… because they kill so many native animals, some to the point of extinction and unique to Australia. Feral cats are implicated in 22 of 34 mammal extinctions in Australia.
While most near extinctions in the world — like elephants, rhinos or tigers — are large mammals, because of human predation and land pressure, in Australia it's micro fauna that are threatened and mostly by feral cats. They are "bite-sized" animals, bite-sized for cats.
This is a long article, from the New York Times magazine run in today's international print edition, but rather engrossing, I found.
Interesting that the blowback to the culling program is almost all from outside Australia. In Australia there's widespread understanding that feral cats are a serious problem and if we want to preserve what remains of our unique native fauna we must kill some cats.
Still, the top comments on the article, mostly Americans, are broadly supportive too.
One thing I didn't get from the article is how effective, or not, the program is. The aim is to kill two million feral cats by 2020. How are we doing? It didn't jump out at me, and maybe I just missed it. /Snippet:
It wasn't just the boodies. If anything, they were lucky — some small groups of burrowing bettongs clung on at a few islands that were relatively sheltered from the ravages visited on the mainland. Since the First Fleet's arrival, 34 mammal species have gone extinct in Australia. All of them existed nowhere else on earth; they're gone. More than 100 mammal species in Australia are listed as between "near threatened" and "critical" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The continent has the highest mammal extinction rate in the world. Cats are considered to have been a leading threat for 22 of the extinct species, including the broad-faced potoroo, the crescent nailtail wallaby and the big-eared hopping mouse. "Recent extinction rates in Australia are unparalleled," John Woinarski, one of Australia's foremost conservation researchers, told me. "It's calamitous."
What's unusual about Australia's mammal extinctions is that, in contrast to nearly everywhere else, the smaller animals are the ones hit hardest. After the Pleistocene's wave of species disappearances carried off enormous creatures like saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths, large mammals all over the world have continued to face pressure, mostly from humans. Globally, it's rhinos, elephants and gorillas that are among the most threatened. Not in Australia. There, it's the desert bandicoot, the Christmas Island pipistrelle and the Nullarbor dwarf bettong that have disappeared. They belong to the category of creatures that, Woinarski noted in his seminal 2015 paper documenting the decline, are "meal-sized."
