Feline felling
if it was the rabbit before, it is now the cat which has taken Australia by its whiskers! Approximately 12 million house cats, another imported species, have multiplied in great numbers and have taken over the island continent killing many indigenous species. Among them are the pig-footed bandicoot, the brush-tailed bettong, the rufous hare-wallaby and a dozen other birds and marsupial species, most of which are either extinct or else found only in the zoo.
Such is the disgust for the feline population that Richard Evans, a member of the Parliament, called for an eradication of cats in the country. "Cats are responsible for 39 species being either extinct, locally extinct or near extinct in Australia," he observed. According to the national parks and wildlife service, domestic cats each kill some 25 native animals a year and wild cats kill as many as 1,000 annually.Evans would like to kill all cats by ad 2020 either by neutering them or else spreading fatal feline diseases in the wild.
However, not all are happy with the way the cats are being mercilessly killed. Said Leo Oosterweghel, director of the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens, "In Queensland, people were getting out golf sticks and hitting them. It became a sport." In tropical Northern Territory, the annual flooding causes cats to run up trees and people come by boats at night and shoot them by the thousands. Members of the Cat Protection Society are also against the anti-cat campaign. According to Hugh Wirth, national president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, "Responsible pet ownership and government regulation can solve the problem better than mass killings, which will only create a temporary dip in cat population." For instance, when the state of Victoria introduced the cat-control law, which prohibited cat owners from letting their pets outdoors, the killing of endangered Iyrebirds went down.
John Walmsley, a conservationist and an anti-cat crusade member who is in charge of the Warrawong Sanctuary in Southern Australia, would like people to love Australian indi-genous animals as much as they love cats. He advocates using marsupials as pets instead of cats as the former make excellent house pets.