CHATTER AWAY: Overnight Open Thread

April 27, 2019 JMG Community, Open Thread

The Australian government wants to kill two million feral cats by next year — and it wants to do it by airdropping poisonous sausages. There are currently an estimated 2 to 6 million free-roaming cats across the country, and officials say they are threatening native wildlife populations.

According to the Australian government, the goal is to “reduce the impact of feral predators and increase the resilience of our native species,” because cats “damage the productivity of Australia’s farming sector.”

The government wants to kill two million wild cats by 2020, which it says are a major contributor to the extinction of at least 27 mammals since their introduction to the country by Europeans, possibly in the 1700s.

The New York Times has published an extensive report on how domestic cats first spread across Australia and came to endanger so many native species.

Why Australia has declared war on feral felineshttps://t.co/3uwkPfwuBq

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) April 27, 2019