Morovia, we hardly knew ye

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — As the Federal Reserve prepares to raise interest rates, after the biggest annual growth spurt since 1984— with an accompanying inflation  uptick — there is panic on Wall Street, angst at the Federal Reserve and unrest inside the Beltway. Observing all this tsuris, I’m reminded of an obscure historic episode that I studied briefly in college, about the now defunct middle-European kingdom of Morovia.

Between and after the world wars, Morovia — like most of Europe — suffered hard times. But, although jobs were often scarce and growth was stagnant, the little nation’s fragile economic fate was strangely decided by a public policy clash over cats and birds. 

Morovia was a nation of bird-lovers. Their feathered friends were as dear to Morovians as are banks and chocolate to the Swiss. But the birds were in trouble — particularly the country’s most beloved native species, the Alpine pileated nuthatch. This bark-feeding parasite-eater was unique to the paulownia forests that grew on the steep slopes of that small mountainous nation. However, an abundance of cats in Morovia threatened the nuthatch — whose upside-down feeding habits made it particularly vulnerable to marauding felines. When a nuthatch sets its little heart on gobbling up every worm, grub, weevil and borer in the forest, it loses all perspective on the big picture. 

Viewed today, from a historical perspective, the “nuthatch crisis” had an easy solution: cut back on cats. This remedy was favored by a vast majority of  Morovians, including most housecat owners. Economically, a thinning of the cat herd made sense because the chance to spot, and photograph, a foraging pileated nuthatch as it scurried ravenously up and down the trunk of a paulownia, made this tiny country a tourist mecca. Morovia drew birdwatchers from all over the world. For several years, the World Chickadee, Titmouse and Nuthatch Forum, the biggest conference of its kind, was held in  Khvorçzyl, Morovia’s scenic mountainside capital. 

Centrist lawmakers in the Morovian parliament proposed a plan to stabilize the cat population: neuter as many as possible, capture and euthanize feral cats and nudge pet-lovers toward dogs, tropical fish, potbellied pigs and other creatures that posed no threat to the nation’s dwindling flock of defenseless nuthatches.

However, a small, but fierce pro-cat faction in parliament, who were mockingly known as the the Kitty Kat Kaukus, coalesced under a charismatic figure, Baron Augustus von Huisterberg. He ridiculed nuthatch defenders as woolly-headed nature nerds who were hellbent hamstringing Morovia’s potential development — especially it’s timber-rich paulownia forests. He called the presence of the nuthatch “an infestation.” The cats-vs.-birds clash, he insisted, was a matter for nature to decide without government interference. “Let Darwin rule!” he roared at raucous Kitty Kat Kaukus rallies. He also claimed, with no corroboration, that the nuthatch carried avian diseases often fatal for small children, pregnant women, diabetics and the elderly.

Morovian ornithologists disputed Huisterberg’s charges, but went unheard in the mounting roar of Morovia’s bird-flu panic. They published volumes of research disproving his claims of bird-spread pestilence. Baron von Huisterberg countered by calling their work “fake science” and accused them of seeking to profit greedily from government grants for “phony studies of Tweety-Bird poop.” 

To bolster their position, Huisterberg and his party invoked the “slippery slope” specter, arguing that reducing cats would not merely trigger a “nuthatch explosion,” but would invite into Morovia invasive species “of such vastness that their flocks will eventually block out the sun and cover Morovia with a coat of bird-borne filth.”

In a famous speech, Huisterberg said, “Perhaps the nuthatch is as harmless as my opponents contend, even in swollen numbers. But as we nourish the nuthatch, will we be able to hold back flocks of noisy mourning doves, voracious hordes of English sparrows and German pigeons, and the paratroop plague of Canada geese who cover the earth with putrefaction wherever they land? Morovia will fall — choked to death by duck feathers. Crows will peck the eyes out of our sleeping children’s faces.”

Huisterberg garnered support from a powerful animal protection movement whose members believed that cats are endowed with unalienable rights among which are life, liberty and lunch. An extremist wing of the Morovian Lutheran Church declared that kittens have souls, bestowed by Jesus Christ at the moment of conception. The practice of spaying cats, common throughout the developed world, was compared in Morovia to the Nazi castration of Jews in the Holocaust. Veterinary hospitals were bombed. Binoculars were banned.

After winning a bare third of the vote in a pivotal Morovian election, the Kitty Kat Kaukus was able to paralyze parliament, larding every new proposed law with pro-cat amendments and threatening to walk out if any nuthatch preservation measure came under consideration. Huisterberg orchestrated mass protests in which his political opponents, and veterinarians, were shouted down as “kitten-killers.” 

The prime minister offered myriad compromises that would protect all domestic cats and provide international adoption services for the nation’s swelling surplus of unwanted kittens. But the Kitty Kat extremists held their ground, stifling every effort to force a parliamentary vote on a controversy that dragged on, draining the economy, year after year. 

Morovia’s decline, of course, paralleled that of the Alpine pileated nuthatch, the last of which was seen in 1957, being eaten atop a backyard birdbath by a calico housecat named Muffin. Unable to save the national symbol from extinction, Morovia’s legislature gave up and disbanded. A tiny nation — overrun by feral cats and abandoned by refugees whose livelihoods had collapsed and whose rugs reeked of cat pee — simply dissolved, absorbed into surrounding nations and swiftly erased from memory by all but a handful of iconoclastic historians.

Many of those scholars cite a reactionary cult of cat-lovers as the cause of Morovia’s demise. Others, however, blame the majority party’s inability to cut a deal acceptable to felinophile extremists, thus sealing the nation’s doom.

Today, except in a few corners of academia, Morovia has sunk into an obscurity so deep that its very existence is widely regarded as a comic fiction invented by Irish novelist Leonard Wibberley.