Lazy, selfish justifications for… well, pretty much for everything humanity does;
“I don’t ever want to have to change or be inconvenienced in any way, so the unsustainable status quo is just gonna have to stay the same, for everyone, forever.”
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I feel like when options include:
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Wildlife management professionals with microchip scanners and traps.
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Children indiscriminately killing anything that looks like a cat.
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literally anything else.
Options 1 and 3 are far superior.
Pet cats will get outisde sometimes even with owners who do their best. When microchips exist we should use them…
Also considering that cats can carry pathogens that infect humans lets maybe not have kids handling piles of dead animals ?
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Stop; you’re making too much logical sense and spoiling the violent fantasy.
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Trapping and euthanasia is one way to go. Why haven’t they done that? Maybe they are doing that and it isn’t working out so well, or the costs are greater than the Wildlife budge allow. I don’t know about NZ, but in the US the Wildlife Depts are woefully underfunded.
You’re making a straw man assumption and I assume you’ve never hunted before in your life.
Such as? Your first suggestion is a good one and would be a good in tandem with a cull.
True, and that’s sad if a cat runs away and gets killed by a car or something like this cull. But not everyone microchips their pets.
Also - is this actually a big issue? How many microchipped animals are running around out there? (And again, if they are doing that, they are killing the native wild animals.) I guess this is the first year a that feral cats have been added to the category, so this may simply be a precaution that people watch out for collars etc.
True, wild animals can harbor pathogens. So can domesticated ones and live stock. There are measures people can take to reduce that risk. Also, DEET up to avoid ticks (I don’t know if Lymes disease is a thing in NZ or not.)
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Just a thought… trapping and sterilization is far more humane than trapping and euthanasia.
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In my county schools don’t have walkathons or readathons or sell cookies or just ask for donations, nope, they actually have animal killathons. Squirrels and rabbits are the victims most of the time. They send grade school kids out to kill animals as a way to raise money. Or, or, they have gun raffles.
When we vote, any local candidate that supported or promoted or participated in such a thing doesn’t get our vote. It involves some serious Facebook or other social media stalking but if they did such a thing they bragged somewhere.
In my neck of the woods there are several organizations that help you trap feral cats and then spay or neuter them for around 20 - 40 bucks each. We’ve done a lot of trapping ourselves.
So when people say trap them it’s not to find them a home, it’s to fix it so they can’t have more babies. Is it the solution for New Zealand? I don’t know if they ever tried so maybe, maybe not.
We had the feral cats under control in our neighborhood by trapping any new one that showed up, fixing it, and then releasing it. We had it down to one last feral that’s been in the neighborhood for almost 8 years. She mostly lives in our yard where we provide heated shelters, food and water. A few days ago two kittens showed up, an injured one and it’s freind. They appear to be house cats that were released.
Those are the people that are fueling the problem and they should be fined. We also have a couple neighbors that let their cats roam around, we have no idea if they are fixed but I’m getting to the point that I don’t care and may trap them and take them in and then release them.
I wish cats would have to be licensed and tagged like dogs, it might help with some of the problem. Requiring all cats to be spayed or neutered would also be a good way to get this under control. Any cat from a shelter is normally fixed before rehoming, it’s the ones that are sold that are the problem. If you want to raise show cats then require a special license. No one needs to breed cats and it should be illegal.
I love animals, I really hate irresponsible animal owners.
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I help out with trapping and sterilization campaigns, and I’ve fostered over a hundred* cats for the local Humane society over the last 20 years. Sterilization is dramatically more expensive than paying bounties, particularly for females (males are cheaper and easier to sterilize, but it’s also less effective in limiting population) and if the sterilized animals were released it wouldn’t address the problem NZ is trying to deal with.
But your compassion is admirable and it’s always nice to see a positive contribution to the theatre of ideas, so I’m sorry to be so critical.
*Edit: I am semi reliably informed that only 97 cats were fostered. We adopted five during that same time span, though 
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Most people who eat meat and drive cars are repulsed by training kids to kill pet animals. Or having them out playing with guns by themselves.
I mean - it sounds like excellent serial killer training.
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No, having everyone comfortable with using guns and killing things is great, just look at the paradise it has made modern America.
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Trapping felines isn’t terribly good training for killing anything else, from what little I know about it.
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I stink at quoting so forgive the freeform reply.
With indiscriminate what I really meant to imply is that they will not be able to discriminate feral and domestic cats (they are the same species after all). I did not mean to imply a bunch of kids playing rambo at a petting zoo. 
The idea that the prize is after checking to make sure it wasnt a pet seems ridiculous to me. Microchips can be scanned and collars can be checked before euthanizing an animal. I dont know NZ law but in my mind requiring microchips and/or collars for pets which already get licenses seems a good step before letting anything outside get culled.
In terms of diseases. Cats carry a lot of zoonotic transmissible diseases that are pretty nasty. Safely dealing with a single large animal (which may have only a single common pathogen to worry about like chronic wasting in deer for e.g.) is a lot easier than dealing with a lot of small ones. I simply don’t trust that an under 14 year old has sufficient training to safely handle potential infectious material at the levels a broad cull would produce. Also if the idea is shooting or trapping, a scared or half dead cat is a problem. This should really fall on professionals.
Other ideas? Perhaps this isn’t being done because this is a club attempting to solve a problem and not a government program? Maybe adults should do the hunting? I’m sure an expert would have plenty of options to offer.
Attempting to cull a species is not simple work and should be coordinated at a much higher level. Hell in my town they gave up on culling the coyote living in a park I can walk through in 10 minutes. They just bounce back.
For those suggesting trapping, how do you keep from trapping the wrong animals?*
*answer: you don’t
In NZ these other animals might be things you want to get rid of, like Australian opossums, but they are also likely to be animals, such as ground-dwelling birds, that you are desperately trying to protect (from cats among other things, like those opossums I mentioned). Live trapping isn’t easy or a panacea.
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At least with a live trap you can let the wrong animal out🤷♂️
But yeah its HARD.
In an attempt to remove a single problematic HUGE rat that was burrowing under my deck supports I mananaged to catch everything but the rat. My trail camera footage showed the damn thing to be too smart.
Thankfully the racoon family that moved in scared it off. Then the racoon was detered with a motion activated sprinkler 
.
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This is just… I don’t know. Obviously something needs to be done but as others have mentioned getting kids to do it is extremely fucked up.
Where is that little old lady when we need her? Doing some quick back of the envelope math she could swallow a lot of cats before coming up to the cumulative volume of what she swallowed before the horse killed her
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So true. Except I was responding to your comment about killing them.
That wasn’t even a halfway decent dodge. You can do better!
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Take all your clothes off and register with the state police.
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You can’t distinguish between feral and “owned” cats - including, to a large degree, in terms of the environment damage they do as well. Best case scenario: this hunt doesn’t happen, but it scares cat owners into keeping their animals indoors, and they trap the feral cats.
People keep their cats indoors, so it’s not even an issue. Simples. (Any cat owner who cares about their cats keeps them indoors anyways - outdoor cats have a very low life expectancy.)
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100% cool with killing feral cats.
Good to know, you’ve given me a lot to think about. Maybe though that information would be more use to someone who has some reason to care? Like your therapist or parole officer?
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