The story of Pugal, the cat who made his home on Mount Pulag and captured the hearts of hikers and netizens alike, should have been a gentle anecdote about the wild making space for the domestic, or a simple tale about the cat who considered the majestic mountain of mossy forests and dwarf bamboo part of his home. But in the Philippines, even a single cat can’t escape the complicated tangle of conservation, policy enforcement, and public outrage.
Recently removed by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) from his home in Pulag’s protected landscape, Pugal was labeled an “invasive predator.” Environmentalists cited potential threats to native wildlife, particularly smaller mammals and birds. The online reaction to Pugal’s story was swift, emotional, and scathing. “Pugal is just one cat,” many cried. “Why target him when humans (especially irresponsible hikers who leave their trash on the mountains) and human industries are the real threat?”
And honestly, they’re not wrong.
In the same month that Pugal the cat was removed from Mount Pulag in the name of biodiversity (to date, he’s safe and well in his new home), satellite images revealed fresh scars on the Sierra Madre (specifically what’s supposed to be a protected site, the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park) in Dinapigue, Isabela. Dinapigue, a town nestled in the northern section of this vital mountain range, is now the site of a large-scale mining operation approved and permitted by the very same agencies supposedly tasked with environmental protection.
See? Pugal, a single cat who wandered among hikers and slept in tents, was deemed enough of a danger to warrant removal. Meanwhile, a legally operating mining corporation is allowed to denude massive tracts of primary forest, which are home to countless endemic species, natural disaster buffers, and carbon sinks, with a simple “but they have the proper permits.”
Of course, I am all for wildlife protection. Feral cats (or any animal, for that matter), especially in sensitive ecosystems, can and do pose risks. In such cases, action may be taken in the form of humane trapping or removal, spaying and neutering, and getting them ready for adoption. (I am against culling, which is practiced in Australia and New Zealand.)
But when the same urgency applied to Pugal’s case is glaringly absent in this one, which, again, involves a harmful extractive industry, there’s clearly something wrong.
We seem to have misplaced priorities.
The way we treat Pugal vs. how we treat companies carving up mountain ranges lays bare the consequences of living in a system so deeply entrenched in capitalism.
It’s easy to zero in on the visible and the manageable, like a lone cat on a hiking trail, than to confront the multi-billion-peso industry that funds local economies and bankrolls political campaigns. It’s easier to follow the letter of conservation law than to challenge the broader policies that allow the destruction of irreplaceable ecosystems in the name of “development” or employment generation.
The Sierra Madre is the largest remaining forest block in Luzon, working as a buffer against storms and typhoons. Its forests hold vast stores of biodiversity and water catchment areas that sustain communities.
But even as public concern mounts, the DENR has remained largely silent on how it plans to address the aggressive pace of legal but harmful mining, exempting capital from the kind of scrutiny we so easily place on a single animal.
We need to draw the line and eliminate double standards.
Environmentalism cannot just be about enforcing technicalities. It has to reckon with the systemic drivers of environmental loss: a development model that sees trees as timber, rivers as waste pipelines, and mountains as mineral deposits.
Sadly, we live in a country where conservation often plays second fiddle to profit.
What we need are policy-driven solutions that go beyond speeches, interviews, and social media posts on government websites. That includes ending the rubber-stamping of environmental compliance certificates, increasing community oversight over local projects, and mandating full transparency of mining and development operations in protected areas.
The DENR must also update and enforce policies that account not just for species protection, but also for long-term ecosystem health and the cumulative impact of so-called “legal” activities.
And finally, we, the public, must stay loud.
We need to devote the same energy we used to rally for the protection of a mountain cat to challenge much bigger threats: weak environmental governance, extractive capitalism, and complacency.
We must fight for what sustains us all.
And we must know that, at the end of the day, it’s not Pugal who poses the greatest threat to Mount Pulag. It’s our refusal to look at the true predators, the ones wearing suits and barongs, not fur.
