Australia’s war on feral cats | Hacker News Reader

Australia’s war on feral cats

theconversation.com

33 pointslermontov42 comments

What a silly set of arguments:

1) "We have ethical responsibilities to cats as well as to biodiversity"

2) "[Compared to humans] are we really to believe that it is cats who are the enemy of biodiversity?"

3) "Out of respect for cats and the people who care for them, we should give preference to nonlethal alternatives in management first and foremost."

To which I say:

1) There will always be more cats. We're nearly out of some of their prey, such as brush-tailed bettongs and mountain pygmy possums.

2) Your argument is humans are worse, therefore we shouldn't do anything about cats? Really?

3) This is a reasonable point, insofar as you can figure out an ethical way to deal with an undomesticated cat once you've caught it.

I've hunted and killed feral cats on properties before, good luck doing any kind of rehoming with a feral cat. They are a lost cause.

You don't 'rehome' a feral cat. You do TNR. Safe, humane, and effective. <http://www.neighborhoodcats.org/HOW_TO_WHAT_IS_TNR>

The arguments in that article don't seem to ring true. It's claiming that simple trap-and-remove just has other cats move into the area and that if you don't catch all of them, the breeding pairs bring population back to the same level. But with TNR, the population is never reduced, since you put them back; you have the same problem with breeders if you don't catch them all; and when the neutered cats start dying out, they'll be replaced by the same neighbours anyway.

Neutered cats compete for resources that otherwise breeding ones would access.

So you have a full competing population, otherwise there'd be spare for the breeding cats. Then when the neutered ones die, existing breeders fill in the gaps, or, as the article says, neighbours come in.

mmmh... yes and no. Neutered male cats are bottom feeders in the cat societies. They will be attacked and easily displaced from the best areas by the other cats.

Maybe is diferent for neutered females. Females stay in the same territory with her mothers often, they only move when are in heat and there is not any appropiate male at sight.

These kind of dilemmas are not unique. Here is an example from a fellow user https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10385725

Cats are totally out of control here and there needs to be more action both on fully feral animals and those left to roam freely by their "owners".

I can't move around my yard at any time of day or night without disturbing a cat. They aren't chipped or tagged and there are no registration fees unlike dog ownership. There is no equivalent of a dog catcher or fines for people who let them wander.

I got a hefty fine for a chihuahua cross that bolted out the door a child left open and got a couple of blocks away before we noticed. A huge threat to humans and livestock that was.

My neighbours cats set up near permanent residence in our yard shitting Toxoplasmosis into my kids sandpit and killing native wildlife that would cost thousands of dollars in fines and/or a jail sentence if their owners did it and there is no recourse. I am surprised illegal baiting of them isn't more common.

>>> They aren't chipped or tagged and there are no registration fees unlike dog ownership. There is no equivalent of a dog catcher or fines for people who let them wander.

In Western Australia it's now illegal to let your cat out the house unless it's chipped, tagged, tattooed and de-sexed. Other states will probably follow soon.

In my SA suburb, there are limits on cat ownership and registration requirements. I've also done some work with the government raising community awareness of the importance of desexing pet cats.

Requiring chips and desexing seems like an easy, smart option to me - the cost is minimal in the lifetime of feeding and caring for a cat.

Hopefully compulsory pet de-sexing will be coming to South Australia soon as well. While I appreciate that dogs can be a hazard to people and livestock, I wish my local government took animal control seriously when cats were involved. They have a schedule of nearly 50 different fees and expiation payments relating to dogs on their website. In relation to cats they suggest people identify their pets but do not mandate it.

They have a $4000 fine for an unauthorised person killing a cat within 1km of a dwelling but nothing to penalise owners at all except for threat of destruction of unidentified animals.

what's tagging (as opposed to chipping)?

They have to have tags attached to their collar to show they're registered.

Ah, of course, silly me. Our cats are chipped, tattooed, and desexed - just not tagged.

When I pay yearly dog registration my local council supplies numbered plastic ties (used to be disks) which must be attached to the dog's collar. They aren't attached to the dog itself so more like soldier dog tags than cattle tags.

Tattooed?

