Guest essay by Eric Worrall
An Australian ecologist has created and deployed a killing machine, which uses robot technology to identify and spray feral cats with poison. The cats die when they lick the deadly poison off their fur. The feral cats are being targeted, because of the threat they pose to rare and endangered birds.
Robots, lasers, poison: the high-tech bid to cull wild cats in the outback
A trial of ‘grooming traps’ is aiming to eradicate one of the biggest threats to Australian wildlife – feral felines.
It took John Read, an ecologist seven years to invent and produce four of the “grooming traps”. After extensive testing, he has switched on the first one in a nature reserve in south-west Queensland.
“Cats are hard-wired to hunt,” Read said. That means they can kill dozens of animals a night but it also means they are often reluctant to eat baits since they prefer to kill an animal themselves.
“This trap targets the cats’ achilles heel,” Read said. Being fastidious groomers, cats will lick off almost anything that gets on their fur. So Read has developed a trap that exploits their tendency to try to get their numbers under control.
With four laser rangefinders, the trap detects when something moves in front of it. If it’s taller than a cat – perhaps a dingo or a koala – the top rangefinder will be triggered and it shuts down. Similarly, a rangefinder at the bottom needs to be able to see between the cat’s legs, meaning a low-slung animal like a wombat or a quoll won’t trigger it.
Finally, two rangefinders at the front and back of the trap need to be triggered simultaneously, indicating something the length of a cat has moved in front of it.
This device is obviously not quite the deadly Terminator cyborg from science fiction, but it has to be seen as a big step towards building scary autonomous robotic killing machines. Who would have thought an ecologist would come up with something like that? Perhaps we should all start being nicer to our local bird watchers, especially those with an Ecology degree – there is no telling what they are working on in their basements.
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This sounds like applied cruelty.
There is no product that can be sprayed on a cat that will humanely kill it.
Permethrins are out, rat killers would be possible, such as warfarin derivatives.
However it is not clear that a lethal dose would be delivered.
Is there any trial data on this.What about non target species?
Having said this the feral cat is the cause of most of the so called species loss in Australia, blamed lamely on ‘Climate Change’.
Attempts to exclude cats in the NT have led to big rises in small marsupial populations, followed by the fences excluding cats being broached and the populations being wiped out.
If all the money spent on closing down efficient coal powered power stations was spent on controlling rabbits, foxes, cats, Mynah birds, feral bees and ants, Australia would revert to an indigenous speciation
in no time.
Green ideology is so focused on ‘saving the planet’, it forgets to start here with the self evident and spend money on the possible.
Birds are disgusting creatures that shit on everything. Let the cats roam.
I remember reading about a sharpshooter hired to eliminate feral cats in Oz. One of them weighed 38 pounds.
Ian M
38 pounds?? Even overfed house cats never get that fat!
I suspect they’re evolving into something a bit bigger…
seriously..they DO get rather large
the size of a middling dog isnt uncommon in some rural areas with good food sources and where the largest tom, n queens manage to mate and the genetics go to work
in Whyalla no one walks even with their dogs without a large stick or rake handle, in certain of the fringe areas
Pretty small sharpshooter I’d say.
Feral cats are everywhere, in this region (Kimberley) most are black, so can’t be seen at night when they hunt. I have seen them as large as any cattle dog. Catching to neuter and spay is out of the question. The idea of poisoning has some merit, as recent laws make all pet cats to be neutered, chipped for ID and kept in at night, because of the damage they do.
Nobody here has suggested a suitable alternative, yet, but I haven’t read all the comments yet.
recent laws make all pet cats to be neutered, chipped for ID
Pity it doesn’t apply to their owners.
Pygmy sharp shooters, – the right people for the right job.
Only 38 pounds? That’s quite a skinny sharpshooter.
“One of them weighed 38 pounds.”
That is a pretty light-weight sharpshooter …
Please remember it still holds true that:
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” –
Illustrated London News (ILN), 4/19/24
GK Chesterton
Think income tax, social security, welfare, Department of Education, Department of Energy, War on Poverty, et al.
All from progressive government and never fixed when conservatives take over.
As if; It is the duty of the Repubs to maintain the status quo and keep ‘busines’ (read that as “the money”) flowing …
Read Repubs as Chamber of Commerce …
Is there anything in Australia that is not considered a pest?
I wonder how many small Australian marsupials will be killed before they work out that the machine is not suitable to the job.
In some areas where there are infestations of these wild cats all of the small ground dwelling kangaroos, wallabies, bilbies, spotted quoll and many other small species have been wiped out or near wiped out. Bilbies are extremely rare now, except in zoos and protected and fenced refugees. I would be worried that the quoll that is very much like a cat could be mistaken by the robot for a cat.
