News Alert: Another Example of Feral Cat Eradication Gone Wrong

[Maggie Funkhouser]

Designated a World Heritage site in 1997, Macquarie, an island located
halfway between Australia and Antarctica, has had a history of
nonnative species inhabiting its beautiful landscape. The island is
well known for its vast populations of seabirds and elephant seals
that migrate there each year to breed, but it seems the feral cats,
rabbits, rats, and mice have been receiving the most attention. Over
the past 100 years, passing ships have introduced these species to the
island and now authorities have been working to remove them.
Environmentalists were especially concerned for the native seabirds’
survival, so in 1995, the Parks and Wildlife Service of Tasmania tried
to remove most of the feral cats. Unfortunately, this cat-removal
project shows the dangers of meddling with an ecosystem and not taking
into consideration the in-direct effects of such projects.

By removing the cat population, this allowed for the rabbit population
to explode, in turn, most of the island’s fragile vegetation that the
birds depend on for food and shelter has been destroyed and causing
many island slopes to erode. According to Dana Bergstrom, of the
Australian Antarctic Division, and her colleagues, removing the cats
has “caused environmental devastation that will cost authorities 24
million Australian dollars ($16.2 million) to remedy.” Subsequently,
the park service now plans to use technology and poisons that were not
available a decade ago to eradicate rabbits, rats, and mice from the
island.

Again, this story is another example of why humane, non-lethal methods
of animal management should be utilized over total eradication
attempts. As more attempts to eradicate one animal population take
place, the more we hear about how another animal population quickly
flourishes and causes new problems. By implementing sterilization
programs (such as TNR for feral cats), there is no sudden large-scale
change in an environment to create a sudden reaction, instead an
animal population is slowly reduced over time allowing the environment
to gradually adjust—nature will find the balance and there will be
less casualties.

Other Examples:

Cape May, NJ: feral cats removed causing explosion in skunk population
Amsterdam Island: feral cats removed (to protect ground-nesting birds)
causing black rat and
house mice populations to increase
(they began to prey on ground-nesting
birds)
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