It’s nice to read that some Australian citizens including some Australian scientists strongly disagree with the war against feral cats in Australia which takes place daily and nightly in order to try and protect the small mammals and marsupials in the outback.
The scientists who organise the killing of feral cats such as Dr. Katherine Moseby, use literally any means possible to arrange for their “murder”. She says that she doesn’t hate the feral cats but it is a choice between cats and wildlife and is therefore prepared to kill them. The fact that the feral cats might and frequently do die in great pain is apparently irrelevant to her.
The New York Times has a long article reporting on one aspect of the eradication of feral cats to protect marsupials in a conservation area called Avid Recovery. Dr. Moseby and her husband, John Read, an ecologist, sometimes work at night. They founded Arid Recovery in 1997.
Catastrophic
John Read said that “Cats are just catastrophic”. Those words are reverberating around the Internet. They indicate a strong bias against cats brought to the island of Australia by European settlers beginning in the late eighteenth century. The whole problem has been created by people and people continue to create the problem.
I have not seen any Australian conservationist or scientist write about the loss of native species in Australia because of human activity; because of the increased human population in Australia resulting in many more human settlements which damages wildlife habitat or removes it entirely. I’ve not seen a study on that. This is passing the buck.
Australia’s conservationists/murderers of feral cats admit that it is impossible to eradicate feral cats in Australia. There’s just too many of them and they are too well entrenched and part of the ecosystem. All they can do is go on killing them as fast as possible. It is never going to stop. Just endless amounts of animal suffering thanks to careless humans who set free their domestic cats hundreds of years ago.
Shooter
In one of her night-time forays into the outback to check on native species and the rate of killing of feral cats, Dr. Moseby “made her way to a small outbuilding to check on the shooter’s progress”. The New York Times article is referring to a man with a rifle shooting feral cats as fast as possible at night.
Dr. Moseby was pleased to see a “line of red droplets” leading down a stone path. She remarked that “Fresh blood trail’s a good sign”. She wanted to see blood, the blood of feral cats and inside this building there were carcasses “of more than a dozen cats”. They were piled high in a large shallow container. Later they will be examined by experts for their stomach contents to check on the prey animals that they had killed.
It seems that a long time ago Dr. Moseby lost any squeamishness about killing cats because she came to the conclusion that “You have to make a choice between cats and wildlife.”
The long article of The New York Times covers numerous ways of killing feral cats. I can’t trawl through this article and read about it. I understand the need to protect native species but there must be a more humane way to do it.
RELATED: Scientists create a long-lasting female cat contraceptive
More humane ways?
Surely it is not beyond the powers of scientists and conservationists to find ways to curb the procreation of feral cats through perhaps a contraceptive gel rather than a 1080 poisonous gel delivered by a notoriously evil device called a Felixer. I think there should be more research on contraceptives rather than on different ways to kill cats. The Felixer is employed in the Arid Recovery reserve where it is believed to have killed 33 cats. More than 200 of the devices have been deployed across Australia Dr. Read said.
It is just one tool in a big toolkit designed to kill feral cats on the Australian continent.
Nathan
America’s best-known animal advocate in respect of animal shelters, Nathan Winograd, pointed me in the right direction on this article. I had seen the article before but didn’t really want to tackle it but as he did, I have. He remarks that the New York Times “is once again amplifying the misguided, misleading, violent and even sadistic practices of native species ideologues.” That points to another issue: the speciesism in favouring species considered native to Australia over species brought to Australia. When does an invasive species became native? A hard question.
He dislikes as strongly as I do calling cats “catastrophic”. And he hates the idea that Australians have “embraced trapping, shooting and [using] a poisoned gel that causes immense suffering and prolonged death. In past years, they endorse cutting the heads of while still alive.”
RELATED: The inventor of the Felixer, a device which poisons feral cats, is misleading the public
Medieval indoctrination?
I had not heard about that last-mentioned form of animal cruelty. But it does not surprise me. It seems to me that after years of indoctrinating the Australian people that feral cats are a version of the devil in the same way that black cats were regarded in mediaeval times in Europe, Australian citizens now believe that the feral cat is the enemy of the state to be killed in any way possible and the pain caused is completely irrelevant.