Dead right, all cats and quolls vary in size, it’s called age and genetics. This robot will kill other species. I’ve seen quolls the same size as cats, this device will help eliminate the few that are left. Didn’t anyone think of outlawing cats completely in Australia, Oh that’s not going to work either!
I didn’t know toxoplasmosis was so common…………
🙂
actually it IS , far more than people realise.
According to the WHO, toxoplasmosis is second only to malaria in human infection rates. In some developing countries 95% of the population is infected. And contrary to popular alarmist press, most infection is caused from eating tainted meat products, not cat feces, even in the USA and other developed countries.
There is a Saturday Night Live sketch in here somewhere.
Playing God and deciding that cats are worth less than birds. I disagree.
birds pollinate and spread seed of our native species
cats kill birds and lizards marsupials etc
they have NO place in australias ecosystem except as CONTAINED AT HOME PETS!
the same as ,sadly ,dumped dogs also are a serious problem in some regions,
bounty on a fox? 10
bounty on a wild dog(non dingo) 50$
Victoria, aus
How about a robotic ecologist killing machine? I prefer cats to ecologists.
Welcome, Australia, you have creating a new plague of feral rats and fearless birds. Hitchcock or writer of Ben will be rolling in their graves
The problem continues to be the legality of cats elsewhere. They were not always feral.
feral Cat are a pest species, they kill all the native wild life they encounter, shoot them and shoot them often.
Great Idea Sun Spot, or it would be if most boys were still allowed access to a gun.
My my. I have a feral who was caught as a kitten. Her worst habit is getting robins.She is sitting across from me licking her face and watching the sparrows. But then I am watching some idjit from Oz on big brother. Boy I need help!
Ok
There’s no way for this to go wrong. There are many ways for it to go seriously wrong tho.
Forget about “who thinks up this crap,” go straight to “who authorizes it.”
Saw this cat eliminator demonstrated in a news item about the newly rediscovered Night Parrot population in Qld. Fantastic idea, I reckon. We’ve lost far too may species to feral cats, and anything that gets rid of them is good news, in my view. This is how funds for the environment should be utilised. As for setting traps and speying- this particular nature reserve is in the middle of nowhere and is visited by people infrequently, hence the need for an automatic cat killer. There may be only a few dozen of these parrots left- thought to have been extinct for a century. As a bird, and especially parrot lover, I’d love to see feral cats completely eliminated from this country. Along with foxes, cane toads and wild dogs.
So the rabbits are OK then?
My litytle list was suggestive, not comprehensive.
There were no parrots in Melbourne throughout my childhood, except at the Zoo.
Despite the abundance of domestic cats throughout the suburbs, rainbow lorikeets started appearing in the early years of the new century, with populations exploding over the next few years.
Why didn’t cats prevent the take over of my city by parrots?
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/18/1082226635772.html
Pope Innocent VIII launched a crusade against cats in 1484 – “to be burnt, along with the witches that own them”
The claim about the heat island is interesting. My grandpa used to have a property near Gisborne in Victoria.
Gisborne is beautiful, but it is also around 1200ft above sea level, so it is quite cold compared to Melbourne.
I remember even when I was young the trees were full of Lorikeets. So maybe temperature is not such a factor.
Lorikeets are a different proposition to Night Parrots, which live in a part of the continent that has few trees, and in any case the Night Parrot lives on the ground and spends the day in spinifex (which is a low spikey shrub). Cats don’t seem to do much in controlling Indian mynahs, which, unlike lorikeets, are a pest.
— http://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/pests-and-threats/animal-pests/animal-pests-a-z/rainbow-lorikeet/
Obviously there are either insufficient feral cats in Auckland or there are too many people spreading BS about feral cats.
Feral cats aren’t a big issue in urban areas. There, it’s pet moggies that’s the problem. The impact of feral cats on ground-living species in the Australian outback is obviously going to be very different than that of cats generally in urban areas with many trees, on a species which spends most of its time high in those trees, although lorikeets will come down quite low for nectar on native shrubs like grevillia. They also form large flocks which are very noisy, warning flock memners when predators come into view.
The Night Parrot was thought to be extinct for ~100 years (1912–2013). Cat populations throughout Australia, domestic and feral, increased dramatically throughout that period.
“Night parrot capture and tagging hailed as ‘holy grail’ moment for bird lovers”. – Guardian, Aug 2015
Are you sure cats are a significant problem for this species?
As discussed earlier- the Night Parrot is a ground-living nocturnal bird, inhabiting semi-arid to arid parts of Australia (well, they did originally). It’s reasonable to assume their near-demise is as a result of feral cats and foxes.
Now if we could discover an easy way to destroy windmills. Where is Don Quixote when we need him?
Eric, the people affected by the Black Death in Istanbul would have been Greeks. The Turks are not native to the area.
