The Australian government had declared war on the feral cats and is planning to hunt millions of cats. Australian government justifies their hunting with proofs about various issues from cats. Many nature lovers in Australia is in fact not very happy with the cats. Watch the video to find out more about this.

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In Australia, cats now inhabit 99.9 percent of the land area. For a cat lover, it sure is heaven. But the Australian government sure does not share this view. In July 2015, the Australian government announced a “war on feral cats,” with the intention of killing over two million felines by 2020. However the 2019 bushfires had complicated the government's efforts in hunting them down.

Cats were brought to the continent by the Europeans who were settling there. Since they were not native animals, Australian animals were not able to co-evolve with them and cats were considered as invasive species. Hence the environmental impact of the cats in Australia were much higher than in any other part of the world.

Predation by both domestic and feral cats has caused few species to become extinct and many are on the verge of extinction. This prompted the government to issue the war declaration on the feral cats.

Australia's biodiversity is special and distinctive, forged over millions of years of isolation. Many mammal species that survived have been reduced to a minute fragment of their former range and population size, are now threatened and continue to decline. A research found that every year, each individual feral cat in Australia kills 390 mammals, 225 reptiles and 130 birds. That adds up - Every year, feral cats kill 1.4 billion native Australian animals—around the same number that died in the catastrophic 2019 bushfires when more than 73,000 square miles burned. The report also states that Australia’s almost 3.8 million pet cats kill up to 390 million animals every year. Australian species are really on the verge of catastrophe.

Since they were first introduced by European settlers, feral cats have helped drive an estimated 20 mammal species to extinction. And that's significant in Australia, an island nation that was cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years. Today, an estimated 80% of Australia's mammals and 45% of its birds are found in the wild nowhere else on earth. Many people in Australia genuinely hate cats because of the threat they pose to other species.

Not only Australia, but New Zealand too wages this war against the feline creatures. In fact, there have been calls to put a stop to domestic cats altogether. New Zealand has no native land mammals besides bats, meaning a large variety of birds -- including the country's flightless Kiwi -- were able to thrive in a land without predators. Now, 37% of New Zealand's bird species are threatened. What's more, many of New Zealand's native birds are ground-dwellers, making them susceptible to cats.

Do you agree with their views and actions?

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