A Michael Broad Blog
The headline is somewhat startling. Australians, reading this article, would be horrified because the authorities in Australia are super-sensitive to feral cat predation of native species. And the reason why feral cats are on the island of Australia is because of human carelessness in the first-place hundreds of years ago. And here, today, we …
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 …
Introduction: This article conerns a new study on cat predation. The first point to make is that the study I’m referring to concerns “free-ranging cats (Felis catus)”. That’s important because across the world there are many small wild cat species which prey upon many types of animal. This study and this article is about …
Svalbard: is probably the best-known place on the planet where domestic cats are entirely banned to protect wildlife. The main town in this remote archipelago (a cluster of islands) is Longyearbyen which is the administrative center. It is the most northerly human settlement in the world. The island is an icy wilderness with polar …
There is a lot of talk nowadays about the killing of small mammals, marsupials and reptiles plus birds by unsupervised domestic cats outdoors, stray cats and feral cats. This topic highlights the biggest negative against domestic cat ownership currently on the agenda. Since 2005 there have been discussions about how to minimise the impact …
If you search the Internet for an answer to the question in the title, be prepared to be misled. I will explain what I mean. People expect to find a specific percentage, a definitive answer to the question. You won’t find one. I am convinced of it. I have spent a good 30 minutes …
I think that this is important. I have been digging around because I know that journalists writing for respected websites including news media website often distort the facts. They make claims and hard statements which simply are not true. They quote scientific reports but in doing so they actually misquote them. This is a …
There is a confusing (to me) and complex interplay between the feral cats on the Australian continent, the rabbits upon which they prey, and the conservation of precious native mammals. European rabbits were introduced to Australia in the 18th century. European cats were also introduced to the continent at a similar time (as were …