Judging from comments on the Guardian, the media has been successful in convincing people a $450,000+ investment in a cat-killing machine is justified because unconfined cats are eradicating all the “good” free-ranging animals.
The cats are sentenced to eradication based on speculation, hearsay and computer models. There is no concrete evidence they are guilty as charged.
The proposed Australian mass cat slaughter is no more about saving threatened species than Obama’s Clean Power Plan is about saving the planet.
verdeviewer says:
The cats are sentenced to eradication based on speculation, hearsay and computer models. There is no concrete evidence they are guilty as charged.
That applies to every comment here that cheers the poisoning of feral cats.
I’ve never said that ferals aren’t a problem in some areas.
As far as humans are concerned, all of nature is subject to cost/benefit analysis. The cost of feral cats is far smaller than some of the baseless opinions here, and the benefits are greater. Given the choice, would we be better off with more rodents? Because ferals constantly hunt them down and eat them. Get rid of feral cats and you have different problems.
Once again: the only thing that works is trap, fix, release. It’s not perfect. But every other ‘solution’ has a bigger downside.
please have a look at this picture of a feral cat in Australia ..
http://www.earthintransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/feral-cat-aus-060613.jpg
Australian feral cat diet….http://www.issg.org/database/species/reference_files/felcat/prey_australia.pdf
You decide whether cats are guilty as charged
Apart from killing them they can be kept out….
e.g. http://www.australianwildlife.org/sanctuaries/faure-island-sanctuary.aspx
and this one for those who wont believe the size!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-04/huge-feral-cats-arnhem-land/4731696
ozspeaksup,
You’ve convinced me. The biggest cat I’ve seen in several years of working in our local Humane Society was just at 30 pounds. The one in that picture looks bigger.
I am the first to admit that I am no expert on Australia. I’m trying to keep the conversation focused on the article, where this “ecologist” proposes a ‘solution’ that cannot work:
Despite the impressive science behind it, it is very expensive, and for a country of 7,600,000 square kilometres, it has zero chance of success. It simply can’t overcome the vacuum effect. Once Cats are removed from a region, more simply migrate in. Using it just slows the process of an ecosystem reaching a sustainable balance with the change.
These “ecologists are the same kind of fools who created the problem in the first place, by introducing rabbits.
In defence of farmers, sometimes ecologists really act like idiots as they implement their ideologies. The removal of feral species from Macquarie Island is one of the best examples of ecologists wrecking the ecosystem in the process of trying to turn it back to 1788. Cats, Rabbits, and Rats were first introduced in the 1860s. Although the Cats hunted some native birds, a new balance was formed in which all species were relatively assured of survival. Almost a century later, the myxomatosis virus was introduced to eliminate rabbits. As Rabbit numbers fell, Cats turned to native birds. With each new myxomatosis outbreak, the ecosystem was pushed into chaos…
[source]
I suspect that as usual, money is the unspoken goal of ‘ecologists’:
To deal with the problem of Cats, scientists asked for $500,000 to eliminate a feral population of around 500 Cats.
I think a simple bounty on feral cats, say, $10 per head, would be far more cost effective.
GregK, from the issg.org reference:
Data collected from 22 studies of feral cats in mainland Australia suggest that mammals comprise the major prey of feral cats in most localities. Introduced rabbits and house mice predominate in semi-arid to arid habitats, whereas marsupials (especially the common ringtail possom) are predominant in temperate forest, urban, and suburban habitats. Brushtail possoms, sugar gliders, greater gliders, brown antechinus, brush rat and swamp rat are consistently part of the diet of feral cats in the temperate forests…In wet-dry tropical habitats where rabbits do not occur native Rattus spp. become more important, including the pale field rat, dusky rat and the long-haired rat.
No mention of bandicoots, bilbies, rat-kangaroos, quolls, hare-wallabies, and others whose supposed extinction was previously attributed to foxes. Where are the “rare and endangered birds?” Is it not strange that demise of species once attributed to foxes is now being attributed to cats?
Foxes are clearly a bigger problem than cats, and combined agricultural impact and control efforts are estimated to cost AU$2 million per year. But in areas where foxes are poisoned with 1080 baits, rabbits proliferate and require additional control.
Little note is made of the fact that rabbits compete for food with native prey species. The demise of the Eastern Quoll began with the introduction of rabbits, before even foxes entered the picture:
http://www.rewildingaustralia.com.au/what-went-wrong-with-the-eastern-quoll/
The article describes the current demise of quoll in Tasmania. Conclusion: “The Tasmanian experience demonstrates that if NSW and Victoria are ever to reintroduce the eastern quoll, at least on a landscape scale, we must first reintroduce the [Tasmanian] devil– in a hope that a healthy devil population would suppress cat and perhaps fox numbers, allowing the eastern quoll to have a chance to survive in the wild.”
