I recently wrote about Australia’s war on feral cats. In today’s news, we find that the bounty on cats is not reaping sufficient cat deaths; the government has decided that the solution to kill millions of stray cats is by airdropping “poison sausages” according to Australia’s CBS News.
It has been my experience that our “well intended species” always makes things worse when we screw with Mother Nature. We created the problem with the cats in the first place and now we feel the need to fix the problem by poisoning all of the cats so as to minimize the impact the threat of the cats on native wildlife populations.
I mentioned the problem of non-target species eating the bait. As I see it, many native wildlife species eat the same food as cats and maybe even a few children. The plan to poison all of the cats seems to not be very well thought out.
Australia is faced with a difficult problem. Since the introduction of cats by Europeans in 1700, 27 mammals species are now facing extinction. Even here in the United States cats are blames for impacting wildlife populations. Australia believes that their are estimated between 2 and 6 millions cats in their country. Having been in houses hoarding cats, I know the difficulty in getting an accurate count. Australia has set their goal of wanting to kill 2 million cats by 2020.
So, this is how I think it will unfold: Australia will successfully kill a whole bunch of cats, but at the same time they will be killing a whole bunch of the species they are trying to save. A couple children will come across the food and hopefully not eat enough to harm them. And, all the while the cats will continue to breed and in a few years they will be back where they started.