The hunting cat

Read more about cat psychology

The domestic cat is a carnivore and like all members of this family is an aggressive and efficient hunter. It doesn't matter whether the cat is owned, unowned or feral it is more than capable of attacking and killing our native wildlife. Even a cat that has been purchased from a breeder and has never been trained to hunt by its mother has natural predatory ability.

One must remember that even a bite from a cat will normally kill wildlife through shock or infection. What we can do is try and reduce the threat by controlling the overall cat population. As responsible pet owners we can help by:

Confining our cats
One of the biggest myths is that our owned cat population does not hunt because we meet their food requirements. Research suggests that an owned cat will kill approximately 32 wildlife per year regardless of how much food is supplied. By confining our cats we are helping to separate the owned and unowned cat populations which helps to reduce unwanted breeding.

By confining your cat at night you are helping to protect our native wildlife because many of our native animals are in fact nocturnal.

Having them desexed unless they are going to be used for breeding purposes
A female cat is capable of producing, on average, a litter of four per year for seven years. When you consider that each female only needs to reproduce two kittens in her lifetime to keep the cat population at its present level, you start to understand the enormity of the problem. Ask your teachers if you can work through the activities in Unit 4B of the Teachers Manual. It asks you to try and calculate the number of cats one female would be responsible for in her lifetime if she had two males and two female kittens each year for seven years. Keep in mind that you would need to include the kittens produced by her children, their children and so on. It is a frightening figure, particularly if you consider that most of these would belong to our unowned population and be killing approximately 5 animals per week each to subsidize their food intake from our rubbish and handouts.

Ensuring that they are registered with the local council and microchipped
We need to isolate our owned cat population from the unowned population. As we have already discussed, desexing and confinement are not controlling the unowned population. This means that our unowned population is increasing at an alarming rate. It is a problem being faced all over the State form the city centre to our semi rural areas. Our Animal Control Officers are fighting a huge battle and they need our help. By ensuring that your cat is confined, registered and wearing its tag, you will be helping to identify our unowned population. By reducing this population we will be helping to protect our native wildlife.

Feral cats
Feral cats, which have no contact with humans, have to be self-reliant in regard to food supply. They will kill ten animals per week simply to survive. Our native animals have evolved within the Australian environment. When the cat was introduced it did not have a natural predator therefore adapted to Australian conditions and its numbers increased very quickly. There are a number of programs in place, which help to reduce their numbers.

The best way to help is to look after our owned population and make sure it doesn't mix with the feral or unowned population.