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OPINION: My first pet was a cat called Booey.
A beautiful grey Burmese who we loved dearly but also accepted was a roamer.
Who were we to stop his nightly wanderings?
Oops, he’s brought in another fantail.
I grew up south of Hamilton and Booey’s backyard was a gully - home to birds, eels and we now know - native bats.
These days, the gully is cleared of invasive weeping willows, planted with hundreds of natives and laid with traps that frequently catch rats, stoats and possums.
My parents have linked up with the neighbours in a bid to wipe out pests and return Waikato’s precious pockets of swamp and bush to their former bird and bat filled glory.
The fact we used to let our killing machine cat roam the gully with gay abandon is embarrassing.
But it’s OK. Because now we know we’d never let Booey roam.
It’s OK to accept what we did in the past is no longer acceptable and it’s possible to change our ways.
And we must.
Because we are a nation of entitled cat owners.
Our attachment to cats extends beyond our pets to a creature that is far from domestic.
Feral cats.
An apex predator to our native birds clawing their way to ecological disaster status in Aotearoa.
Yet no one is talking about them.
Politicians are allergic to talking about killing feral cats, fearing falling out of favour with the public.
Government agencies - DOC, MPI… refuse to take the lead.
There’s no dedicated funding to feral cat control.
There’s scant research to ascertain the extent of their devastation of our wildlife.
It is a national embarrassment.
We claim to hold our natural environment dear, but we are wilfully ignoring one of its biggest threats.
Part of the problem is our conflating of feral cats with cute cuddly companions.
When alive, there is no doubt that a feral cat is a wild animal.
It hisses and snarls, and it does not want your pats.
But when dead, the sight of a limp tabby body hanging out of a trap inspires shock.
I get it, I don’t like killing animals.
But the fact that feral cats are established predators in our most pristine backcountry, our beaches that are home to rare shorebirds, our braided river systems… this is our fault.
We have allowed their population to boom to an estimated 2.5 million.
They are out there surviving on native birds as we diligently remove their competing predators.
They are living a crappy life - no cuddles, no vaccinations against disease, no vet care for a broken leg.
When I watched Chrissy, a trapper in Glenorchy, shoot a trapped feral cat in the head, I flinched.
Before pulling the trigger Chrissy whispered “I’m sorry”.
It’s the hardest part of her job.
But I was left in no doubt that the cat was gone instantly.
A humane end is what we should all support for all of our feral cats.
It’s the best option for them and for our taonga species.
Our ground dwelling birds evolved to evade Moa and Haast eagle, they are skilled at hiding in the undergrowth.
They don’t stand a chance against cats - finely tuned hunters stalking the ground at night.
We must move forward as a country and put feral cats on our kill list.
We are skilled humane executioners, we’ve been doing it for years for stoats, weasels, possums and rats.
It’s time to grow up, and treat feral cats like the killers they are.
And if we love our Booeys, we’ll microchip and desex them, get them a scratching post and some toys, and keep them on the end of the bed at night.
