Friday, March 07, 2014

Hunting Feral Cats in Oz


Nigel Gellar, Warddeken Senior Ranger Coordinator, in holds up a giant feral ginger cat. The feral cat population across Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australian has exploded, and the aborigines in the area say that have noticed a steep decline in local birds and other wildlife. The Warddeken ranger group is using pictures of the enormous feral cats in the region, to leverage funding from the Federal Government to monitor and kill the non-native ferals.



As Australian Geographic has noted,

Australia has the world's worst record for mammal extinctions; 28 species and subspecies, mostly marsupials, have become extinct since Europeans arrived, and many of these extinctions are linked to cats and other introduced species.

In the U.S., a study from the Smithsonian Institution, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service shows that free-ranging pet and feral cats in the USA kill approximately 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals each year.
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