Borneo is Asia’s largest island, sitting just to the East of Indonesia. It’s one of those hot, tropical islands where skin is often sticky and white shirts quickly become soiled. Mosquitos were a fact of life on the island, adding to the tropical misery. At some point in the 1950’s, the World Health Organization and the British (Remember: the sun never sets on the British empire, still true today apparently, but only barely) decided to use dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) to combat the pests, which happen to be the deadliest animal in the world, owing to the massive amount of infectious disease they bring about. The DDT was very effective in eliminating the pesky blood suckers, but this led to another problem — the DDT killed local cats, which led to an explosion of rats.
In 1960, the British decided on a novel solution to the rat problem. If there were not enough living cats, thanks to the pesticide, then adding cats must be a good solution. It is this logical path which led to the creation of Operation Cat Drop, which in the annals of the Royal Air Force has to be right up there with guided pigeon missiles (no joke, they were used during World War 2 to middling effect) in the realm of whimsical outlandish ideas.
Planes flying out of Singapore dropped as many as 14,000 cats (although the real number is thought to be much lower) from crates onto the island. This means that someone was likely walking around on the ground when legions of felines literally fell from the sky. Here is how the National Institutes of Health put the lead up to the special cat operation:
“In the early 1950s, there was an outbreak of a serious disease called malaria among the Dayak people in Borneo. The World Health Organization tried to solve the problem. They sprayed large amounts of a chemical called DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria. The mosquitoes died and there was less malaria. That was good. However, there were side effects. One of the first effects was that the roofs of people’s houses began to fall down on their heads. It turned out that the DDT was also killing a parasitic wasp that ate thatch-eating caterpillars. Without the wasps to eat them, there were more and more thatch-eating caterpillars. Worse than that, the insects that died from being poisoned by DDT were eaten by gecko lizards, which were then eaten by cats. The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by outbreaks of two new serious diseases carried by the rats, sylvatic plague and typhus. To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, the World Health Organization had to parachute live cats into Borneo.36”
Exactly how successful the airdrop plan was is hard to gauge, but there is strong evidence that yes, in 1960, cats really were dropped from the sky to fight rats. Funny because I can’t get my three cats to get off the couch and hunt much of anything.
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Sources: NIH, Wikipedia