Giant feral cats are 'absolute muscle' from dining out on the best native wildlife

Friday, 2 September 2022

Not to be confused with your friendly neighbourhood kitty, feral cats live and breed in the wild, hunting for survival and killing native birds in the process.

As giant, feral cats ravage Canterbury wildlife, conservationists are pushing for a national policy on cats.

Forest and Bird estimates there are 2.5 million feral cats in New Zealand, about double the number of domestic cats, and in Canterbury, a pest controller says they are at “plague” levels.

Forest and Bird regional conservation manager Amelia Geary said feral cats were “smashing” the high country kea population as well as wildlife on the Canterbury Plains.

Geary said there was so little biodiversity left in Canterbury the lack of better cat control meant “whatever’s clinging on is really struggling in the face of cat predation”.

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Flock Hill Station pest control manager Browny with a 10kg feral cat.

In the wild, feral cats’ food includes rabbits, birds, bird eggs, lizards and wētā, and native birds stand little chance against such efficient killers.

The Department of Conservation (DOC) says feral cats have a heavy impact on endangered bird populations like kakī/black stilts and wrybills in braided riverbeds in the central South Island.

Selwyn pest controller Sean Ellis said the cats he managed to catch were in superb condition, indicating how well they were dining out on Canterbury wildlife.

“Once they become good killers, they live on the best meat. They are absolute muscle.”

Selwyn pest controller Sean Ellis says the cats he catches are “absolute muscle”, living on the best meat.

He said cats had to learn how to kill effectively to get meat to survive in the wild, and he had seen the devastation the cats were doing in the back country.

DOC and conservation groups including Forest and Bird are pushing for a national policy to mandate cat registration and de-sexing of pet cats and kittens.

An intermediate step has been compulsory cat microchipping laws by some local authorities.

Following a bylaw change that came into force this July, the Selwyn District Council became the fifth local authority in New Zealand to introduce mandatory microchipping for pet cats over 4 months of age.

Council regulatory manager Susan Atherton said the council had received “overwhelming support” from submissions for the cat regulations to be put in place.

The new bylaw means Ellis and other trappers can more easily identify feral cats, as pets are chipped.

Ellis, who is based in Springfield, Selwyn, has been doing voluntary pest control work around the South Island for 15 years, and said feral cats in the wild could get really big.

The average house cat weighs about 5kg, he has caught wild cats weighing almost twice that.

“The biggest one I’ve seen was in Flock Hill Station [near Cass in Canterbury], which was over 10kg.”

Ellis said the feral cats in Selwyn were usually domestic cats that had been abandoned – often after Christmas or during holiday periods.

“Let's say you get 10 cats dropped off. Eight of them may starve to death but two of them may figure out how to survive.”

Those two will be the cats that kill huge numbers of wildlife and grow to double the normal size.