Letter from Janet Allan about Killing Cats in Australia
Letters From All-Creatures.org and The Mary T. and Frank L. Hoffman Family Foundation

By Janet Allan
February 29, 2016

To the Editor:

On the 7:30 report of February 24 on Channel 2, a member of the Sporting Shooters’ Assoc, demonstrated shooting a free living cat with a bow and arrow. He shot the cat in the head. The poor creature was running around with an arrow sticking out of its head, obviously crazed with pain and fear. The cat got caught up in a fence and he shot it a second time in the shoulder. It struggled free and ran off into the bush with two arrows sticking out of its body, obviously to die a long and agonizing death. This is all with the full approval of our Government. It is part of their diabolical plan to kill 2 million cats.

Cat hating has become popular in Australia. Many people think hating cats makes them environmentalists.

The propaganda distributed about the damage cats do to the environment is not based on valid research at all, but hearsay.

The figures referred to are often from the Federal Government Feral Cat Abatement Plan 2008 which uses figures from a 1996 newspaper editorial and NOT from validated scientific research.
 
Some much more reliable research “Suburban Cats and Wildlife” shows cats kill mainly introduced species, and those native species they do kill, such as crimson rosellas, are massacred in their thousands every year considered by many as pests.
 
On channel 24 February 26 there was ABC footage of foxes being caught in cages and collared in order to find more effective ways of killing them. There was no footage of foxes caught in steel jawed traps but the men filmed were carrying around armfuls of them. They are widely used to trap both foxes and rabbits.

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