The Parachuting Cats of Borneo
How the use of DDT to control malaria led to a cascade so absurd it required airborne felines.
2 min read · from UNINTENDED by Mayank Mehta
In the 1950s, the World Health Organization sprayed the insecticide DDT across large parts of Borneo to combat malaria. The logic was unimpeachable. Malaria was killing people. Mosquitoes carried malaria. DDT killed mosquitoes. Within months, malaria rates dropped sharply. The program was declared a success.
Then the roofs started caving in.
DDT hadn't only killed mosquitoes. It had killed wasps that preyed on caterpillars. Without the wasps, caterpillar populations exploded, and the caterpillars had a particular appetite for the thatched roofs of local houses. Across the region, roofs began to disintegrate as caterpillars chewed through them.
But the cascade wasn't finished. Geckos and other small lizards had eaten the DDT-poisoned insects and accumulated the toxin in their bodies. Cats ate the lizards. The cats died. With the cats gone, the rat population surged. Rats overran villages, eating stored food and spreading disease. The region that had just been saved from malaria was now facing a potential outbreak of plague and typhus.
The situation was so dire that the Royal Air Force was called in to execute one of the strangest military operations in history. Cats were collected in Singapore, loaded into perforated containers, placed in aircraft, and parachuted into the interior of Borneo. Operation Cat Drop, as it became known, delivered the cats safely to the ground, where they went to work doing what cats do. The rat population began to decline.
The story of the parachuting cats is often told as a joke, and it's genuinely funny. But beneath the comedy is a lesson that shows up again and again in this book. Every element in a system is connected to other elements in ways that are invisible until you remove one. DDT killed the mosquitoes. But it also killed the wasps, which killed the roofs, which killed the lizards, which killed the cats, which fed the rats, which nearly killed the people the DDT was supposed to save. Each step was logical. The outcome was absurd. And no one saw it coming until the cats started falling from the sky.