urbpan: (I LOVE DOGS)
[personal profile] urbpan
Domestic cats are some of the worst invasive species when allowed to roam free and breed. They kill native prey species and compete with native predators. (They also spread diseases like rabies and toxoplasmosis.) In Australia, a place free of placental mammalian predators for millions of years, they are especially bad. That's why they can get away with a feral cat recipe contest while in America we couldn't get a simple hunting season going, on the grounds that it was "cruel and inhumane" (As if somehow hunting feral cats is more cruel than hunting feral pigs, or for that matter, any animal.) Unfortunately for those who would eat cats to extinction in Australia, it turns out they aren't especially good eatin'. Their fur could be a good product to motivate a cat hunt, but you couldn't import it into Europe. Fur, useful as it may be, has fallen out of favor in recent decades, anyway.

What do you think? Any good way to control feral cats that you can think of? Capture/Sterilize/Release is one solution, but still puts cats out in the wild, to kill birds and spread disease. Part of my new job is dealing with feral cats, and not all of them are saved. It seems like a waste to toss a carcass in the trash, or incinerate it, when it's made of useful meat and fur. Or is pragmatism uncalled for with the sensitive issues surrounding beloved species? Do all cats (and horses) deserve decent burials? What to do with the glut of unwanted and pest animals?

Date: 2007-09-03 01:42 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] gemfyre.livejournal.com
It's pretty damn easy to tell a fully feral cat from a lost pet in Oz. I have no problem with other people eating the meat from those ferals. I couldn't do it myself because I feel an affinity with cats (for the same reason, if we ever catch a cat while out trapping mammals, I plan to tell the people with me to deal with it while I go elsewhere).

Sterilise and release is handy in some circumstances, because it breaks the breeding cycle, instead of just taking individuals out of the population to be replaced by others. Some research into effective control techniques actually requires cats to be re-released so their behaviour can be studied (same sometimes with foxes - although foxes are obliging - they'll take those 1080 baits).

In New Zealand possum meat and fur is popular because they've become a pest there. You can't be all sentimental when you're talking about thousands of feral creatures out there destroying native species.

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