“Pet cats kill 83 million native reptiles and 80 million native birds in Australia each year. Night-time curfews “would benefit native nocturnal mammals, but won’t save birds and reptiles, which are primarily active during the day,” wrote Woinarski and others in response to the report. Some conservationists hoped the report would go further.
Most controversially, the report also urged governments to mandate night-time curfews to prevent domestic cats leaving their homes after dark. Second, cat owners should be required to spay and neuter their cats to reduce the number of unwanted litters and the dumping of stray cats. First, pet owners should be required to register their cats, a measure designed to encourage responsible pet ownership and ensure revenue reaches local councils who enforce cat-control regulations. To reduce the impact pet cats have on native animals, the report recommended three major steps. Every year, feral cats kill 1.4 billion native Australian animals-around the same number that died in the catastrophic 2019-20 bushfires when more than 73,000 square miles burned.įeral cats are not the only problem: The parliamentary report also found that Australia’s almost 3.8 million pet cats kill up to 390 million animals every year.Ī greater bilby feeds at night in the Great Sandy Desert in Australia.Īuscape / Universal Images Group via Getty Images The final report found that every year, each individual feral cat in Australia kills 390 mammals, 225 reptiles and 130 birds. Set up in June 2020, the committee conducted hearings and received more than 200 submissions from scientists, conservation organizations and animal welfare groups throughout the second half of 2020. The report also recommended greater cooperation between all levels of government in dealing with Australia’s feral and pet cats. Faced with this crisis, the report launched “Project Noah,” a plan to increase the number of exclosures like Newhaven. The report asserted that Australia leads the world with 34 such species wiped out and a further 74 land mammal species under threat.
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With time running out for many species, this February, Australia’s federal parliament released a report that confirmed that cats were the primary drivers of mammal extinctions in the country. Newhaven is on the front line in Australia’s fight to protect its native animals from cats. Inside the fence, threatened and reintroduced native species such as the red-tailed phascogale and western quoll are making a comeback. The fence at Newhaven was completed in March 2018 and the exclosure-an area built to keep unwanted animals out-was declared feral-predator-free the following year. Left unmanaged, cats would continue to eat their way through much of the rest of the Australian fauna.” “Many mammal species that survived have been reduced to a minute fragment of their former range and population size, are now threatened and continue to decline. “Australia's biodiversity is special and distinctive, forged over millions of years of isolation,” says Woinarski. At the sanctuary’s heart is a fenced, 36-square-mile reserve from where Ellis and her colleagues from the Australian Wildlife Conservancy removed feral cats-escaped pet cats or the descendants of cats that came to Australia aboard the convict transportation ships-to create an area where native species could recover. With its 23 ecosystems, Newhaven-an area in northwest Australia about one-third the size of the U.S.’ Yellowstone National Park-encompasses 1,023 square miles of sand dunes, salt lakes and red-rock escarpments. On a yearly average, an estimated 2.8 million feral cats roam the continent, but according to John Woinarski, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University and co-author of the book Cats in Australia: Companion & Killer, this number can balloon to 5.6 million in years of heavy rainfall. Within 70 years, cats had spread throughout the country cats now inhabit 99.9 percent of Australia’s total land area. As she puts it, out there, “There are no stories without cats”.Ĭats arrived in Australia with the first European settlers in 1788. As an Aboriginal Warlpiri ranger at Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary in central Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, she knows what they can do to Australia’s native animals: In just over 230 years since their introduction to the continent, feral cats have wiped out more than a dozen species that lived alongside Ellis’s people for millennia and pushed others to the brink of extinction.
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