Cats and Australia’s wildlife don't mix

This isn't an easy photo to share. It shows a feral cat killing and eating a brush-tailed phascogale: a tiny carnivorous native Australian marsupial that should be darting through our bush at night, not dying in the jaws of an introduced predator. It's confronting. But I think Australians need to be confronted. Because this is what the feral cat crisis, and the broader roaming-cat crisis, actually looks like.

For all their softness, agility and familiarity, cats are one of the most destructive predators ever unleashed on this continent. Our Government's own statistics show feral cats kill more than 1.5 billion native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs every year, as well as another 1.1 billion invertebrates (animals like insects etc that don't have a skeleton). Predation by feral and domestic cats is a threat to more than 200 of Australia's endangered animals. This isn't a side issue in conservation. It's one of the front lines.

And yes, the extinction toll is even worse than many people realise. Thirty three Australian mammal species have been driven to extinction since European colonisation, and cats are directly implicated in two-thirds of those losses. Australia is infamous for the worst mammal extinction record in the modern world, and feral cats are one of the chief executioners.

Scientists like my friends Sarah Legge, Katherine Moseby and Pat Hodgens have spent years working on the front lines of this crisis and trying to stop it. Sarah Legge has pointed to the grim fact that more than 60 Aussie mammal species and subspecies are highly or extremely susceptible to predation by cats and foxes. She has also highlighted one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have: when cats and foxes are excluded, native mammals can bounce back. Across Australia’s fenced-off cat- and fox-free havens, threatened mammal populations have increased sharply, while populations outside those havens continue to decline.

And Katherine Moseby’s work suggests the impact of cats is even greater than previously thought. Using DNA and necropsy evidence, Katherine and her colleagues found many deaths previously hard to attribute were in fact caused by cats. As she puts it, there are “a lot more cat killings than previously thought”. That should send a chill through the spine of anyone who cares about bilbies, bettongs, quolls, dunnarts and all the other small native animals trying to survive in a landscape full of introduced predators.

Pat Hodgens has helped show what determined action can achieve on Kangaroo Island. After the fires, high numbers of feral cats moving through burnt country posed a huge threat to exposed wildlife with nowhere left to hide. But in a predator-free refuge, endangered species such as the Kangaroo Island dunnart rebounded strongly. Pat puts it plainly: if you want to save Aussie species, you need to know your enemy, and one of the biggest enemies is the feral cat.

I saw some of this reality up close during my time as Threatened Species Commissioner. I will never forget being supervised gutting a feral cat in the Flinders Ranges by Katherine Moseby and finding multiple lizards and small mammals inside. Nor will I forget Pat Hodgens making me do the same on Kangaroo Island, one of the five islands designated for feral cat removal under Australia’s first Threatened Species Strategy that I developed in that role.

But here's a key warning we must also hold onto. Yes, feral cats are a massive problem. But controlling them is good politics and we must never let that become a political smokescreen. Governments shouldn't get to wave the feral cat crisis around as though it somehow excuses habitat destruction, land clearing, native forest logging and climate change. Cat predation is one of the major immediate threats to Australia's wildlife, but it's not the only one. Animals are being hit from both sides: their homes are being bulldozed and degraded by climate change, and then the survivors are then picked off by cats.

So the call to action is threefold.

First, don't let governments off the hook on habitat loss and climate change just because they say feral cats are real and terrible. We must deal with all the threats.

Second, support the people and organisations doing the hard work on cat control. Groups like the Invasive Species Council and the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions are pushing practical action, research and innovation. They deserve our backing.

Third, if you choose to own a cat, keep it indoors and securely contained. Domestic cats might be cute and cuddly on the couch, but outside they're deadly invasive predators. Research shows they kill huge numbers of native birds and reptiles, and from a wildlife perspective, keeping pet cats contained 24 hours a day is the only responsible option.

Australia’s wildlife defines us as a nation. Most of our animals are found nowhere else on Earth. If we're serious about keeping them, we have to get serious about feral cats and responsible cat ownership too.

Cats and Australia's wildlife don't mix.