A cat moves through the tall grass with a small, squirming
rodent in its mouth. Eye shine reflects the light as the cat turns
to look at the camera. Then it moves off into the undergrowth,
unafraid and lord of its domain.
It could be any patch of open ground in urban Melbourne and the
cat, indistinguishable from any well-fed domestic feline, could be
ridding the land of one more rodent that will scarcely be missed.
This is, after all, what cats do, what we expect them to do.
The Action Plan for Australian Mammals, released in June, found
that 55 of Australia's land mammal species face serious threat of
extinction. Dr John Woinarski of Charles Darwin University and
co-author of the plan says "for land mammals in particular,
predation by feral cats is the principal factor that is
contributing to decline".
Such is the language of academia, necessarily measured and
cautious.
But there is so much more to this story than dry, scientific
assessment. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Australia's
largest private conservation organisation, puts it more starkly:
according to the AWC, there are 15million feral cats in Australia
and they kill an estimated 75 million native animals every night
across the country.
It is a figure, almost apocalyptic in scale. And yet, Atticus
Fleming, the AWC's Chief Executive, describes this figure as "very
conservative". There are other published studies, he warns, that
record up to 30 native animals being killed in a night by one cat
alone.
It is a perfect storm. And it is sending many of Australia's
native wildlife species spiralling towards extinction.
Where did all of these cats come from? To answer this question
requires a journey back into the early decades of white
settlement.
"Cats arrived here very early on," Fleming says. 'Some probably
survived from shipwrecks. Others came with the first settlers.'
Whether brought as pets, or as a means of controlling rodents on
ships bound for Australia, these cats quickly gained a foothold in
areas surrounding the first settlements. "Feral cats probably
became widespread in Victoria and NSW by about the 1840s," says
Woinarski.
Throughout their relatively short stay in Australia, feral cats
have proved themselves to be a highly adaptable species with few
natural enemies in the wild. And since they arrived they have been
breeding like rabbits.
Indeed domestic cats going wild are only a small part of
this long-established problem. "Strays are a problem,
particularly around the urban fringe," says Fleming, "and obviously
in urban areas with cats that are now going wild. But we have to
remember that feral cats have been in the landscape for a couple of
hundred years."
