CAMPAIGN TO RID CONTINENT OF CATS DIVIDES AUSTRALIANS.

Byline: Seth Mydans The New York Times

As if in some B-movie thriller, people here are raising a hue and cry about an alien predator that is spreading out of control across the land: a plague of millions of killer house cats run wild.

Interlopers on this isolated island continent like the settlers who brought them here 200 years ago, stray cats have multiplied through Australia's deserts, forests, and urban alleys, driving indigenous species to extinction as they go.

Without any natural enemies to keep them in check as on other continents, perhaps 12 million wild cats have been killing small creatures whose evolution has not taught them that cats are their enemy.

Extinct already, or living only in zoos, are the pig-footed bandicoot, the brush-tailed bettong, the rufous hare-wallaby, and a dozen other birds and marsupial species that were found nowhere else on Earth.

Scores of other species are endangered, wildlife specialists say, including woylies, boodies, numbats, and the potoroo.

Conservationists have been warning for years about this feline colonization, but lately their cause has been taken up in a nationwide alarm that is being met with anguished opposition from cat lovers.

``I am calling for the total eradication of cats in Australia,'' proclaimed Richard Evans, a member of Parliament, putting the issue on the national agenda last October.

``Cats are responsible for 39 species being either extinct, locally extinct, or near extinct in Australia,'' Evans said the other day. Domestic cats each kill an estimated 25 native animals a year, and wild cats kill as many as 1,000 a year, according to the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Though he now says a cat-free continent may be beyond reach, Evans drew wide support with his proposal to kill all cats by the year 2020 by neutering pets and spreading fatal feline diseases in the wild.

The proposal recalls a partly successful attempt earlier in the century to eliminate rabbits, another species imported to Australia, with a virus popularly known as white blindness. By the thousands, dying rabbits staggered onto highways and were hit by cars, causing widespread alarm.

The rabbits, however, were mostly a threat to crops. But with the perception that the survival of the native fauna is at stake, a hatred of cats has swept the nation, causing some cat owners to keep their pets at home to avoid cat-killing vigilantes.

Hugh Wirth, the national president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said that ``75 percent of Australians view cats as virtually as distasteful as Lucifer himself.''

One local journalist told a visitor: ``Do Australia a favor: kill a cat. What do you want? Do you want cats or do you want koalas?''

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the anti-cat campaign. Leo Oosterweghel, director of the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens, agreed with Evans that cats must go. But he said he was concerned that the demonizing of cats was leading to a rise in cruelty toward them.

``In Queensland, people were getting out golf sticks and hitting them,'' he said. ``It became a sport.''

In the tropical Northern Territory, where annual flooding flushes wild cats up into the branches of trees, park rangers go out in boats at night and shoot them by the thousands.

``They flash their floodlights down the rivers and the eyes of the cats light up like Christmas trees,'' Evans said.

Members of the Cat Protection Society have protested the anti-cat campaign and the RSPCA called Evans's proposals ``outrageous and unnecessary.''

Responsible pet ownership and government regulation can solve the problem better than mass killings, which only create a temporary dip in cat population, Wirth said.

In 1991, the shire of Sherbrooke in the state of Victoria was the first local government to introduce a cat-control law, including prohibiting cat owners from letting their pets outdoors, and it has slowed the killing of endangered lyrebirds.

A leader of the anti-cat crusade is John Walmsley, a conservationist who once publicized his cause by wearing a cat skin on his head like a coonskin cap, its small flat face looking out over his forehead.

``The biggest problem with wildlife we have in Australia is domestic cats,'' he said. Walmsley, who runs the Warrawong Sanctuary in South Australia, said he wants people to love Australia's indigenous animals as much as they love cats, and has been trying - without great success - to persuade Australians to adopt a variety of marsupials as pets.

``The bandicoot makes an absolutely delightful pet,'' he said. ``It is the marsupial rat, I suppose. You can house-train them and they'll eat the mice in your house.

``The quoll makes a wonderful pet. It filled the niche of the cat before the cat came to Australia. The quoll will eat your mice and you can put it out at night.

``The most wonderful pet of all is the platypus,'' he said with an enthusiasm few others seem to share. ``How else can I explain it? They are charming, absolutely delightful. I don't know why Australians don't have platypuses as pets.''