Daily MOS: Straya’s Feral Pussy Hunt

Y’all, I wasn’t going to.

Then it was 2am and I was looking at that adorable bunny/emu cavalry picture and all the merch I could get it printed on. So of course, a bunch of other Australia swag was recommended. One was a picture that said “the world is a cat playing with Australia.” An outline drawn around the other continents, with just a bit of creative geography, resembles a cat pawing at Australia.

So after the emus and bunnies, I looked up “Australia’s war on cats,” because there was no fucking way, right?

Today’s Moment of Science… Straya’s feral pussy hunt.

Every time I think I’m making a joke about Australia, I’m accidentally… not. The country is currently embroiled in a battle with their mouse population. I was a touch confused about that because articles from a few years ago said they were battling cats and, historically, a problem with battling pests in Australia has been a lack of natural predators.

So how did cats become such a goddamn problem in Australia?

Same way everything seemingly cute, fluffy, and innocuous did: fucking imperialism.

Looking at records and genetic sequencing, it’s likely that cats arrived in Australia with First Fleet in 1788. These are the same ships that sent military families, criminals, and most dangerously, bunnies to Australia.

Cats are technically an invasive species in many parts of the world. As much as you all love your cats and I love my cats, they’re goddamn monsters, and I’m not just talking about what they do to the furniture. If you have outdoor cats, they don’t merely enjoy a frolic in the grass. They head out and hunt for sport like a Trump sibling whose father never hugged him enough, leaving a trail of dead animals in their wake.

There’s a rite of passage amongst cat parents waking up to find that Fluffy has presented a small dead animal to you in the middle of the night. According to a study from the University of Georgia, that’s what happens to about 20% of their prey. 30% becomes food. The other 50%? Left for dead, because the cat decided fuck this mouse in particular.

Cats are sociopathic killers who allow us to live with them. Aren’t they just fucking precious?

What happened when millions of cats were plunked into ecosystems that didn’t have openings for them in the food chain? They decimated native species of birds and other wildlife, and in Australia alone, are suspected to have contributed to driving at least sixty native species to extinction. This isn’t just an Australia problem, with cats killing well over two billion birds in the US annually.

In a study from the University of Sydney, a bit over ⅔ of pet cats in Australia- about 2.7 million felines- are allowed to roam outdoors. While an outdoor pet cat typically kills a bit under 200 animals (including reptiles, rodents, and birds), a feral cat rips through about 750 animals in a year. In 2019, there were estimated to be as many as six million feral cats in Australia. That’s a lot of dead numbats.

While some countries take an “eh, what are you gonna do about it” approach, maybe neutering and releasing cats just to let them attack more birds for the rest of their natural lives, have we not noticed a trend with Australia’s unique approach to invasive species? It’s a bit uncomfortable to think about the darling bugger that many of us have purring on our laps right now as a critter that was culled by the millions, but… Straya. In 2015, they went on a campaign to kill at least two million of their feral cats by 2020.

Now? Mouse plague.

To be fair, ecological disasters tend to have a confluence of causes. The major contributor to the current mouse plague is a large grain harvest. It would be premature to blame- or entirely exonerate- the reduction in cat population for a significant contribution to the mouse plague. It’s also unclear how much they could even help. With giant fields of mice overrunning absofuckinglutely everything, there’s the occasional video surfacing of an exhausted cat just letting the little squeaker find a look-out spot on its head, having entirely lost its will to fuck up even one more mouse.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, still horrified by the day my cat Oliver presented me with not one, but two opossums alive and kicking, like a cat straight out of Australia.

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