a 20-fold increase.

💧 World groundwater levels are showing an “accelerated” decline over the past 40 years, driven by unsustainable irrigation practices as well as climate change. Groundwater is a major source of freshwater for farms, households, and industries, and depletion could pose severe economic and environmental threats.

🙋🏻‍♀️ The president of Azerbaijan has added 12 women to the previously all-male COP29 organising committee following backlash. Twelve women were added to the 28-member committee – most of whom are government officials and members of parliament – bringing the total number to 40.

🌀 Wild weather:

• 🌀 An (ex-tropical) cyclone in Queensland, Australia.

• 🌧️ San Diego had its wettest January day on record, ranking in the top five wettest days for any time of year since 1850.

• 🔥 Columbia has declared a natural disaster as wildfires continue to burn in the country.

• 🌨️ A snowstorm made up of more than a dozen whirlwinds (or mesovortexes) created extremely localised but intense snowfall in northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana. The whirlwinds performed a 30-hour hypnotic looping dance down Lake Michigan, stunning meteorologists and dumping nearly three feet of snow in a narrow swath only a few miles wide. Take a look:

And in business news

💸 YouTube is making $13.4 million a year from advertising on channels that spread climate disinformation. The Center for Countering Digital Hate analysed scripts from over 12,000 videos from the past six years on 96 channels that promote content that undermines the scientific consensus on climate change.

♻️ Lego has launched a take-back pilot programme in the UK, where customers can return bricks for recycling. Through the Lego Replay scheme, the company will transform the recycled materials into new items to support creativity and learning in schools. It forms part of Lego’s efforts to become more circular, ensuring every brick is rehoused, repurposed, or recycled to keep them in play for longer.

👎 A study has revealed that clean cookstove projects, a popular type of carbon-offset scheme, likely overstate their climate benefits by an average of 1,000%.

🛑 The EU will ban terms like “climate neutral” or “climate positive” that rely on offsetting by 2026 as part of a crackdown on misleading environmental claims. The use of terms such as “environmentally friendly”, “natural”, “biodegradable”, “climate neutral”, or “eco” without evidence will also be banned, while a total ban on using carbon offsetting schemes to substantiate the claims will also be introduced. Under the new directive, only sustainability labels using approved certification schemes will be allowed.

One small thing you can do

Take a one-day pause.

Do as little as possible for one day. Close your laptop. Take a break from social media. Stay out of the shops. Avoid driving.

What to do instead? Spend time outdoors, share a meal with friends, and give yourself permission to do… nothing. Connect with something that brings you joy or just be content being bored.

Michael Coren writes in the Washington Post: “A shared day of rest, at a minimum, might slow the pace of consumption, curb emissions, or ease the burden of so many people working weary weekends. But slowing down, even for a day, may also be at the heart of a cultural change convincing society that a more sustainable way of life is not only good for the planet, but also good for them.”

Because lots of little actions combined can add up to something remarkable.

I'll leave you on this happy note...

Cats being cats.

kittens_today_random

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