The Australian government has become the topic of discussion among all cat lovers since they have declared a ‘cat holocaust’. According to reports, the island has decided to airdrop poisonous sausages across hectares of land to kill millions of feral cats.
The idea behind this is to get rid of the feral cat population which is reportedly responsible for the extinction of around 20 mammal species.
The sausages will be made of kangaroo meat, chicken fat, herbs, spices and poison, and the cats will die within fifteen minutes of eating it. The planes deployed for this task will be airdropping 50 sausages every kilometre in the cat-infested areas.
According to the national commissioner of threatened species, Gregory Andrews, feral cats are the single biggest threat to Australia’s native species. A study published in the journal Biological Conservation showed that cats kill about 377 million birds and 649 reptiles every year in Australia.
The Australian government’s plan to eradicate cats has received a lot of backlash from people. Reportedly, more than 160,000 people signed almost half a dozen online petitions to stop this from happening.
Conservationists have argued that the government are putting the entire blame on the cats, and are overlooking other factors like urban expansion, logging and mining which also reduce biodiversity.
People have expressed their disagreement to this idea on Twitter as well.
What do you think?