This evil looking device is the work of humans. Humans are very good at inventing and building mass killing devices. It is in our nature which tells us something about us.
You can see that quite a bit of money and time has been invested in its manufacture. It looks well made and robust enough to withstand the harsh conditions of the Aussie outback. It is strange to me how people can become so creative and precise about killing innocent animals.
It is called the Felixer 3 and it was invented by Dr John Read in consultation with South Australian engineering consultants. The name is quite interesting too. It is obviously a third model. The mark 3 is more effective than the mark 2 at killing cats. I am guessing that the name is a mix of ‘feline’ and ‘fixer’ because it fixes (resolves) the feline problem which to Australians is the feral cat problem, a problem which was created by Australians themselves. Yes, the innocent feral cat kills native species as do humans only it is much easier for Aussies to blame feral cats than themselves. It is called human arrogance.
As a feral cat walks by the device, it detects their presence and sprays them with a poison, 10801, in gel form which sticks to their fur. The cat licks it off and bingo, it dies of poisoning. It is described as a ‘laser-sighted toxic goo gun’. There is an element of joyous fun about the description. Clearly there is no shame or concern about the mass killing of cats and the distressing way it is carried out. The poison does not kill painlessly – far from it (see below).
I wrote about this evil device in the summer of 2018. It was described then as a ‘cutting edge device’. Shame about the crude mentality behind it.
Putting aside for a moment the immorality of it (in my view although I understand the reason for building the damn thing) there are two points worth raising, (1) how does the machine attract cats to it in the vast spaces of the outback and (2) how does it differentiate between feral cats, stray domestic cats (someone’s pet), wandering outside domestic cats, other wild animals and pet dogs? Do they care?
Maybe the authorities who devised and built it will have a fancy answer to those questions. I hope so. In the meantime the Australian government should in all fairness look at what businesses are doing in destroying the habitat of native species on the Australian continent and see if they can curb them. They’d save more native species that way than by using the feral cat doomsday machine as I have called it. The trouble is that Australia has to grow economically which means more people. This inevitably means less wild animals.
P.S. I know a lot of people will find the Felixer 3 perfectly acceptable and I get that. The name of the poison, 1080, is its catalogue number. It is a ‘metabolic poison’. It causes an accumulation of citrate in the blood which prevents the cats from metabolising carbohydrates. This deprives them of energy. Symptoms in humans 1-3 hours after ingestion are abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting. sweating, confusion and agitation followed by seizures and muscle twitching. There is progressive hypotension (low blood pressure) and lung infections. There are no antidotes. Sub-lethal doses just damages the cat.
