Pets or vermin? How Australia is tackling its two cat populations
The Australian letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australian bureau. To register to receive it by email. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a reporter based in the Northern Territory.
No amount of gentle persuasion, disciplined training, rehabilitation or punishment can ever get cats to ignore their killer instincts. Like their wild counterparts, even the most domesticated felines threaten every potential prey they encounter.
In Australia, where feral cat populations are managed with significant amounts of federal money, time and resources, management of pets – and especially domestic cats – is the responsibility of state and local governments.
But there is growing pressure from local councils and animal protection groups to join efforts to monitor both populations, because domestic cats reproduce just as fast, eat as much and can cause as much damage to native wildlife as feral cats.
If the nation is serious about taking action against feral cats, says Nell Thompson, secretary of the Australian Institute of Animal Management, the Australian government should stop segregating their interactions with domestic cats. “Both are national issues,” she said.
The challenge, she added, has more to do with people than cats. Ms Thompson said the current approach is plagued by poor communication with cat owners, poor funding from governments and poor data collection.
In Australia’s desert center, Alice Springs City Council has a dedicated domestic cat management team. The municipality imposes harsh penalties for roaming domestic cats (the offense of ‘animals in general’ carries a fine of $880), uses cat traps and a web of cameras and promotes the use of ‘catariams’, or caged enclosures .
Further afield, in remote indigenous communities, cat populations have increased dramatically. Even as special ranger programs exist to hunt, lure, kill – and in some places eat – feral cats, annual growth rates for domestic cats have increased as much as 250 percent.
That’s because in indigenous communities, feral cat hunters often act as domestic cat owners, taking feral kittens as pets.
Dr. Brooke Kennedy, a Kamilaroi woman who leads research into cat ownership in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, said the distinction between cats to be killed and cats to be kept is rooted in a cultural belief that every female animal must first be must experience ‘birth’. it has died. Therefore, in the community there were no problems with killing a mother cat, but kittens were spared.
As part of her work in the area, Dr. Kennedy goes door to door collecting data on pet populations, their sexless status, and owners’ desire to sterilize their animals.
“How many dogs do you have? How many cats do you have? Are they desexed or not? Do you want them desexed?” she would ask, to which the answer was routinely, “No, not this time; next time.”
“Come back, they’ve had a litter of kittens, and now they’re happy that the cat has been slaughtered,” said Dr. Kennedy.
Brooke Rankmore, a former conservationist who is now the CEO of the nonprofit Animal Management in Rural and Remote Indigenous Communities, said these repeated household checks had successfully accelerated desexing programs and raised community awareness of the rate of reproduction and the impact of a cat walk. loose on the environment.
“Each of these communities is like a dripping tap,” Ms Rankmore said, “and if we don’t have veterinary services there that desex companion animals, then they are a source of population in our remote landscapes.”
Like some Australian states and cities, several local councils have toyed with mandating desexing programs and limiting the number of animals per household. But in reality, the rollout of a two-pet policy has been haphazard, stilted and largely ineffective.
So how do you balance the harmful environmental impacts of domestic cats with the rights of owners to keep pets and decide whether or not they are gender-biased?
Dr. Kennedy is clear: Without investment in sustainable relationships with Indigenous pet owners to ensure they are part of the process, efforts to strengthen veterinary access, desexing and education will fail.
“Relationships are so important,” said Dr. Kennedy. “I can come in there and suggest desexing their cat, and then they’ll think about it.” Whereas if you showed up tomorrow and said, “Hey, desex your cat,” they’d tell you to take a piss.
In big cities, Ms. Thompson urged urban policymakers to approach animal management the way the nonprofit Rural Animal Management Organization does in remote Indigenous communities: issue fewer mandates, use better demographic data on cats, more pursue follow-up with pet owners and become part of national cross-pollinations. sector discussions.
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