New Zealand has announced plans to eradicate feral cats by 2050, as part of efforts to protect the country’s biodiversity.
Speaking to Radio New Zealand on Thursday, conservation minister Tama Potaka said that feral cats are “stone cold killers” and would be added to the country’s Predator Free 2050 list, which aims to eradicate those animals that have a negative impact on species such as birds, bats, lizards and insects.
Cats had previously been excluded from the list, which includes species such as stoats, ferrets, weasels, rats and possums, but Potaka used the interview to announce a U-turn.
All domestic cats should be fully indoor cats. Any domestic cats found outdoors should be killed. Nasty little disease spreading song bird killers.
Not sure why this is such a controversial take. House cats should indeed not be outside, unless they are on a leash.
Cats must only be indoor pets. We can easily separate pet mice and rats from their feral counterparts and we need to do the same to cats. And I am a cat person big time.
Same.
Love cats.
Keep them in doors.
Outdoor cats and feral cats are walking, prowling ecological disasters.
New Zealand needs its “Emu War” moment.
I feel so terrible
Here is a video of some of the efforts
Cats are remarkably capable predators, and cat owners are remarkably irresponsible.
Letting your cat be an “outside” cat is bad enough for the environment. Not spaying/neutering said “outside cat” is how we get feral cats everywhere.
That said, I dont love the vague “eradicate feral cats” language. Would greatly prefer a broad spectrum spay/neuter/tag program to naturally reduce their population.
Predator-free NZ was always destined to ruffle some feathers though.
As someone who donates significantly to spay/neuter efforts (in the U.S.), these irresponsible people piss me the fuck off. To the extent that I have cut people out of my social circle over the issue.
I don’t think just spaying is enough. It’d have to be capture or even worst case euthanize. Leaving cats and any nonnative predator is especially harsh on local species each second they are in the wild because new zealand is one of the few places with flightless birds like the kakapo, which are critically endangered (just one step away from being extinct in the wild)
Spaying and neutering and releasing is more effective because then they still compete for the same resources, pushing reproduction down. I wonder if they can use that she other methods to get the population down to zero.
That’s when you are trying to control the population. These are invasive species, worse than that, invasive predators. Eradication and control are two different things.
Neither of those solves the problem entirely, but an eradication aims to keep the population of invasive species much lower than control. Any amount of invasive predators, especially as effective as feral cats, needs to be controlled.
Feral cats and pet cats are just two different things, like feral pigs and wild pigs. Even pet cats need to be tightly controlled, every bird a pet cat kills is multiplied in aggregate, these things we love are absolutely brutal.
Yes that’s why I said “I wonder if they can use that
sheand other methods to get the population down to zero.” Zero means eradication.I’m sorry, that’s totally fair, I don’t mean to sound dickish. They can’t hit zero. Australia is a model for how bad invasive cats can get, and the cat is already out of the bag, so to speak. They either target aggressive goals, which are primarily culling mixed with chemical and some limited physical spay/neutering programs. But when you are talking bang for buck, it’s really easy to look to culling primarily.
Spay nueter programs are much more expensive and usually donor funded. You gotta do a lot to an animal to even modestly safely remove it’s sex organs, especially females. I wouldn’t be surprised if they pop up in NZ, privately funded, in addition to the other programs. Desexing is still is the best way to deal with an active colony with a food source, you are right.
New Zealand has no native predators, and cats are extremely good predators.
These aren’t house cats that got lost, these are cats that are entirely wild and are now an invasive species. TNR would still decimate the local fauna while waiting for nature to take its course.
They also can’t be housed like you might do with a house cat turned stray.
as much as I love house cats, in New Zealand, the feral cats are an ecological apocalypse.
look up austrialian cat plague…at a certain point exterminating them is the only realistic option
I adopted mine, got her spayed, and she absolutely never goes outside. Not that she would, she’s too much of a chicken shit to bother trying to get out.
I mean they gotta put thiel on that list
To the people thinking “oh poor kitties”. In New Zealand, cats are like terminators (or more accurately, Predators from those movies). Pretty much everything evolved to be incredibly easy pray for cats. Sure, it sucks that cats have to die, but they’re an incredibly invasive species that hunts the native species to extinction. They should’ve never been imported in the first place.
New zealand is extremely prone because its home to flightless birds and other similar species that never grew up against land predators of this nature. That’s why cats and even rats are especially dangerous. These flightless birds have no real way of protecting their young and even themselves.
It’s sad for cats because we see them as companions and pets, but new zealand holds a lot of critically endangered species that simply cannot exist anywhere else
Time for them to catch up in evolution’s arms race or be left behind with the other failures like the dodo and the dinosaurs
Not how evolution works.
Survival of the fittest? No? Am I a slider? Did I land on a world where natural selection isn’t one of the evolutionary pressures on the ecosystem?
All of Oceania is this. There’s a lot of unique land animals that evolved with no threat. European colonisation really fucked that entire region and the ecosystems within.
On average, each roaming, hunting pet cat kills more than three animals every week. The numbers add up. On average, over a year each roaming and hunting pet cat in Australia kills 186 animals. This number includes 110 native animals (40 reptiles, 38 birds and 32 mammals).
That’s for Australia’s 3.7M pet cats that aren’t kept indoors 24/7. So that’s approx 407M native animals killed each year by cat lovers that don’t responsibly take care of their cat—71% of cat owners. Factor in other contamination and habitat destruction, you can expect that to be closer or even over half a billion native animals killed each year.
So, yeah, Oceania countries will hunt and kill cats. And anyone that doesn’t keep their cat inside or at least bell it’s collar, is a real piece of shit. Certainly doesn’t give a fuck about animals and the environment. It’s a totally different part of the world to Eurasia where it’s fine to just have strays all over the countryside because they’re actually a part of the functioning ecosystem.
