A Michael Broad Blog
The BBC is asking whether cats should be culled to stop extinctions. Of course, the author is discussing the culling of feral cats primarily in places where there are native species preyed upon by these cats. There have been rare instances of species being made extinct by predation from feral cats; hence the question. …
The latest wheeze by the Australian authorities to keep down the feral cat population on their continent is to blowup rabbits and their homes. Rabbits are a prey animal for feral cats and the argument is that if you destroy rabbits you destroy feral cats because they might starve to death which I think …
The Conversation website boldly states that “baiting foxes can make feral cats even more brazen”. That statement is based on a study of 1.5 million camera traps photographs taken in forests of Australia. They studied the photographs by hand. ‘Sympatric’ – where wild animals live in the same area or their distribution overlaps. Is …
The Felixer is a fiendish device devised by Dr. John Read, the founder of Thylation. The Felixer is a green box which jets out a poison called 1080 in the form of a gel at 50 metres per second. The idea is that when a feral cat walks past this green box it detects …
I’m told that the feral cats of Australia are larger than the usual European variety (see link below) because they have plenty of food and good conditions under which to flourish. Australia’s feral cats are consistently blamed for killing native species including small mammals and marsupials. The small mammals that the feral cat kills …
I had never heard of the word ‘nativist’ until Nathan Winograd used it. It is good one when used to describe the Aussie attitude to feral and stray cats. Nativists believe in nativism which means, “the political policy of promoting or protecting the interests of ‘native-born’ or established inhabitants over those of immigrants, including …
A study found that feather boas are effective in luring feral cats. The person who carried out the study, Alexandra Paton, a PhD student at Tasmania’s School of Natural Sciences at the University of Tasmania, doesn’t tell us in so many words exactly why she is so excited about feral cats being lured by …
Patrick Gower is mixed up in my opinion. He has a Wikipedia page so he has some influence. And he supports the North Canterbury hunting competition in New Zealand which attracted so much criticism recently as it entailed kids of 14 shooting at feral cats that could be domestic cats. Other animals are in …
