I wonder how many cats every house needs to rid it of mice. Given the volume, I doubt there are enough cats in Australia to even make a dent.
Disneyland has roughly 400 cats that keep the park largely rodent free, which is a minor miracle given the amount of food there is there.
Oh, the irony.
There's even a guy that skins them and turns then into stubby holders.
Their skill set is absurd.
Absolutely silent, leap multiple times their body length, jaws & claws, climb, extremely agile / flexible and fast.
Owls. The larger ones will kill even cats.
It seems that efficient hunters are quite rare to evolve, as there have been lots of ecosystems totally turned on their head with the arrival of a new predator. Stoats, foxes, house cats have all found niches in ecosystems unfilled for hundreds of thousands of years and wiped out many local species. Or maybe the problem is that they are too good, and if left to themselves they would decimate their prey to the point they can't sustain their own numbers and die out; in the long term predators need to exist in an equilibrium.
American culture is specifically oriented toward preventing this kind of thing from happening. A feral cat is judged to be in need of a home. And there is a very widespread popular effort to say that you are doing something immoral if you don't spay your cat -- if a fertile cat did go feral, it might have children!
There’d be at least a couple hundred in any one block. Thousands at night.
Keeping someone captive and ending their ability to reproduce seems more like abuse than love.
But coyotes and maybe even wolves have become more common. Such that I remember people remarking about how a housecat wouldn't last long if left to roam. The predators may have increased due to other prey becoming more common as well, like turkeys.
"Feral cats are one of the major invasive species in Australia"
"In 2016, 29% of Australian households had a domesticated cat"
"Cats in Australia have no natural predators except dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles, and as a result, they are apex predators where neither the dingo nor the eagle exists"
Based on the given figure of 2 million or more feral cats in Australia, each killing 740 wild animals a year, that's 1.5 billion total.
So, given all that, I wonder why the mice are a problem at the moment.
In this case however when we have hundreds of new mice each day, the fear effect and eating of mice would likely just be a drop in the bucket. The mice from nearby farmland and forests are fleeing starvation. A single house can collect and kill thousands a week and still more are coming, and the flood of mice can start up from apparently nowhere if you live near such areas. The only good thing is that it will stop at some point, and the professional traps can help to keep the situation at bay.
Anecdotally, one.