Edit: Finally I scrolled past all the "cat tattoos" on Google, and found out what this is about: http://www.mypetsdoctor.com/tattoos-indicate-spay-neuter

That's probably not the tattoo that's meant. When most cats get neutered/first shots, they get a tattoo in the ear with a unique serial number, which includes a vet to contact. That way if the cat gets lost it can be tracked down. It was the only "permanent" way of doing it before microchips.

http://www.icam-coalition.org/downloads/Identification%20met...

Having grown up with a cat lady (17 cats at some point) I can tell you that anyone who claims 'look in the mirror' and try to apply human ethics to their pets is completely irrational.

Most of the time these people will actually make up complete nonsense story to justify the pet behaviour, including completely stupid stuff like "it's Tuesday, he always like to be on the dinning table on tuesday" and endless other nonsense.

There are several papers [ Example: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/toxoplasma... ] describe how Toxoplasmosis could not only get into owner's system, but also change their behaviour; they had demonstrated that mices infected with it would actually be /attracted/ to cats completely irrationally.

When you look at this and extrapolate on how many people are actually /crazy/ about cats [ Check, the interweb! ] and could be affected by that sort of brain damage --all of them driving, voting and making 'rational' decisions-- it's really worrying...

I go home to see my mother on the weekends a lot at the moment (temporarily of no fixed abode). When I start getting ready to leave at around 6pm on a Sunday the dog will lie in the Hallway between me and the front door. We consider that he knows I'm about to leave, and that's why he's there. I spend plenty of time in my room without seeing that behaviour.

Am I suffering from brain damage in anthropomorphising his behaviour somewhat? Or am I simply choosing the explanation that gives me the most comfort?

The reality is I can't tell why any human being does something, regardless of the fact they can actually talk. I choose what to believe as the motives for them, and do the same for my dog.

Dogs are not cats. The dog cares about you and knows you usually leave then. They have a very good sense of time even thought they "live in the moment."

Agree with the first part, but not with the last paragraphs. Neither Cats nor toxoplasma are known to change the behaviour of adult humans. Every human brain in the world is strongly wired to react in the same way to an animal with short face, round head, big eyes and high pitched voice. Round face (still developping bones), means "cub" and "do not harm. Protect". Most humans react in the same way to seals or cub dogs for example, and simians and all mammals do the same also. Is just that cats are like babies in many aspects; they like to drink milk, cry like human babies, have warm bodies... having similar weight and size thanhuman babies, can be carried around also, and they remember you, can communicate with you and want to stay next your body to warm himselves, so is easy to create a bound.

Toxoplasma can damage permanently the brain in human foetus, but normally is not a major concern in healty adults unless you have a defective inmune system. Lots of people with antibodies do not even remember to be ill or know when caught it. Inmunization is for life normally.

Weird article. The article finishes up complaining that humans are the prime agents of reducing biodiversity and are hence morally obligated to fix it... but apparently not by animal management. Somehow we are morally obligated to fix the damage we have done, but not by reducing the numbers of cats (or foxes, toads, pigs, rabbits, camels...). The proposed alternatives are merely links to sites that don't give clear paths of action - the first is a link to a book talking about ways to live near wild animals (ie: not wide-ranging maintenance of biodiversity) and the second is a puff site.

> Out of respect for cats and the people who care for them, we should give preference to nonlethal alternatives in management first and foremost.

Ah, the "this animal is pretty" problem. What a bizarre argument that the article makes; that humans are the actual scumbags that are the real cause of the problem... but at the same time, we shouldn't engage in a cull because it will upset some humans.

In any case, it's something a self-correcting problem - if there really aren't 20M fetal cats in Australia, then the proposed cull won't get 2M of them.

20 million is probably a low estimate. I have previously worked with a farm owner to cull wild dogs (not dingos, mainly large dog breeds that went rogue). They attacked livestock so the owners had an economic need for getting rid of them. In a fairly small area of 500 acres (2km^2) there were around 30 dogs. Australia is a massive country.

I am a cat person but I can't see how allowing feral cats to drive even more species to extinction is a good thing. The moral argument falls unstuck when you think that cats lives, which are common, geographically safe and domesticated, are more important than hundreds of species which will be extinct if steps are not taken to correct the balance. Some small mammals are primary pollinators in Australia too so you are then also looking at plant species becoming extinct too.

We should engage in a culling of humans. This despicable species of hairless African chimp has marauded the rest of the earth.

Humans are 7 billion. Ideally, we need some 500 million.

Are you volunteering? :-)

Well, going by the article, you're welcome to use any form of population control that won't upset any humans.

