Cats in Australia

Historical context

Historical records date the introduction of cats to Australia at around 1804 and that cats first became feral around Sydney by 1820. In the early 1900s, concern was expressed at the pervasiveness of the cat problem

Domesticated cats

It has been identified that domesticated cats predate on native animals, and surveys of catches have regularly occurred

By 2006, 26 percent of Australian households had a domesticated cat.

Feral cats

Feral cats are one of the major invasive species in Australia and have been linked to the decline and extinction of various native animals. They have been shown to cause a significant impact on ground nesting birds and small native mammals. Feral cats have also hampered any attempts to re-introduce threatened species back into areas where they have become extinct as the cats have simply hunted and killed the newly released animals. Numerous Australian environmentalists claim the feral cat has been an ecological disaster in Australia, inhabiting most ecosystems except dense rainforest, and being implicated in the extinction of several marsupial and placental mammal species.

A field experiment conducted in Heirisson Prong (Western Australia) compared small mammal populations in areas cleared of both foxes and cats, of foxes only, and a control plot. Researchers found the first solid evidence that predation by feral cats can cause a decline in native mammals. It also indicates that cat predation is especially severe when fox numbers have been reduced. Cats may play a role in Australia's altered ecosystems; with foxes they may be controlling introduced rabbits, particularly in arid areas, which themselves cause ecological damage. Cats are believed to have been a factor in the extinction of the only mainland bird species to be lost since European settlement, the paradise parrot. Cats in Australia have no natural predators except dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles, and as a result they are apex predators where neither the dingo or the eagle exist.

Australian folklore holds that some feral cats in Australia have grown so large as to cause inexperienced observers to claim sightings of other species such as puma etc. This folklore is being shown to be more fact than fiction, with the recent shooting of an enormous feline, in the Gippsland area of Victoria. Subsequent DNA test showed it to be a feral cat.

Since 2016 there is a program on Kangaroo Island to eradicate an estimated population between 3,000 and 5,000 cats within the next 15 years.

Phantom cats

There have been numerous sightings of phantom cats in Australia including the Gippsland phantom cat and the Blue Mountains panther.