Call to shoot cats for a bounty gets animal lovers fuming

By GREG ANSLEY Australia correspondent

CANBERRA - Graham Eames is not going to win any popularity contests.

Already offside with animal welfare groups because of his advocacy of duck shooting, Eames is now lobbying the Victorian Government to extend a trial bounty on fox tails to cats.

"They're a worse problem than the foxes when it comes to native birds and wildlife, because at least foxes will eat blackberries and crickets and anything that's going," he says.

"These cats just kill and eat. They kill for fun."

Eames is a spokesman for Field and Game Australia, a duckshooters' organisation set up 40 years ago to protect endangered wetlands, and which has a strong vested interest in the preservation of wetland ecology.

Field and Game argues that feral cats, with urban strays and roaming pets, are more devastating to the environment than foxes, and the trial A$10 bounty on fox tails now under way in Victoria should also embrace cats.

And if household pets end up in hunters' sights, Eames says, blame the owners.

"Once your Mr Tinkles has got off the lounge and gone outside and gone wandering for three hours at nighttime, he's not a pet cat any more. He's a stray cat and he's doing damage."

Eames is at the sharp, controversial, end of a wave of concern about the impact of cats on the Australian environment, roughly equivalent to the impact possums have had in New Zealand - but much more emotional.

Animal welfare organisations, including the RSPCA, recognise the vast scale of feline attacks on birds, animals and reptiles - leading to the extinction of some species - but are loath to advocate control by hunting.

For organisations dependent on suburban sensitivities for their funding - and all too aware of the outrage fuelled by commercial kangaroo culling - any suggestion of payments for the shooting of cats is anathema.

The RSPCA has described Field and Game's proposal as "cruel and uninformed" and instead urges increased programmes to boost responsible cat ownership, de-sexing, and control of cats.

Eames has no problem with this, but says responsible cat ownership will not end the problem of strays or control feral cats.

"We're in an ecological war with these things. The best way to take a bridge is to tackle it from both ends at the same time."

While his bounty proposal has angered cat-lovers, there are already large-scale control programmes targeting feral cats in rural and outback Australia, introduced and operated without too much fanfare by state and federal agencies.

A federal five-year national plan includes the use of poisons on offshore islands, and new research into control and eradication methods across Australia.

In New South Wales, the National Parks and Wildlife Service uses traps, baiting and shooting to control feral cats in national parks and reserves, and in towns and cities it traps and kills strays using lethal injections. Even at the risk of a public relations nightmare, environmental agencies are turning to drastic measures because of the enormous damage caused by cats since they arrived in Australia, officially with English settlers in the 18th century but probably earlier through traders and shipwrecks.

Once in a country with no natural enemies, they thrived. In NSW, there are now an estimated 400,000 feral cats, in Victoria a further 200,000. Across Australia, about 12 million feral cats ravage native wildlife.

Cats caused the extinction of a sub-species of red-fronted parakeet on Macquarie Island, contributed to the extinction of other species, and have threatened the recovery of endangered species such as rufous hare-wallabies in the Northern Territory.

A single cat almost wiped out an isolated colony of rock wallabies in Queensland.

Both feral and domestic cats kill and eat more than 100 species of native birds, 50 mammal and marsupial species, 50 reptile species, and numerous frogs, snakes and other reptiles.

Research has shown that even well-fed domestic cats raid urban reserves and bushland on city fringes, killing possums, bandicoots, birds, lizards, snakes, skinks, bats, native rats and mice.

Eames says Victorian studies have shown that the state's 900,000 pet cats each kill 16 mammals, five birds and five reptiles a year - a total loss of 22 million units of wildlife. And he says stray cats kill even more.