Editorial note: this editorial is based on the Council's published statement, the Bill as gazetted, the Government's summaries of the sittings of 1, 2 and 5 October and the remarks quoted.

Until last week, government employees on Little Cayman and Cayman Brac were trapping cats and shooting them where they were caught, under a programme run from Elgin Avenue by the Department of Environment, authorised by the National Conservation Council and underpinned by a Cabinet order of 22 December 2025. It is lawful. On 1 October the Minister of Health, Environment and Sustainability, Katherine Ebanks-Wilks MP, announced what the Government's summary of the sitting called "the temporary suspension of the Department of Environment's feral cat culling programme in the Sister Islands". She gave that undertaking to the member whose bill would stop the cull. On 5 October the House deferred the bill and rose until November.

That member is Christopher Saunders MP, the elected member for Bodden Town West. He told the Cayman Compass, which published his comments on 7 September, that he sat in the Cabinet that first authorised the cull and had since learned how it is done. "There is nothing humane about it and that is what has been bothering me," he said. His National Conservation (Amendment) Bill 2026, gazetted on 2 September, redefines "alien species" as one "whose natural range for the preceding 100 year period does not include the Islands", and bars the Council from delegating its powers without "specific written consent of the Cabinet", which Cabinet may revoke.

The Council's response, a statement dated 21 September, did not defend the cull on its merits. It warned that the bill would "very quickly unravel decades of dedicated conservation work" and treat "farm animals, pets and even pests, as part of our natural ecosystem". On the Cabinet clause it said it was "unclear what practical benefit this additional approval requirement would provide as the functions concerned are scientific and technical matters delegated to qualified Government experts". The statement runs to 782 words and does not mention the method of killing once. Ten days later the Minister stood up in the House and conceded the point the statement had not deigned to address.

The Blue Iguana Class

That sequence matters, because the statement is the clearest expression yet of a view that has governed Cayman's environmental policy since the Act passed in December 2013: that what may be killed, what may be built and what a Caymanian may do with a parcel of land are technical questions for experts, and that an elected member who asks about them is interfering with science.

The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) has a term for the people who hold that view: the Blue Iguana class. The name is no slur on the iguana or the scientists who saved it. It describes a class: the unelected "experts", to borrow the Council's own word, who sit on the Council, staff the Department, speak for both through the advocacy groups, and treat every change to the Act as an attack on nature itself. Its members cannot be removed by voters, and exercise powers that Parliament gave a council and the council handed on to civil servants. When the Council says it is "unclear what practical benefit" Cabinet oversight would provide, it is telling Parliament, politely, that the people's representatives are in the way.

The Sister Islands cull is the perfect illustration because it is so small. No developer profits. The only cost of Mr Saunders' bill is that the Department would have to ask permission. That the establishment treated that request as an existential threat, and that the Government then granted its substance within a week, tells you how the Act is understood by those who administer it: as theirs.

The Science Is Not the Argument

None of this means the cull is wrong on the science. Endemic iguana hatchlings, the Council says, "do not recognise a cat as a threat until it is too late". Dr Ian Kirkham, the Council's chairman, told the Compass on 7 September that "trapping and killing cats with a single shot was the most humane way to do it", and asked whether Cayman was "prepared to see the local extinction of brown boobies" on Little Cayman. That is an argument, and it deserved a place in the Council's formal reply. Its absence is what a single point of view looks like from the inside: not disagreement with critics, but an inability to see that they have raised anything. Nor is the 100-year clause well written; the Council is right that it would sweep in rats, and the bill needs an amendment that protects the cat and nothing else.

The Question the Second Clause Asks

But the merits of the cull are not what the statement is about. The second clause asks a simple question: when a council created by Parliament hands its powers to a department, should the elected government be told, and should it agree? Mr Saunders' answer is the ordinary one: "at least let Cabinet know who is your delegate," he told the Compass. Dr Kirkham's answer is that the Council handles "thousands" of referrals and the clause "may" require approval "on every single application". That is a wording point for committee stage, not an answer.

Parliament has already answered it, for a different council. On 2 October the House gave a second reading to the Health Practice (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill 2026, moved by the same Minister. It lets health councils delegate to subcommittees, and, she told the House, "where a subcommittee includes persons who are not members of the council, cabinet approval is required before delegation may occur. This safeguard ensures accountability." Roy Tatum MP, for the official opposition, had "no difficulty with that principle at all". It passed its third reading on 5 October, the day Mr Saunders' bill was deferred. Cabinet approval is a "safeguard" when a council regulates nurses and "an added layer of bureaucracy" when a council decides what may be killed and built on the Sister Islands. The Government has not said how it reconciles the two.

Asked by the Compass before 7 September, Premier André Ebanks MP said caucus "will articulate its view in due course". The House rose before it did, which is a way of never having to. In a week the Government has shown that it can overrule the Council's "experts" when a backbencher presses, and that it would rather defer the question of who those experts answer to than vote on it. Mr Saunders' bill has done the country a service by forcing that question into the open: who does the National Conservation Act belong to, the people who voted for it or the unelected "experts" who administer it? Deferral is not an answer, and the Minister who wrote Cabinet oversight into one council's law on Monday owes the House a reason why the other is different.