Shooting Feral Cats (Trigger Warning).

[Zardnaar]

So, equip the drones with infra-red cameras.

That's fancy stuff!!!

It was a month ago.

Man killed by pack of dogs in Northland, police believe

Police believe a man has been killed by dogs in the Far North community of Panguru - and some are still on the loose.

www.rnz.co.nz

 

[El_Machinae]

Release isn't an option either outside of a few urban areas I suppose.

I would recommend against it, regardless. Surgery and then release would be much more cruel than euthanization.

 

[NovaKart]

I’m worried about rabies which is maybe not a problem in New Zealand. That’s why I steer clear of stray cats normally, they’re really common in Iraq and Turkey, they’re not as common in US but lately I’ve heard some noisy ones mating outside.

 

[Farm Boy]

It's not that neutering animals is particularly cruel, considering all the available options. We just stop caring once it's a carcass. Neutering is expensive, intensive, and if the destruction of local wildlife is the problem, neutered animals still eat. An outside gib adopted us growing up(Mom named him Amber before we sorted out his anatomy, he didn't seem to mind). He would bring us songbird gifts. So, it doesn't address the problem. If you've already captured the animal, getting rid of it was the goal. So really, why bother capturing it? Shooting things in live traps sucks. But I guess trapping can be a tool to be used, and leg traps hit unintended targets enough that live traps + culling might still be a legitimate thing in some areas.

 

[Kyriakos]

Reminds me of Swift's Modest Proposal.

I don't know about feral, but (street/stray) city cats can reach dangerous numbers, because people keep feeding them. The upside is that the cats become docile (or opportunistic?) near people, but it's one thing to have 5-10 cats in a couple of city blocks, and quite another to have tens of them.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

I used to very against cats being kept indoors.

Now I am very against them being outside. The ecological damage they do is just too vast.

We need to cull and invasive species.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

One of the side effects of the spread of coyotes in North America is that bird populations are recovering because coyotes are killing feral cats.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

One of the side effects of the spread of coyotes in North America is that bird populations are recovering because coyotes are killing feral cats.

Were coyote originally there before humans messed it up?

 

[Chukchi Husky]

No. Coyotes were found mainly in the Southwestern United States and Mexico. What caused coyotes to migrate throughout the rest of North America was the near complete eradication of wolves, the attempts to eradicate coyotes through poisoning, the elimination of urban feral dogs and the fission-fusion social nature of coyotes allowing coyotes to adapt to new environments and lifestyles better than wolves can.

 

[Arwon]

It's only in the ACT because we have a Green/Left govt and the full extent has just come in.

We're still battling something called 'The Street cat Alliance ' that goes and feeds in town ferals .... because "kitties".

Feral dogs are a big issue in 'communities' (read Aboriginal Towns) where it's basically unsafe to walk around. Some feral control needs to be enforced there as well.

This is a bit of an unfair take on the alliance, they do trap and desex with strays and semi owned cats, mostly in areas like the industrial suburbs. Most of the cats they catch they rehome, some they keep at their own building, but they release the fraction who aren't suitable for that. The idea being that if a colony is fully desexed, it won't grow, and it'll peter out over time.

They just don't want to be forced by the government to stop catching and desexing, or to participate in killing that fraction, in order to keep operating under the new laws

Which, as one of the few groups of volunteers who were already working to keep urban cat numbers down before this, who were established to fill a big gap, is a pretty fair position. If the government want to do kill programs on the urban periphery they should fund and run those themselves.

 

[emzie]

No. Coyotes were found mainly in the Southwestern United States and Mexico. What caused coyotes to migrate throughout the rest of North America was the near complete eradication of wolves, the attempts to eradicate coyotes through poisoning, the elimination of urban feral dogs and the fission-fusion social nature of coyotes allowing coyotes to adapt to new environments and lifestyles better than wolves can.

It wouldn't surprise me if the majority of coyotes now live in urban areas.

 

[Farm Boy]

There's a lot out this way, too. They prey on farmsteads with birds and young livestock, and they're pretty smart, so they tend to get eliminated around those operations.

