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Cat And Chicken Make For Strange Bedfellows fine art photography. A not uncommon sighting is a feral cat and wild chicken hanging out together on rocks lining the shoreline of the Pacific ocean, Oahu, Hawaii. Oahu is estimated to be home to more than 300,000 of the estimated 2 million feral cats that roam the Hawaiian Islands. European colonists originally brought cats to the islands after using them as natural rodent-control systems on shipboard. The earliest documentary evidence attesting to the presence of wild cats in Hawaii is a passage in the writings of explorer William Breckenridge dating to 1840. Mark Twain, after touring Honolulu in 1866, also wrote that he had seen “Tom cats, Mary Ann cats…platoons of cats…regiments of cats…millions of cats.” While some of the ships’ cats eventually became pets, most were left to fend for themselves. Lacking larger predatory mammals in Hawaii, the feral cats were able to survive, thrive, and reproduce amidst a rich buffet of many smaller, more vulnerable native animals. This has led to what some call Hawaii's "cat crisis." In recent years, some of the damage from feral cats has been mitigated, thanks to Hawaii’s teams of land managers and predator controllers. As state policy, Hawaii has to date relied on the capture, spaying or neutering, and adoption of feral cats.