What affects us affects cats
Tasmanian devils create a “landscape of fear” for feral cats, which causes the cats to avoid altogether those areas where they might encounter Tasmanian devils. This has become clear because in Tasmania the Tasmanian devil has suffered from a fatal transmissible cancer to the face which has caused their population to plummet by about …
This is an audio recording of my discussion with Sharon who is an Australian woman living in Melbourne, Australia. She also has a home on French Island which is not that far from Melbourne (see map below). French Island is largely a nature reserve and so it serves as a useful model to examine …
Yvette Harper is an extraordinary lady. She understands feral cats and knows that you never force along the process of socialization. It’s baby steps all the way otherwise you get knock-backs because cats lose the trust that has been patiently gained. She has being socialising feral cats for about four years. For those who …
We need balanced headlines on the story about feral cats preying on the rare and endangered Leadbeater’s possum, a tiny creature living in ‘tall wet forests of Victoria’s Central Highlands’. Phys.org leads with a disturbing headline ‘Evidence that feral cats are preying on the critically endangered Leadbeater’s possum‘ which is bound to get the …
This is the political problem with the mass culling of feral cats in either New Zealand or Australia. The Australian authorities want to kill – by any practical means even it is cruel – millions of feral cats in Australia and that mentality has been promulgated by Dr Morgan in New Zealand. The Conservation …
This is described as a cutting-edge program to kill feral cats in Australia. You put a machine, the ‘Felixer’, on the ground in a well selected site and it squirts a specific amount of a poison (1080) onto the cat’s fur. The cat licks it off and dies. Voilà, job done. I presume cats …
A recent study on how many reptiles are killed by cats in Australia concluded that 649 million reptiles are killed annually by both domestic cats and feral cats on the continent. The news media headlines translate this to cats killing almost 2 million lizards a day in Australia and even causing the extinction of …
Australia’s dirty secret is shooting kangaroos and cats at night, out of sight. The authorities consider both these animals vermin and pests because (a) the kangaroo competes with livestock for pasture and (b) the feral cat kills native species. Kangaroos have been in Australia for millions of years. They are a native species. The …
