Aussie cats might have to be locked up in the evenings if a new curfew proposal goes ahead. To that, most cat owners would say: good luck.
It’s just one of several recommendations made by a parliamentary inquiry into feral cats mauling native wildlife to death.
“Feral cats kill over three billion native animals a year which equates to a kill rate of more than 1,100 per cat. These are truly horrific numbers,” Queensland MP Ted O’Brien, who’s also the chair of the committee, said in a statement.
“One of the great tragedies of last year’s Black Summer Bushfires was the loss of wildlife, with between one and three billion animals perishing. To think that feral cats kill more wildlife on an annual basis really put this problem in perspective.
“Feral cats still need to be culled, but it’s going to take time before we have the technology to rid these lethal carnivores from our natural environment at scale.”
A few places around the country already enforce cat curfews, like Wodonga on the border of Victoria and NSW.
“It is generally and widely accepted that dogs are confined at all times and that there are consequences when this does not occur,” the Wodonga council said in a submission to the inquiry.
“Currently the same is not true for cats, despite overwhelming evidence in support of cat containment.”
However, the RSPCA noted that a cat curfew can’t legally be enforced in most of NSW, for example.
The cat curfew is but one suggestion, so don’t clutch your pearl-pendant collars just yet. Other recommendations include a national cat ownership education campaign and increased support for desexing, registration and microchipping.
The inquiry also did not clarify whether the Lithgow Panther counts as native or feral.
