Australia’s native animals are facing a stunning onslaught of feral cats. Just how bad is it and what can be done to correct the imbalance?
Domesticated house cats, Felix catus, were brought from Europe to Australian in 1804, and by 1820 some cats were abandoned, became feral and lived on the edges of the fledgling city of Sydney, NSW.
Today — almost 200 years later — feral cats live right across the continent in deserts, forests and grasslands. According to the Australian Wildlife Conservancy an estimated 5 to 18 million feral cats are now driving extinctions.
Each feral cat kills between 5 and 30 animals per day. These formidable hunters prefer mammals, but also eat birds, reptiles and amphibians.
If each feline predator eats five animals a night and that’s multiplied by a conservative population estimate of 15 million cats, a minimum estimate of 75 million native animals are killed every 24 hours.
In July of 2015, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government released a plan to bait, trap and shoot more than two million feral cats.
Activists like Steven Morrissey, former frontman for The Smiths, declared the plan “idiotic.” Animal rights defender Brigitte Bardot wrote a scathing letter to Australia’s pro-fossil fuel Environment Minister Greg Hunt instructing him to neuter the wild cats instead of killing them.
So what can be done other than poisoning, trapping or shooting feral cats?
The solution, ladies and gentlemen, is to work with nature, not against her. Allow me to introduce the largest land predator on the Australian continent – a 55-pound, free-ranging dog, called a dingo, which is classified as a subspecies of grey wolf.
Dingoes kill feral cats. They also keep populations of rabbits, rats, red kangaroos, swamp wallabies, common bushtail possums, common wombats and another 164 species in check. Dingoes prevent diseases from becoming epidemics by culling the old, weak and sick amidst their prey.
Currently, Greg Hunt’s Ministry of the Environment spends millions of dollars each year spreading 1080 poison to eradicate all dingoes. According to one Sydney veterinarian — 1080 poison is analogous to being electrocuted for two days before it finally kills dingoes or any other native animal that makes the fatal mistake of eating it.
The government-sponsored dingo 1080 program is ecocide. We know that ecosystems unravel when apex predators are deliberately massacred. Special interest groups representing livestock farmer’s loathe dingoes, yet without these essential top predators diseases amongst vermin quickly erupt into epidemics.
My colleagues from the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, University of Tasmania and The University of Adelaide concur that allowing dingoes to perform their apex predator role will significantly reduce the feral cat population.
Will Environment Minister Greg Hunt and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull stop the 1080 dingo eradication program? Voters are dissatisfied with the current Australian federal Liberal government and particularly Greg Hunt and Malcolm Turnbull because they continue to subsidize and promote big coal, fracking and 1080 poison.
I predict that Hunt and Turnbull will lose their current political positions in the forthcoming election.
The Australian continent needs dingoes, not more deadly poisons that seep into fresh water and threaten the health of all life forms. End the dingo ecocide, now.
Earth Doctor Reese Halter is the author The Insatiable Bark Beetle.