While their neighbors in New Zealand called for “woah on feeral kets” earlier this year, Australia is planning its own nationwide effort to wipe out free-roaming cats in an attempt to prevent the extinction of local wildlife.
The “war” announcement, made on Wednesday by Australia’s Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, comes on the heels of a report that calls “invasive animals” like cats the primary force behind species extinction in most of the world, including Australia. The report was released by a group of academics from 143 countries who make up the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which advises the UN and sovereign states on wildlife policy.
Plibersek singled out felines in a press conference announcing the plan.
“They played a role in Australia’s two latest extinctions … they are one of the main reasons Australia is the mammal extinction capital of the world,” she said.
In addition to targeting felines on the mainland, Plibersek said Australia’s government would attempt to completely purge Christmas and French islands of their cat populations.
I have not had the opportunity to read an advance of the report, which was just released, and it will require careful reading as well as additional research before I’d feel comfortable commenting on the claims. That said, the numbers bandied about in press accounts (which claim cats kill more than 2.6 billion animals a year in Australia) are similar to the claims we’ve heard before, so unless there’s original research here and not a rehash of the same meta-analyses frequently cited in stories about cats and their impact on biodiversity, it doesn’t change the simple fact that it’s bad policy to act without reliable data.
I’m talking about an actual effort to count the feral and stray cat population in defined areas, as the Washington, D.C. Cat Count did using trail cameras, monitors and other methods. Obviously that can’t be applied to an entire country, but it can be done in different locations and provide a baseline to work with. Without that effort, the estimates of feline impact are nothing more than guesswork by professors sitting behind desks often entire continents away from the locales in question, plugging invented numbers into formulas intended to extrapolate totals for birds, mammals, lizards and insects killed by felis catus.
While similar studies estimated the number of cats in the US at between 25 and 125 million, Australia’s federal government says there are between 1.4 and 5.6 million cats in the country. If that’s true, it means each free-roaming cat in Australia kills between 500 and 1,850+ animals a year. It’s also difficult to accept estimates of predatory impact when the corresponding estimates of total cat population are so vague.
Still, as I’ve written in earlier posts, government intervention was inevitable without proactive measures. Australia’s cat lovers and caretakers would do well to voluntarily keep their pets inside, and to double their efforts to catch, spay/neuter and find homes for as many strays as they can.
If you live in Australia, you have until December to provide feedback to the federal government, and it’s probably a good idea to check with your local animal welfare groups, which are undoubtedly composing their own responses to the plan.
Pain In The Bud 
May the evil these cowards do
Come back to them anew
Two times two, times two, times two.
As I will it, so make it true.
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I didn’t mention it in this post because I didn’t want to make it overly long, but I’ve written quite a bit in previous posts about the mice plagues in Australia starting in 2020, not coincidentally after they enacted their plan to kill 2 million free roaming cats by air dropping poisoned sausages.
The photos of the mice swarms have to be seen to be believed. Thousands upon thousands of them descending on farm fields, rampaging down roads, destroying businesses, homes, grain silos and doing billions in damage.
I think any reasonable person would agree cats do kill small mammals, birds and reptiles, but the questions are: Are cats really the primary drivers of extinction when habitat loss, pollution etc are so damaging? And can anyone provide evidence that shooting cats on site, poisoning them, etc, will have any measurable effect? Right now they can’t even say that because they don’t have any reliable estimates of the cat population. Bad policy and decision making all around.
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Only a bunch of bastards would consider the eradication of feral and stray cats even doable and desirable.
Stubbornly following flawed evidence and hoping for a good outcome appear to be an Australian speciality.
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The report on species extinction is pretty dense and I haven’t gotten into it yet, but I did notice the contributer credits listed only one Australian while the rest were from universities all over the world.
This stuff masquerades as hard science, but there’s nothing like the rigor and care that goes into studies in the hard sciences. Lots of manipulating numbers toward a goal rather than collecting data and seeing where it leads.
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Well Austrailia is NUMBER ONE IN ANIMAL CRUELTY!
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Oh rats! And that’s just what they’ll get. I’ve said it all before. Likely the same bogus “science”. I’m sure not everyone in that part of the word agrees with this war on cats. I know of two cat bloggers in New Zealand.
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Part of the world
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They’ll get an earful from their local animal welfare groups and people in the public comment phase that ends in December. The question is whether anyone in the federal government will listen.
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I rather think humans trying to micromanage nature and overpopulation are more responsible for the number of animals going extinct worldwide. Poaching and loss of habitat are killing far more animals than cats.
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I agree, Katy. We seem incapable of learning the lesson that human interference almost always makes things worse.
The argument is that humans already interfered by bringing invasive species with them when they settled in places like Australia, and to this day invasive species still hop continents by hitching rides on ships, passenger and mail jets and that sort of thing. It’s deeply unfair to blame cats for doing what they naturally do and there’s gotta be a better way to handle the situation.
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They should try TNR and have those people dedicated to feeding the colonies, making sure that they don’t need to hunt for food.
Did they try eliminating rabbits, which is an invasive species that the English colonists introduced?
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I’m not sure if the Australians mentioned rabbits in their press conference, but the report mentions them. Australia has a long and brutal history of killing rabbits with everything from viruses to tractor-like vehicles with blades that dismember any small animal in their path. Also, poison and the old classic, randomly shooting them as if that’s going to do anything.
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Great! Machines that kill any small animal in it’s path. That sounds like it might kill a lot more animals than the cats do. And don’t they have a mouse problem in Australia? One would think they’d be glad to have cats and snakes around.
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I believe the machine has blades designed to drag through the dirt and kill anything on the ground as well as in boroughs. Reading about it was enough for me, I didn’t have any desire to look for more information.
The mouse problem is decades old and comes and goes, especially with certain weather conditions, but I don’t believe it was coincidence that Australia went ahead with its plan to kill 2 million cats by air-dropping poisoned sausages in 2019 and the mice plagues started again in 2020.
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Oh great
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Australia, like New Zealand, act like barbarians when it concerns unwanted animals. Besides cats they kill rabbits, foxes and more yet they keep ruining their ecosystem by clearing native vegetation, polluting their air and waterways. If they were so concerned they would end deforestation instead of killing innocent animals.
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