Cats are everybody's problem. The scale of the carnage (there is no other word) is breathtaking. There is quite a bit of scientific literature available, however the popular press, though more sensationalist, gives a decent picture on how significant the problem is:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdo...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/9-leading-causes-of-bird-dea...

I won't claim to have the final answer on this issue, but the study you are citing has been subject to a brief statistical analysis which I think reveals it as highly suspect, at the least.

http://www.alleycat.org/document.doc?id=633

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-...

Similar research has been done in the UK (I believe by the Mammal Society, sorry cannot find a reference) and the estimated number of bird deaths per year was 300 million.

This is a tough problem to quantify - typically the studies follow a number of cats closely and then extrapolate based on the estimated number of cats. Clearly this is close to an educated guess however the important part is that we are getting some idea of the scale of the problem. Given all the pressures on wildlife, this one is probably one of the more solvable problems.

An interesting perspective and it seems like more science needs to be done to sort out the true scale of the problem. However I still don't take issue with using lethal means to control the problem, and I don't doubt in some areas it is a problem.

Looking at the issue pragmatically we're not going to see the political will to paying for a bait, neuter and release program. Meanwhile we're losing native prey species who cannot wait for the "ethical" solution to work its way through our parliament.

The cat situation is so bad in some areas one guy made an automated cat deterrent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbkLjjlMV8

Best video ever. thanks, I needed that :-)

I'm not really sure what the point of these sorts of article is - do they want to let feral cats roam free throughout Australia unrestricted? Do they want feral cats to be taken into captivity?

It's not really constructive to try and argue that Dingoes and Tasmanian Devils are excluding cats from the food chain. Dingoes are absent from much of southern Australia - and so they aren't competing with cats in the first place. Devils are stricken by a disease epidemic and are more scavengers than hunters - they aren't outcompeting cats. Native marsupials that cats might be competing with would probably more or less include quolls - and guess what? Quolls don't seem to be able to outcompete cats.

Then when it comes to cat numbers, the argument seems to be that unless we're certain about numbers no feral cat culling is worthwhile. That's a strange argument, given that the link to the ABC's Fact Check on cat numbers seems to conclude that numbers are estimated at anything from 5 to 20+ million but aren't verifiable. While we can't verify numbers (nobody has the time to conduct a survey of every cat in Australia, like we do for humans), I think it's fair to conclude feral cats outnumber domestic cats at least 2 to 1.

Thinking too much about the ethics of conservation is as dangerous as not thinking about it enough - humans caused the cat problem, so we should fix it. And also fix the cane toad problem, the fox problem, etc.

Nice post, it seems like two feral cats (at the least) is one feral cat too many, if they are fertile.

It strikes me that there's a reasonably simple metric that can be applied, if you presume biodiversity to be good, and human induced extinction to be bad.

If you do, then the value of a feral's cat life is far lower than the value of a threatened native Australian mammal's life.

As for the non-lethal vs. lethal, it's all well and good to propose it, but I'd take such proposals a lot more seriously if you had a way of funding it. Conservation is always underfunded by government, so if you want to change how it's done, Morrisey, put some money on the table.

The same holds true for the usage of 1080 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_fluoroacetate) vs. using more humane lethal methods - trapping and shooting are far more expensive to administer per square hectare.

I wonder how many would be opposed to hunting and eating them. Apparently some Australians are doing this already:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_meat#Oceania

Who here remembers John Wamsley? Is he still on a crusade to reduce the feral cat population in Australia? I remember this guy from way back, he made a lot of people mad.

http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/wamsleys-war/clip1/?n...

Also, this article reads hilariously close to an essay from a climate change "skeptic".

Yes, I remember him - was in the news recently, but can't remember what for. I remember going on a school camp to his reserve as a kid. A friend of mine was antagonising a large kangaroo and got attacked by it as a result - entertaining at the time!

Hat your cat today!

My goodness what a stack of incredibly illogical arguments.

Life is important. OK, cats kill many animals during the week to live, many per night even. We obviously have a moral obligation to save them from cats.

It's not true there are so many feral cats.... ok so we have to kill far less, which is better for everyone.

TL;DL I like cats (because humans have breed them to be likeable) and I don't like making hard choices.

A lot of the problem with feral cats is not the cats in fact, is the environment. We need to start removing places from cats, not keep removing cats from places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com