An annual hunting competition for children in New Zealand has a new category this year, awarding a cash prize to the young hunter who kills the most cats.
You read that right.
The North Canterbury Hunting Competition announced the new category on Saturday and says it will offer a $250 prize to any child 14 or younger who kills the most felines.
In a statement, the local SPCA pointed out the obvious, that cats will suffer horribly, pets will die and the competition will result in bungled kills en masse, leaving wounded cats to suffer horribly before the children finish them off — if indeed they do.
“There is a good chance someone’s pet may be killed during this event,” the Canterbury SPCA wrote in a statement. “In addition, children often use air rifles in these sorts of events which increase the likelihood of pain and distress, and can cause a prolonged death.”
Prompted by the same sloppy “research studies” that inspired Australia to kill millions of cats — and resulted in a mouse plague of biblical proportions in 2021 and 2022, causing billions of dollars in damage to farms, homes, businesses and infrastructure — New Zealand is on a disinformation-fueled jihad against felines.
Like all such studies, the claims that cats are singlehandedly responsible for declines in native wildlife, thus absolving direct human activities of blame, come by way of overzealous bird conservationists and others who insist the mass murder of cats will save native birds and small mammals. As if humans destroying habitats, dumping chemical waste, creating wind farms that act as bird dicers, building glass skyscrapers that millions of birds fly into every year, saturating entire swathes of the Earth with light pollution and EM radiation that harms and confuses animals — and all the other things people do — have no impact whatsoever, and it’s only those dastardly cats who are the culprits.
You’ve got to hand it to the misguided conservationists, who have picked tiny scapegoats who can’t defend themselves verbally or physically against humans.
To understand how the “hunting” (killing) competition can be real, it’s important to understand the context of the way cats are portrayed in New Zealand. Gareth Morgan, a Kiwi economist and politician, launched a campaign about a decade ago with the stated goal of eradicating cats from the island nation of 5.1 million people, which would forbid people from adopting new cats and end programs like trap, neuter, return (TNR) in favor of having local animal control departments kill felines.
Morgan, whose Cats to Go site portrays kitties with devil horns and glowing red eyes, says cats are evil animals driven by “bloodlust.”
“Cats are the only true sadists of the animal world, serial killers who torture without mercy,” Morgan has said.
The North Canterbury Hunting Competition, which also offers prizes like dirt bikes for child hunters, pulled the new category announcement from its Facebook page on Monday but stopped short of canceling the event, blaming people who were upset by the idea of cat hunting.
Citing abusive feedback, the group said it’s “incredibly disappointed by this reaction” and said the hunt is for a good cause, raising money for local projects.
Pain In The Bud 
What the actual f*** is wrong with these people? Seriously, is there some type of infectious brain rot going on in NZ and Australia?
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I see those same few “studies” cited constantly in the media, the bullshit studies by Peter Marra et al, and it always burns me that so many journalists are lazy to the point where they don’t actually read the studies they cite.
Because if they did, they’d see plainly that they aren’t studies at all, they’re meta-analyses of studies that have nothing to do with feline hunting behavior, with the authors extensively massaging numbers and inventing others out of thin air to get the figures they want.
You cannot, for example, expect anyone to take your work seriously when you can’t even say whether there are 25 million or 125 million ferals in the US, you have no actual population data, you have no observational studies on hunting habits, and you’re inventing numbers to extrapolate arbitrary figures that are then attributed to cats.
That nonsense wouldn’t pass muster in undergraduate programs in the hard sciences, but somehow the conservation world accepts it as legitimate and the media reports it unquestioningly.
Of course, I’ve worked in print, digital and TV newsrooms, and oh the stories I could tell about incompetent journalists with no intellectual curiosity and no professional pride, let alone anything resembling basic scientific literacy.
I realize I’m shouting into the void in an industry filled with living examples of the Dunning Kruger effect, but when people are comfortable enough in their insanity to launch a contest like this, or poison millions of cats like Australia did in a misguided attempt at protecting local wildlife, people take notice.
When there are lives at stake there should be a significant burden of proof for those who advocate the mass extermination of innocent animals, but no such burden of proof exists. If some clown with a graduate degree publishes a bullshit paper in a bullshit journal claiming cats kill 20 billion birds a year, that claim becomes fact in press reports, resulting in tragic real world consequences like this.
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Exactly! There’s so much junk out there, and so many sound bites. Like the song goes, crap is king. NZ must not have noticed the rodent plague that nearly ate Australia, or maybe NZ thinks it won’t happen to them.
I can only hope this horrific contest will be cancelled.
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As i mentioned few weeks ago i am helping someone fix a 3rd feral that is not fixed. Two others in colony are fixed. 3 blocks away from me. I have photo of one feral with rat in its mouth. Other two are seen at night only wandering to get rats.Cameras on house. This block has barely seen a live rat on the whole block. My block? No ferals and i saw two rats in am.
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I HOPE RATS DESTROY ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING.
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Well, considering what happened to Australia after their ill-advised cat pogrom, NZ is in for a rodent surprise.
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ARE WE IN HELL RIGHT NOW?!!!!!! MY BLOOD IS BOILING!!!
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I wonder, if they succeed in eradicating cats from their country, who the people of New Zealand will blame next as wildlife population numbers continue to plummet. Perhaps the ghosts of cats, which is about as reasonable as putting all the blame on cats in the first place.
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Junk science, Junk people, simple plain good old fashioned cruelty to enjoy killing as a pleasure. The true revenge will be when one of these children grows up to be NZs next serial killer or hate killer or murderer of some description, it’s inevitable.
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I don’t know how anyone can derive pleasure by taking life, much less the lives of innocent animals who can’t defend themselves.
It’s not hunting, it’s killing.
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Breaks my heart…. just sick.
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Gareth Morgan needs to be hunted, tortured and die a slow lingering painful death, which will have been caused by a child hunter who mistakes them for a “Devil lust filled menace”.
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Nah. Let’s have him dropped off in the bush, naked and without tools. He’ll get an appreciation what animals go through on a daily basis to survive.
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Great idea, wish I thought of it. Also make sure he doesn’t have access to any food that people put out for the local animals.
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Horrible! I trash those bogus studies every chance I get, on my blog, in my book, and on social media. Sadly the last fb discussion I was in was deleted by the friend who said feral cats kill birds. The world-wide decline of insect populations is going to kill off the birds. To change that humans would need to curtail pesticide use and habitat destruction. Every day I watch many birds swoop down to get cat food left by the ferals we feed. We’ve found no evidence of birds killed by the ferals, who are well-fed (and spay/neutered). The birds have lots of trees and bushes for cover. Not everyone in NZ approves this, I’m sure. I have an online friend there who’s a cat advocate and takes exquisite pictures of cats. I read a cat memoir years ago by a New Zealander, can’t recall the name. There’s a blogsite called “The Earl of Southampton’s Cat” from NZ. It has to have been written by someone who knows cat behavior well.
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