Sometimes really useful debates happen, but then get lost on Facebook. Here is a good one I had yesterday;
“What we have now is a problem where because humans neglected that duty to their pets and let the animal run wild because we didn’t give a damn about them. The problem with cats eating wildlife will only be solved when proper regulation is put into place.”
False – cats were not introduced by ‘breeders’ or even uncaring pet owners – cats arrived and populations became established by European settlers as an attempt to control rabbits and rodents.
Cats now occupy 99% of Australia. The urban strays are a self-sustaining population (and probably have been since we started living in cities). Even if you created the ‘perfect law’, which stopped every single owned cat breeding tomorrow, it would have no impact on the stray or feral population – none.
Shooting and trapping *will* go on forever. Not because we don’t have the right laws, but because there is NO POSSIBLE CHANCE of eradication of cats on the mainland (quoting the government’s Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre).
We simply can’t possibly trap, shoot and poison enough cats on the 7.6 million (km2) of Australia to keep them from re-establishing. Eradication can only happen on small islands and within fenced areas.
New laws make *people* feel better (especially when they being alllowed to punish other people who ‘deserve it’).
But stray and feral cats are very naughty and tend not to comply – making laws a totally ineffective technique for managing unowned cats.
“If you regulated cats then you wouldn’t have the problem – this means only responsible people get to have cats and if they can’t be responsible then the law makes them be responsible.”
That thinking is faulty – sort of like:
“If we regulated cats and only people we deemed to be ‘good enough’ could keep them; then all biological realities about cat populations become mute and the native animals (who I guess must be living in backyards, because not many pet cats hang out in the pilbara) would magically be ‘saved’…”
It makes no sense.
I think we’re also forgetting that the things cats eat – also include a lot of other ‘non-native’ things…
Even if we *could* eradicate them (which we can’t) we’d have to look at whether overpopulating ourselves with rats, rabbits, mice and hundreds of introduced bird species – would have any environmental impact.
See: Macquarie Island
“Cats wandering in rural situations are not pets. Something needs to be put into place to stop cats leaking out of the suburbs into the national parks.”
The idea that cats ‘leak’ from the owned population, into the stray population, and then into the feral population is frankly, absurd.
There are estimated to be between 2 and 18 million feral cats in WA.
Urban strays would be a few hundred thousand.
Feral cats don’t need extra cats ‘leaking in’, to remain ineradicable. That’s what self-sustaining means.
(If anything, the flow is the exact OPPOSITE way – with the owned cat population absorbing (relatively) small numbers of urban strays. Around 40% of cat owners keep a ‘community cat’, which often ends up taming & coming indoors…)
“I do not agree with this classification of domestic cats. It is really quite simple when it comes to our wildlife which holds far more value than any cat. Inside Cat = Domestic – Outside Cat = Feral. All feral cats should be eradicated. “
I believe that sheep should be allowed to whistle – doesn’t make it true… or even relevant to the discussion.
Whether we like it or not, cats are here to stay. Eradication is not possible – science says so.
What we *can* choose to discuss however, is whether shelters (and shelter workers) should be made continue to act as ’boutique killing houses’ for cats.
Or whether there are more humane options (for both the animals AND the people involved) where cats who are doing very little harm (in environments where ‘more worthy’ animals don’t thrive anyway), could be allowed to continue to live out their lives with a little support.
It’s easy to say – bah! kill all the cats! – – when you’re not the one with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from killing kittens during the yearly, presently unavoidable, and current-policies-determine-to-be-never-ending cat breeding season.
More blah, blah, blah – kill all the ferals…
You are talking about ‘feral cats’.
There are sub-populations of cats, that all behave differently (because they live in different places).
1. Feral cats – live without reliance on humans, in areas where there are no people. Most people have never seen a truly ‘feral’ cat.
2. Stray cats – rely on humans to live. They’re the ones who you find at the rubbish tip, in industrial estates and in the Coles carpark.
3. Community cats/semi-owned cats – are the ones who have one or more humans caring for them. They are often semi-tame (though would probably be deemed ‘unadoptable’ if they were to enter a shelter.
Only the last two, tend to show up on the ‘animal welfare’ radar. They tend to be well fed, so breed efficiently. And have their kittens where people can find them.
Feral cats are unlikely to ever enter a shelter as they don’t live where people live.
Feral cat eradication is impossible on the mainland. This is not me saying this – it is the Feral Animal Advisory Committee in Australia.
How do we know this?
It cost $25 million dollars to remove a population of about 500 cats from a small island off SA (Macquarie). That’s with every single ‘current eradication’ technique.
Those same techniques (bascially dropping a fuckload of poison, which killed seabirds, mammals, the lot) – would be completely inappropriate for an urban setting.
So that is why we have shelters. One by one. killing cats.
This is unacceptable by most animal-lovers standards. Thousands of cats – often semi-tame or very young – being killed with no hope of solution. Shelters, filled with animal lovers, being forced to kill all day long.
Without programs to give stray and community cats options – other than being killed in a shelter – we’re doomed to see a consistent level of killing now and into the future.
I’m personally not cool with that.
“But studies have shown cats can have a twenty kilometre range!”
The ‘studies’ you are quoting, aren’t relevant to urban cat dynamics.
Cats are known to stay around reliable sources of food.
The abundance of food and shelter in urban areas allows a much denser population of cats which results in much smaller home ranges.
Female ranges drop to between 0.2 – 0.5 acres, while the male home range being several times larger.
If a cat has a regular food source (restaurant bins, rubbish tip or human carer) it does not need to hunt, so it’s movements become more centralised.
When you’re talking about managed colonies, the same cats will show up every day for a feed.
So – unless they’re taking the bus – this demonstrates pretty convincingly that the distance they must be travelling each day is no further than how far they can walk home again… in time for tea.
“Feral cats are not impossible to deal with it just takes the political will to have the CSIRO to develop a cotangent that will spread amongst the cat population.”
Lols… I might agree with you on this one.
Just as soon as the ‘CSIRO’ develop a disease that;
– kills all mammals with whiskers…
– oops! I mean, not all whisker’ed mammals, JUST cats…
– that didn’t make them do something unsavoury – like suffer for days before dying (that’s really bad PR)…
– that also has some kind of vaccine, so three million owned, pets cats – people’s family members – don’t suddenly up and die (that’s also really bad for PR)…
– that doesn’t have any terrible side effects like jumping to humans, even though they live in really close proximity to cats – like right in their houses!
– that gets political approval, with cats being the second most popular pet in the country, and with most people having a distaste for killing anything furry that they have a personal relationship with, on-mass…
… …. … then yes, I could probably agree that THEN all the current science would be null and void… and ‘eradication’ could potentially feasible.
And then the Bilbies could once again roam free amongst the Coles carparks just as ‘nature’ intended. Oh happy day!
