I’m not sure why they didn’t bring the cats via boat. I’m sure there’s a good reason, though. — Dan

Bombs Away! (Cat Version)

At just under 750,000 km2 (288,000 square miles), Borneo is the third-largest island on the planet, after Greenland and New Guinea. It is not one united political entity, though; it is home to all of Brunei and parts of both Indonesia and Malaysia. Of particular relevance to us today is the Malaysian part, specifically, the state of Sarawak. (Here’s a map.) As of 2020, there are 2.9 million people living in Sarawak — and a lot of other non-human creatures as well.

But if you go back to the 1960s, one population was lacking. Sarawak didn’t have a lot of cats. And that was a problem.

Ten years earlier, malaria was spreading unchecked throughout Sarawak. The World Health Organization  (“WHO”), which was founded in 1948, took action to help the people there. Malaria is spread by mosquitos, so the idea was to kill the mosquitos before they could infect humans. The WHO used a pesticide called dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — or more commonly known as DDT — and that seemed to do the trick. The mosquitoes died and incidences of malaria fell significantly.

Unfortunately, it caused another problem: rats. As Mental Floss explains, the DDT “killed the mosquitoes, but also virtually wiped out a particular species of parasitic wasp. The wasp fed on thatch-eating caterpillars. With the wasps gone, the caterpillars ate the villager's roofs! An even worse consequence was that geckos ate the poisoned insects and were in turn eaten by native cats.” Before long, the cat population dwindled to near zero. Without the cats around, the rats played, ther diseases such as the plague and typhus. 

As the 1960s approached, these rat-carried diseases spread unchecked. With the DDT-poisoned insects now gone, the obvious solution was to reintroduce a cat population to the region. And that’s exactly what WHO did — but in a way that put to test the adage that cats always land on their feet. 

At the time, Sarawak was a colony of Great Britain, and the British supplied the colony with all sorts of stuff, and wanted to do so as efficiently as possible. Sending cargo ships was, for reasons unclear, disfavored; instead, the Royal Air Force was enlisted to parachute cargo crates to Sarawak’s various communities. And in one of those cargo runs, they dropped 7,000 pounds of supplies, including a create of about 20 cats packed in wicher baskets.

The plan was later dubbed “Operation Cat Drop” and was considered a success. Per an RAF report (via this site), all the cats arrived safely on the ground and were “much appreciated” by the people of Sarawak. How effective the cats were is unknown, as is whether the cats appreciated the trip.

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More About Animals Falling From Planes

(That’s a pretty narrow subcategory! I’m happy I found two things! — Dan)

Today’s Bonus fact: If a cat falls out of a plane, it has a decent chance of surviving the fall — or, at least, a much better chance than a human does. As the BBC explains, “cats [have] a non-fatal terminal velocity. As a falling object accelerates, drag builds up; when this equals the downward force of gravity, the object hits a constant speed or its terminal velocity. This speed varies with different shapes and sizes; a falling human has a terminal velocity of 120 mph, whilst a cat's is just 60 mph.”

From the Archives: Why it May Be Okay to Drop Beavers from Airplanes: Same basic idea as Operation Cat Drop, but for different reasons.

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And thanks! — Dan