Just What the Australian Authorities Are Looking for: Injectable Contraception for Feral Cats!

I can’t leave this discussion alone. The discussion about how the Australian authorities are deciding how to deal with what they consider to be a national pest and destroyer of native wildlife: the feral cat.

There must be a more humane, reasonable and decent way of dealing with the feral cats other than poisoning them, shooting them or in any other way killing them en masse. The authorities in Australia have ruled out TNR. It’s too humane and too slow and they think it’s ineffective.

Update: I have a more recent page on this topic about which starts as follows:

Why don’t the Australian authorities use immuno-contraception (IC) by vaccination to control the population feral cats in Australia which prey on native species and which annoy the Australian authorities so much? The vaccination could be given orally. And it seems to me that theoretically it could be given orally using the device that the clever Australians have devised to chuck 1080 poison over passing feral cats to kill them. The idea of this device is that the poison lands on the feral cat’s fur and then they lick it off. READ MORE BY CLICKING HERE.

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What about injection contraception? Here we have the ability to help control feral cat populations by catching the cat and then simply injecting them in the haunch. It would appear to be a method which may prove attractive even to the Australians because it is very simple, it is expedient and therefore it is cheap.

The only problem is that it is not yet available. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) are researching a “vectored contraception” which works rather like a vaccine against pregnancy. The jab causes muscle cells to block a hormone which is required to reproduce. The hormone is essential in the making of eggs and for the maturing of sperm. Blocking the production of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) makes mammals infertile it is said.

The summary of the research says that the development of nonsurgical methods for long-term contraception is a challenge. They show that injection into the muscles of a “replication-incompetent, recombinant adeno-associated virus designed to express an antibody that binds…..a master regulator of reproduction in invertebrates results in long-term infertility in male and female mice.”

At 2016, the Caltech study appears to be have been extended to the Cincinnati Zoo were a pilot program is taking place with female cats.

I hope that the Australian authorities read this article, investigate the matter further, contact Caltech, help fund their research, do their own research and then come to the conclusion that this sort of contraceptive program is the best way forward. What chance of that 😉 !