In news that’s set to pit the part of you that loves cats against the part of you that loves bilbies/wallabies/birds/pretty much every native Australian animal, the federal government will spend $5 million on community groups in an attempt to wipe out 2 million feral cats, about one-third of the population.
Currently, feral (and some domesticated) cats are wrecking the shit out of our environment, with at least 124 native species at risk of extinction from the furry, feral little hunters.
This will hopefully change when Minister for the Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg announces the first round of grants for community groups to trap and humanely euthanise feral cats in March.
Likewise, Threatened Species Commissioner Gregory Andrews will be working on the initiative and is calling on every major Australian city to provide free euthanasia for trapped feral cats.
He said this cull, which is meant to continue until 2020, will not target domestic cats, and wasn’t driven by a prejudice against the animal:
“They are the single biggest threat to our native animals, and have already directly driven out of extinction 20 out of 30 mammals lost.”
“We are not culling cats for the sake of it, we are not doing so because we hate cats.“We have got to make choices to save animals that we love, and who define us as a nation like the bilby, the warru [Black-footed rock-wallaby] and the night parrot.”
We lose approximately 1000 native animals per cat per year, and these range from less-visible, ecologically important lower [read: ugly] animals, such as crickets and lizards, to downright adorable smaller mammals, such as possums and numbats.
Additionally, there here have been reports of cats turning to larger prey: Indigenous rangers in South Australia’s Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yangkuntjatjara lands once caught a 6.8kg cat with the remains of a 5kg warru in its gut.
Andrews cites the success of community groups in New Zealand and Canberra in culling pests, for example through mixing jogging with trap spotting and using carbon monoxide to euthanise caught pests.
Local initiatives have also been in the work for a while now, with around 211,000 cats culled last year across high-risk areas such as Mount Kosciuszko, home of the mighty mountain pygmy possums.
But given the complexity of an issue like this, it’s not surprising there’s some push back from people who, quite reasonably, would rather not euthanised the pests. The death threats on Andrews’ Facebook page are obviously entirely unwarranted, but equally unsurprising given the state of the internet.
For his part, Andrews feels resolute on the importance of the policy, especially after having found a quoll in a feral cat’s stomach:
“I sleep well because – having been a cat owner for most of my life – the science says every feral cat will kill three to 20 native animals a week.”“I have gutted a feral cat and seen what’s inside.”
To be fair folks, we were warned, and we didn’t listen. We were warned.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: Nickelodeon / Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
