The Australian Broadcasting Corporation have a headline, today (Dec 30, 2021), on their website which I would strongly argue is very misleading and deliberately so. They state that hundreds of feral cats have been "removed" from Kangaroo Island in a bid to protect endangered native species.
It is the use of the word "removed" which I believe has been deliberately chosen to paint the authorities in a better light that should be the case. These feral cats have been removed, yes, but they have been removed because they've been killed. This is actually mass slaughter. The authorities are killing feral cats in their many thousands. It has been going on for a long time. However, it is the first time I've seen this kind of language used which distorts the true picture.
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| A deadly feral cat pointing device which delights the Australian authorities even though it kills feral cats in a decidedly inhumane way. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation call this device a trap when it simply is not. |
Of course, as usual they refer to feral cats as 'pests'. It is rather strange because in some countries feral cats are not regarded as pests but as community cats. The Australian viewpoint is a very negative.
How do you decide if an animal is a pest or not? Well, I would argue that they have labelled feral cats as pests because they kill native species. To restate that in a different way: the behaviour of feral cats leads to the death of native species. And so they call them pests.
On that criterion, they would have to call themselves pests because humans in various ways kill more native species than feral cats. You won't find any information or hard facts on it. It is an estimate from me. But that is not a bad thing because all the numbers about the killing of native species by feral cats in Australia are estimates anyway.
There is one particular method of killing feral cats which they delight in. In another example of a distortion of the truth and heavily biased reporting, they describe the Felixer as a "trap". It is not a trap. It is a device which chucks 1080 poison onto passing feral cats. They groom themselves and ingest the poison and die a painful death.
RELATED: Picture of feral cat Doomsday Machine.
There is no way on God's earth that you can call this device a trap. Nothing is trapped. It just kills feral and stray cats. It also kills domestic cats and other animals but it is designed to feral cats only. How effective is it?
They persist in calling this feral cat poison a trap and that it is five times more effective than a standard cage trap. Standard cage traps do not kill the cats. Cage traps are not designed to kill cats but to trap them after which they can be sterilised and returned under a TNR program or in the worst case scenario they can be euthanised in an humane way.
The Felixer simply poisons animals. There is no attempt to kill the cats humanely under this scheme. Whether it is humane or not is entirely irrelevant to these people.
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