38 Scientific American, April 2020
PRECEDING PAGES: JOEL SARTORE; THIS PAGE: MICHAEL COVE
North Carolina State UniversityAND USFWSAll of the victims had been ambushed and mutilated;
many had their throats ripped out. Every morning
for several weeks DeGayner, a lanky octogenarian,
found the bodies buried under leaf litter along Key
Largo’s route 905, a county road that runs through
the Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge. The
more disemboweled woodrats DeGayner encoun-
tered, the more his disappointment turned to rage.
“It was the cats,” he says, his blue eyes flashing in
the Florida sun. “That’s exactly how they kill. I didn’t
need more proof than that.” Returning to the site of
the massacre, even eight years later, filled DeGayner
with ire. He turned north, glaring toward the abut-
ting Ocean Reef Club, a gated community home not
just to millionaires but also to hundreds of feral cats.
The plight of the endangered Key Largo woodrat
became DeGayner’s personal crusade late in life. To
occupy his time when the conditions were not right
for fishing, the retired hot-tub salesman began vol-
unteering at the wildlife refuge, which opened in the
late 1990s. He was quickly taken by the cinnamon-
colored rodents, which build large, meticulous nests
with a precision he found endearing. Woodrats had
long eked out an existence under a thin stretch of
the lush canopies of Key Largo’s semitropical forests,
where they shared their neighborhood with croco-
diles, snakes and raptors. The population had man-
aged to hang on even as much of its habitat was razed
to make room for pineapple plantations, a missile silo,
oil derricks and luxury condos. But the cats were a
different kind of menace. For one thing, not everyone
agreed that cats were a menace at all.
Fifteen years ago, in a last-ditch attempt to save
the woodrat from extinction, conservationists at the
refuge teamed up with Disney (with its Florida pres-
ence and rodent mascot) to begin a breeding pro-gram at the Animal Kingdom in Orlando. Over sever-
al years wildlife biologists successfully bolstered the
woodrats’ numbers in captivity. The real test, though,
would be surviving back in Key Largo.
DeGayner was sure the woodrats would make it if
he could keep the feral cats out of the refuge. He was
not alone. Local conservationists had repeatedly
asked the Ocean Reef Club, which fed and cared
for the cats through a program called ORCAT, to fig-
ure out how to keep them contained. But ORCAT
de murred: the cats were being scapegoated for a
long list of problems, and anyway it would be impos-Carrie Arnold
is a health and
environmental
reporter based
in Virginia. She
lives with her
husband and (in
door) rescue cat.
Ralph
DeGayner
knew he was
seeing the
work of a
serial killer.
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