This is an unbelievable but true story about air dropping of cats in a remote village of Bario, Sarawak, Borneo.

Brief facts of the story are;

In 1950s WHO carried out extensive spraying of DDT (or some other chemical) to control malaria in the remote village of Bario. Though the mosquitoes were killed but the side effect of the spraying resulted in two chain-linked actions.

Firstly, the spraying also resulted in killing a predatory fly which used to eat a moth larva which fed on the palm fronds. In absence of the fly the moth larva increased many folds decreased the life span of thatched roofs.

Secondly and more catastrophically the dead flies were eaten by gecko lizards which in turn were eaten by housecats. This resulted in large scale death of the cats, which in turn increased the population of rats, who began to invade the dwellings causing outbreak of plague and typhus.

To solve the problem, WHO and Royal Air Force, Singapore, air dropped baskets containing cats in the village.

Ecologists have used this story to show that a well-meaning action had resulted in the unbalancing of a delicate ecological equilibrium.

The story has been making round of internet blogs/e-mails and a search in Google for "Operation Cat Drop" shows more than 600 results. With passage of the time the story seems to have been exaggerated and twisted to suit the need the story teller. Few stories mention, that a whopping 14,000 cats were dropped but this is not supported by any fact. A copy of RAF log does show that about 20 cats were air dropped on 13th March 1960. It is not known whether this dropping was an isolated operation or one of many such actions.



As per the log book following message was received after the dropping;

"Many thanks to R.A.F. and all responsible for air drop arrangements;also to cat donors and cat basket makers. All cats safe and much appreciated ......"

Source of info and more reading:
- http://catdrop.com
- the-great-cat-drop-take-this-test-of-critical-thinking/
- Quarterly News of the Association of Former WHO Staff, April-June, 2005, page 6 (large pdf file - 501 kb - may take some time to load)

JM - What a nutty story! I guess this must have seemed like a plausible scheme to a lot of people, but hard to believe it now! Poor cats! I hope Delta and Lucia never get wind of this one...

It is nutty and hard to believe but it still is a true story. Besides numerous pages on the web, there are atleast 47 reference to it in hard print also. Google Search Link

A crazy story and an F&G quiz by Noisette a few years back!

Unfortunately, a lot of the images are now gone because the site that a lot of folks used back then (PicPlace, maybe?) went out of business awhile ago.

Thank you Lucia for F&G Link. My routine search before posting had returned a nil result. May be I was not using the right keywords.

There are certainly lots of examples of unintended consequences related to tinkering with ecological communities. There's the classic Rabbits in Australia as a prime example.

Java - Excellent example. I remember learning about this in a college undergrad science class of some sort, and having to watch a film of the horrible - yet necessary - eradication techniques. Ugh! The things we do to our world, bulls in a china shop.

Nice one JM Yes, that was on my list of things "I might make a post about if I ever got around to it", but since I haven't, I'm glad you have The story deserves to be told.

I think I must have used this image as a clue

Thank you Noisette for your kind comments. I was feeling a bit guilty after knowing that you had made a post about this earlier. Your above post has reduced the the guilty feeling to some extent.

Thank you once again for being so understanding.