From beloved pet to biodiversity villain: what now for Australia’s cats? | Cats

By day, Trevor Bauer is at war with cats. As part of his job with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, he works at large-scale properties in far-western New South Wales that are designed to keep feral cats out. First, tall electric fences are erected around these properties. Once they’re up, Bauer and his team use bait, traps and occasionally firearms to eradicate every feral cat inside. Then small native mammals such as the numbat, bilby and bettong – normally easy prey for cats – are reintroduced.

By night, Bauer can be found cuddling with his pet cat, a tortoiseshell called Titian, on the couch.

“It is something that a lot of people find funny or weird,” he says, laughing. But Bauer doesn’t feel particularly conflicted about owning a cat and arranging to have cats killed.

“My cat is 18 years old; she’s lived her whole life indoors,” he says. “She’s none the wiser of what goes on outside. And I guess I feel like it’s not like the cats’ [fault].

“Cats are beautiful animals; they’ve got a good design. And that design [means] they’re really good at killing animals. Unfortunately, for the cat, they’ve been introduced to an area where they don’t really belong – the Australian ecosystem.”

Cats are a leading threat to biodiversity in Australia. Introduced by the British after invasion, they spread quickly to every corner of the continent. But our native animals, which had not evolved alongside anything like a feline, had no ability to recognise and evade these natural hunters. To date, cats have caused the extinction of at least 20 native species and are estimated to kill more than 300 million animals each year.

It’s not just feral cats that are the problem. When kept exclusively inside the home, pet cats like Bauer’s beloved Titian pose no threat to wildlife. But the majority of Australia’s 5 million pet cats are allowed to roam and, on average, each roaming pet cat kills 186 reptiles, birds and mammals a year. Not to mention the pet cats that go missing, or are born into litters that are abandoned, which can then seed into the feral population.

“Of course it would be better if Australia didn’t have cats,” says Sarah Legge, a Biodiversity Council member from the Australian National University, who has been researching cats and their impact on wildlife for more than three decades. But that doesn’t mean she is advocating for a cat-less future. “The reality is that we are where we are now, and cats are really important for people.”

Australians’ love affair with cats isn’t going away. Due in part to the Covid pet boom, rates of cat ownership have gone up, with feline friends now in about 33% of households (48% of homes have dogs). And as population growth forces more of us to move into apartments, where keeping dogs can be tricky, cats are likely to become a more popular choice in years to come. Something that is slowly shifting, however, is what the future of cat ownership can or should look like. The solution Legge and other experts are promoting is “cat containment” – preventing cats from roaming by keeping them indoors or on a specially designed “catio”. (Even when allowed in back yards, cats can still kill birds, skinks and other reptiles.)

“I think that’s the change that we will see over time – rather than cats just disappearing and people deciding that they don’t want a pet cat because cats are bad for wildlife, they will say, ‘OK, so how can we have cats in a sustainable and ethical way?’” says Dr Tiffani Howell, a researcher at La Trobe University who studies human-animal relationships. “And not just assuming that they’re low-maintenance pets – because they’re not actually low maintenance.”

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Containment is a fix that state and territory governments are beginning to enforce – in the Australian Capital Territory, for instance, all cats born on or after 1 July 2022 must be contained 24 hours a day. Some pet shelters now only adopt out cats to owners who agree to contain their cat, while local councils have adopted overnight “cat curfews” to reduce the hours pets are allowed to roam. In September the federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, unveiled a draft national plan to tackle feral cats that includes legislative change surrounding the management of pet cats.

While feral cats are a difficult problem to tackle, Legge says, pet cats are, in theory at least, easy. “Just keep them indoors – that’s all you have to do,” she says. “But achieving that is not a conservation management issue. It’s more of a social issue and regulations issue.”

On the regulatory side, Legge says laws enforcing cat containment need to be harmonised around the country, instead of the “patchwork” of different rules we have from state to state, or even council to council. The bigger job is dispelling the idea that cats need to be free to roam for their health and happiness – a misconception, Legge says. And then we have to update ideas of what responsible cat ownership looks like.

“The social environment, when it comes to dogs, is different – there is a social expectation that dogs should be kept under control, kept on your property or, if they’re off the property, they should be on a leash,” Legge says. “Whereas we don’t have that same social expectation when it comes to cats.”

One program trying to change that is Safe Cats, Safe Wildlife, a “community” created by Zoos Victoria and RSPCA Victoria in 2018 that aims to educate cat owners about the benefits of keeping cats indoors. Those who opt in are sent advice, tips and tools on transitioning to cat containment, as well as information about the impact cats have on native creatures.

Peter Lancaster, Zoos Victoria’s conservation campaigner, says his team has been researching the attitudes and motivations of cat owners opting for containing and found that the “priority for cat owners is the welfare of their cats”, with about three-quarters of those surveyed having lost a previous cat to a roaming-related misadventure, such as being hit by a car or attacked by a dog. The fact that cats enjoy longer, healthier lives when they’re kept inside is, Lancaster feels, a more tangible incentive to keep pets indoors than their impact on wildlife.

Whatever gets cat owners to keep their pets inside is fine by Lancaster. And even outside the Safe Cats, Safe Wildlife program, he says it’s a call more cat owners are heeding – the vets his team works with say that in the last two years there has been an “anecdotal shift in behaviour” towards cat containment. Animal Medicines Australia, a body that conducts regular surveys of pet ownership, found that containment rates went from 36% in 2019 to 42% in 2022.

What Legge feels is particularly promising is that Australians still have “unusually high rates of awareness” surrounding biodiversity issues compared with other countries – something that can be leveraged for change. As a former cat owner herself, Legge says the containment solution means “we don’t need to get into the thorny patch of deciding whether we should have cats at all – we can have our cake and we can eat it”.

That’s great news for Bauer, who doesn’t plan to have a cat-free home any time soon, despite knowing better than most the damage felines do when they’re in the wild. “I personally don’t see an issue with having pet cats,” he says. “The clear difference is that the way we look after our cats is that they’re indoor cats. They’re not out there to roam around and do what a cat is designed to do.”