Source: https://biodiversitycouncil.org.au/resources/the-impact-of-roaming-pet-cats-on-australian-wildlife
That’s pet cats and doesn’t count the damage that feral cats do.
Here claims that Australia’s Cats Kill Two Billion Animals Annually, with feral cats killing 1.4 Billion.
I’ve personally scraped up native birds and possums that were killed by neighbours roaming pet cats. Most not eaten. And some just paralysed and left that I called WIRES wildlife rescue for. It’s heartbreaking. These poor little critters didn’t deserve an ending like that.
Cats like hunting. Please keep your kitty inside.
No one in New Zealand actually wants to go around killing cats. Euthanizing them is the tool of last resort, and it’s generally prioritized for areas where urgency is high and other more humane solutions are hard to implement.
You can’t fuck around in an island ecosystem. You have to make hard choices in order to preserve the lives of the native plants and animals.
Most people have not seen a feral cat and assume that they are just domestic cats living rough. Couldn’t be further from the truth. Savage predators loose in the bush and Australia has millions of them.
Yep, there’s a wild difference between “feral” city/suburbia cats, and actual wild feral cats.
I used to live in a pretty rural area in Hungary, butt end of suburbia, backing into the endless fields of wheat and corn, interrupted only by small patches of “woodland” (really just a dozen or so trees occupying a small area, enough to block the view but not big enough to house any larger animals, it’s mostly birds, rodents and feral cats).
There used to be maybe ten colonies of feral cats in my immediate area, and those fuckers would fuck you up proper. They hated humans, and would cross half a field, a four lane road, and a canal just to attack you. Many a times I had to run from the bus stop to home to avoid a trip to tetanus and rabies land…
Definitely a cautionary tale.
australia aiming to be more evil than north korea
Protecting native species from an invasive predator is not evil.
You have to go a long way to be more evil than NK
Funnily enough I just got recommended to rewatch this old vid from tom scott
Maybe it’s the cadence or the accent but I cannot process anything he is saying
whats up with all the cat hating nazi’s here ?
toxoplasma gondii spotted
Well for one they probably like kiwi and kakapo more, one are endangered and another one is critically endangered. And this applied to cat that roam outside and have no dependency on human.
Ironically if anything, house cat kill for fun and will kill everything that move and smaller than them, so kinda like nazi. And i said that as a dad of 4 cats. Cats are cute, and i wish it doesn’t come to this, but other animal deserve a chance to live too.
Feral cats cause the ultimate destruction to local wildlife. They are so common, one of the worst invasive species. And New Zealand’s an island with precious endemic wildlife not found anywhere else in the world. So yeah - it’s about time! Bravo NZ for doing the right thing.
Edit: They need to do this in Hawaii too!
Absolutely. Those cats are destroying boobies. Unforgivable.
Too bad they ain’t much good eatin.
Had a friend from Hong Kong tell cats don’t taste good but dogs do. I took his word for it.
Never had cat, but it can’t be that bad, can it? Guessing it’s tougher meat than we’re accustomed to, but I’d guess it’d still make passable stew meat. Or play up the toughness and make it into jerky.
Might as well get some usage out of them.
General rule of thumb is “don’t eat things that eat things”. Obviously, there are exceptions for survival cases, but the range of pathogens, parasites, and prions one can contract from eating a predator is much, much wider than that from eating vegetarian animals.
With fish it is the opposite. Fish that dont eat fish arent usually very good eating. And most fish that eat fish are even cannibalistic of their own species
Biological magnification still occurs with fish though.
Mercury, it’s what’s for dinner.
Right, good point. I should have specified “mammals”.
Huh. TIL. I always just assumed it was a taste/texture/difficult-livestock-to-manage kind of situation. I wonder if we could offset its potential to carry pathogens by like letting it cure up in a brine or something before cooking it.
There’s also the “each step of the food chain requires 10x more initial input energy” issue with predators. Here is mostly why we eat the animals we eat
Brings back the horrific scene I came across at 14 of a cat arm in a pot.
Umm feed them. Then they’re not feral, their babies.
Thats how you get MORE feral cats lmao
I am a big fan of cats. However, if they live outside, they are feral. And they should not be allowed to keep living outside.
My preferred solution would be for people to take them in and feed them, but you definitely should not be feeding them while they are still living outside. Outdoor cats cause a lot of destruction to the ecosystem by overhunting small animals such as songbirds, even to the point of extinction.
Profoundly disconnected from reality moment
Then they start hunting for sports.
Cats are an invasive species in NZ, which has a lot more small critters living on the ground because there are no native predators to them.
Cats are invasive everywhere. Start killing every stray and then maybe cat lovers will be more responsible.
Now that’s quite a hot take. Various Felines are native to almost every part of the world, except, i.e. NZ.
The overpopulation is the issue. Not their existance.
Not talking about actual wild felines but domestic cats that are allowed to be out doors by their owners or abandoned to live out doors. Their simple existence out doors is the issue.
yes but leave it to politicians to do everything in the worst possible way
Yeah, well fed house cats never bring home dead mice and birds.
🤦♂️
If the cat is a strictly indoor cat and is bringing you dead mice and birds, you may have a problem with mice and birds in your house.
Well, Polly had it coming
I keep mine indoors… and our city sterilizes feral cats and lets them go again if they cannot be adopted timely
A much humane approach that limits the harm a cat could do in the wild
That’s not harm reduction. Letting then go is ecocide. And it isn’t even humane. Feral cats are feral, they can’t be adopted. Better to humanely put them down.
limits the harm
Harm reduction isn’t really sufficient when every single feral cat kills presumably hundreds of criticially endangered birds per year, is it?
With everything deadlined to 2050, I think that is the new end of the world
