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 …
Australia’s Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, recently declared war on feral cats. I thought that Australia had been at war with feral cats for a very long time so this statement came as a surprise to me. They’ve been killing feral cats (and the occasional pet cat or dog) in Australia for many years as …
As an introduction I would like to say this: the volunteers who manage feral cat colonies under TNR programs are very decent, kind people. They do their work without charge, freely and with a love of the cats. One TNR volunteers sums it up, “The amount of suffering is the reason that we do …
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 …
The war against domestic and feral cats in Australia continues unabated. It looks like a war to me and in line with that analogy, the latest policy of a north-west Sydney council, Hornsby Shire, was cruel because it would have led to pointless and possibly illegal cat killing. On my understanding, Hornsby Shire local …