I've only ever seen a couple while on foot around, but they aren't scared of tractors like they are of you directly. Sort of fun to watch them when they're out during fieldwork. One downside of the rebound(compared to when they were more actively eliminated) is I haven't seen a fox in ages.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

It wouldn't surprise me if the majority of coyotes now live in urban areas.

Urban coyotes have taken up the niche that would've been filled by street dogs. A century of active poisoning taught coyotes to avoid areas where they would be poisoned and instead migrate to new areas, including cities that are now free of street dogs. Cities provide plenty of opportunities for coyotes to thrive, not from human waste but from urban fauna. At the moment the human reaction to these coyotes is one of cautious curiosity, a chance to see something of the wild, so there's no active pressure from these humans against urban coyotes, but the problem is that coyotes are losing their fear of humans and are starting to attack humans.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

Sounds a lot like foxes in the UK.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Sounds a lot like foxes in the UK.

After reading about both, foxes in the UK are similar to coyotes in the US in how they are treated by humans and their impact on the environment. The main difference is in their public perception. Fantastic Mr Fox and Disney's Robin Hood has helped to change how foxes are viewed by most people, away from a cowardly pest that existed only to be hunted for sport and more towards something heroic or benign. This isn't true for everyone but foxes are ranked highly as among one of the favourite animals of British people. This hasn't happened with the coyote, with the coyote's most famous cultural depiction being Wile E. Coyote (himself following on from the tradition of indigenous American Coyote stories). Mark Twain called the coyote "the embodiment of want, he is always hungry", while a 1920 article in the Scientific American called the coyote the "original Bolshevik". Even the image of the wolf has changed, away from a bloodthirsty monster and becoming more heroic and something of a symbol of the wilderness, but that took almost near extinction, in some places complete extinction.

 

[Farm Boy]

Coyotes and foxes both kill livestock, as will racoons, mink, hawks, and a number of other things, but coyotes kill them all too(maybe not so many hawks) and are invasive. There's a lot less reason to like them.

 

[Samson]

How is this for a solution: Making Australia’s native animals poisonous could curb feral cats

An implant that makes Australian animals lethally poisonous to cats that prey on them could help save species on the verge of extinction.​

​

Australian mammals are easily targeted by cats because many are small and they haven’t had time to evolve natural defences since the cats turned up. To provide an artificial defence strategy, Anton Blencowe and Kyle Brewer at the University of South Australia and their colleagues have invented an implant that makes native mammals lethal to cats if eaten, thereby preventing the felines from killing other individuals.​

​

The rice-sized implant is inert when it is inserted under the native mammal’s skin at the back of the neck. If a cat eats the mammal, it is likely to swallow the implant, because cats usually eat the whole bodies of their prey. Once the cat ingests the implant, the acid inside the cat’s stomach breaks it open and releases a fatal poison.​

​

The poison – sodium fluoroacetate, or “1080” – leads to unconsciousness then death in cats by causing an energy shutdown in their cells. 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. This is because sodium fluoroacetate naturally occurs in many Australian plants and native animals have evolved resistance to it.​

Paper Writeup (paywalled)

 

[Farm Boy]

If you're propagating endagered native species in captured breeding environment and releasing them that seems like something to look into. Otherwise, wouldn't it be easier to find and kill the cats? They're bigger and more numerous?

 

[Samson]

The writeup says:

[Australia’s rewilding programmes] involve fencing off large sections of wilderness, removing as many feral cats as possible, then reintroducing native animals that are often critically endangered and only exist in captivity. The aim is to restore wild populations, but the programmes sometimes fail because of the difficulty of removing every single feral cat with traditional methods like baiting, trapping and shooting.​

​

“Just one cat that’s left can quickly wipe out a whole population of reintroduced animals,” says Brewer. Inserting the implants into the native animals before their release could help eliminate these last “problem individual” cats, he says.​

 

[Farm Boy]

That makes way more sense, then. I was thinking that flat elimination of predation or creating an aversion in the predator species would not work because unless they outlaw the ownership of domestic cats(which maybe they should) there will be a constant trickle of subsidized reintroduction of that species, too.