Catseroles and kitten mittens.

[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?

Comments

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

We regard kangaroos as "cute", but the Aussies consider them an annoyance, and it's pretty much open season on kangas.

Not the case. Kangaroo populations have blown out of proportion due to agriculture here. Clearing of land to create pasture and sticking water troughs everywhere suits the roos to a tea. And it's not open season - roos are very carefully managed. All shooters must have a permit and only a certain number are to be taken to maintain a sustainable population.

And I haven't yet met one person from America yet who truly understands the feral cat problem in Australia. I adore cats too, but in Australia we're talking animals that were possibly here BEFORE white settlement (some research has shown, and they have no idea how they got here). These are animals that live in the middle of the desert and have done so for at least a century now - miles away from any humans. They're like small tigers, they cannot be redomesticated, they're huge and they're nasty.

In W.A. foxes have been brought under control using 1080 baits, but cats are a bit more of a challenge because they don't take baits as easily. There's also a phenomonen called 'mesopredator release'. Pretty much, once you get rid of foxes, cat numbers explode, so a solution to this issue also needs to be sorted out.

Sure, all of these problems were initially caused by humans. But if you take away just the humans, the problems will still remain because foxes and cats get along quite happily without us. As long as there are small, native animals to eat.