Reintroduction of an extirpated native predator sounds more promising than government-funded dispersal of a robotic terminator that requires regular upkeep and is almost certainly being promoted more for profit than practicality. There’s a problem, however, in that the Tasmanian Devil may soon join the Tasmanian Tiger as no more than a memory:
http://www.rewildingaustralia.com.au/extinction/
Will foxes and cats replace Tasmania’s last native top-level predator?
Presumably the poison is cat specific to allow native carrion eaters to survive? Indian vultures and diclofenac should be a lesson for anyone considering this type of thing.
As noted in Eric’s story, native animals have a high resistance to 1080. It has been used for many years in fox control efforts.
Good luck Australia!
We’ve done the feral cat discussion before.
Normally rational folks refuse to believe anything about feral cats that doesn’t fit their kitty cat belief. A very useless discussion.
That ‘trap’ has a number of issues, but the ecologist should already know about them. If he isn’t blinded by his beliefs.
What he is establishing is a new Darwinian filter. One that eliminates normal sized cats in favor of misshapen, small or large cats. The size selection effect should be evident within years.
Perhaps Australia has begun breeding their own saber tooth lion?
Cats live between 13 to 20+ years. I had a cousin that owned a thirty plus pound cat. Unknown breeding and unafraid of any dogs or people. He was a really cool cat and would hop in the car window to go riding with us.
Coyotes are beyond invasive as they’re endemic to most of America. The Eastern coyote is larger than the Texas area coyote and there is some research that establishes red wolf DNA in the Eastern coyote. I believe those samples were drawn from coyotes captured in Southern Michigan.
Trappers leave their traps out in the weather for at least a year, even if they’ve boiled the traps. They also attempt to de-scent or over scent clothes and gloves. Over scent is soaking the clothes and especially gloves and boots in strong odors that do not scare the animals; like bobcat or coyote urine if that is the animal you are after. Cats and coyotes are considered very tough animals to trap. When someone tells me that feral cats are easy to catch, they just proved that they’ve never really trapped animals.
Feral means the animal has returned to the wild. Nor does it take many bad human interactions to cause feral animals to avoid humans and human scent. Scent animals easily detect for weeks after the human has left. Anyone who believes feral animals just walk into traps has not actually trapped feral animals.
Feral animals do not enjoy or seek rotten meat or baits with rat/mice odors all over them. Rats and mice are incredibly efficient at eating bait without triggering a trap and it takes a truly starving feral animal to enter a trap to nibble at bait with mouse pellets on it.
Cats of normal size eat a fair amount of cat food every day. A feral cat is operating at a much higher energy level and requires much more food. Only their food is fresh meat, not some grain/meat product mix. Fresh meat translates to dead animals.
Cats will hunt any animal they believe they have a chance to kill; rabbits, chickens, pheasants, song birds, etc. Any land or tree nesting bird smaller than a goose is prey to normal sized feral cats. And birds are at their most vulnerable when nesting.
Wild cats, bobcats, lynxes, ocelots, jaguars, mountain lions, etc. have surprising large territories that they range over.
Feral cats, dumped willy-nilly by their ex-owners, are downright crowded in many near urban semi-wild areas. Don’t forget that there is a constant supply of ex-owners dumping new cats. The truly stupid cats quickly feed the local coyotes, the others receive lessons on feral.
Frankly, I do not have the money that shelters and vets require for spay operations. I have never been offered a free spay operation for an animal.
Nor do I have the inclination to waste my time doing the whole shelter dance, especially if someone believes I’m going to take and put the spayed puss right back in my woods. They are destructive for many years and very unwelcome.
Well said ATheoK.
++++++ well said:-)
cool- you got away with posting that.
my comment with links to data on extinctions due to feral cats was removed. surely that was an accident because data is always useful and helpful.
it’s hard to notice something that’s missing- but in Marin county, there is no bird song.
on a warm day, though, one can often smell the stench of feral cats (especially near Paradise Cay)
There are posts going missing gnomish.
I just lost one in the Pat Franks Systematical errors thread.
Near as I can figure, the more links included and perhaps the length of tie you work on a post increases the risk of the post getting lost.
The posts go lost without getting captured by WordPress I think. Meaning that they’re lost before Anthony/WUWT sees them.
Headline – ‘Ecologist dies in mysterious circumstances. Sydney police are relating it to an electrical storm and a brawl in a biker bar, started by a big cat demanding, ‘I want your jacket, boots and mororcycle”
Perhaps learning a little may help.
One place actually capturing and checking diet is:
http://www.aridrecovery.org.au/feral
So is 12 million feral cats a good estimate?
In the desert they eat more reptiles than anything else (see the .pdf below)
http://www.aridrecovery.org.au/LiteratureRetrieve.aspx?ID=179751