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 …
Last week I took my cat to the vet because I found a lump on her stomach that didn’t go away. I paid €120 on the consultation for them to tell me it was her bellybutton. Gigi in Amersterdam, Holland It’s a cute story. And this young woman should be praised for checking that …
Margays at least tend to be nocturnal. Other websites say that they are nocturnal. My reference book on the topic1 tells me that margays in Belize are strictly nocturnal as per radio tracking by a scientist in 1995. The study found that the margay was most active between 1 AM and 5 AM in …
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 …
I’ve recently been doing research on whether owning a caracal is illegal in Australia (I shouldn’t have bothered). It was very hard research because the documentation provided by Australian administrations was poor. What I found was a continual reference to “pests” and “invasive species” or “alien species” or “non-native species”. To Australians non-native species …
Every scientific paper that you read regarding the extinction of native species on small islands in archipelagoes always refer to cats and rats as the top two culprits. One scientific study starts, “Invasive rats are one of the world’s most successful animal groups that cause native species extinctions and ecosystem change, particularly on islands”. …
