“The aim of our project isn’t to kill feral cats, it’s to protect native species it’s just an unfortunate reality that the way to do that is through lethal control of cats.”ĭi Evans at animal charity RSPCA Australia says “culling of feral cats can be justified as long as direct impacts caused by feral cats are shown and that the methods are effective and humane”.Īnimal advocacy group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) argues that a more humane approach would be to catch feral cats and administer them contraceptives so they stop breeding and eventually dwindle out. Some animal welfare groups believe that killing feral cats is inhumane, but Brewer says it is currently the only viable way to protect vulnerable Australian species. There is no danger of domestic cats consuming the lethal implants because the rewilding programmes are conducted in remote areas, says Brewer. “But at least all the bilbies survived fine, so that tells us the implants are safe,” says Blencowe.Īustralia’s wildfires killed 90 per cent of small ground-based animals Unfortunately for the researchers, the trial coincided with a mouse plague that created so much food for the cats that they didn’t try to eat any of the bilbies. Bilbies are small, furry, long-eared marsupials that are threatened by cat predation. In a subsequent unpublished field trial in 2021, the researchers inserted the implants under the skin of 30 native bilbies at a large wildlife reserve in South Australia where feral cats are also present.
“They just kind of curl up and slow down,” says Blencowe. The cats all died within 6 to 12 hours of consuming the carcasses, seemingly in a relatively painless way.
In an unpublished laboratory trial, feral cats were given rabbit carcasses that each contained one of the rice-sized implants. This is because sodium fluoroacetate naturally occurs in many Australian plants and native animals have evolved resistance to it. It is already widely used in poison baits for feral cats because it is relatively non-toxic to native animals, so it shouldn’t harm other predators that may end up consuming the implant. The poison – sodium fluoroacetate, or “1080” – leads to unconsciousness then death in cats by causing an energy shutdown in their cells. Once the cat ingests the implant, the acid inside the cat’s stomach breaks it open and releases a fatal poison. If a cat eats the mammal, it is likely to swallow the implant, because cats usually eat the whole bodies of their prey. The rice-sized implant is inert when it is inserted under the native mammal’s skin at the back of the neck.
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