Cat cull plan far from purr-fect.

Byline: John Avison 

AWILD and windy bit of land in the remote south Pacific called Macquarie Island found its way into the news this week.

Environmental do-gooders have made a mistake that has thrown the island's delicate ecology into the kind of chaos that will cost an estimated pounds 11m to put right.

What they did was kill all the feral cats on the island. They did this because the cats, which arrived on the island with rabbits, mice and rats as escapees from passing ships, were killing the seabirds.

This obviously seemed to be a good idea. The culling decision was probably made by professional ecologists. But it still went badly wrong.

The ecologists forgot, or didn't know, that the cats, as well as killing their fair share of fledgling seabirds, also kept the rabbit, mouse and rat populations under control.

With the cats out of the way, the rabbit population exploded and destroyed much of the fragile vegetation that birds depend on for cover, researchers said this week.

Oops.

Dana Bergstrom of the Australian Antarctic Division told the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology: "The lessons for conservation agencies globally is that interventions should be comprehensive, and include risk assessments to explicitly consider and plan for indirect effects, or face substantial subsequent costs."

What she means is that environmental meddling always has knock-on effects. If you don't think long and hard about what these might be, the results can be devastating.

If I'd been in charge of Macquarie Island I might have done the same thing as the do-gooders.

To say that I don't much like cats is an understatement. I'm not ailurophobic - I neither fear nor detest cats - but I just can't see how the world could be worse off if every domestic cat disappeared from the face of the planet this very moment.

Cuddly Tibbles and kin are not so cuddly. They manage to kill six million songbirds a year in the UK.

The argument is that they catch only the weakest, thus strengthening the gene pool of the remaining birds.

Only a cat lover could come up with this. Nature had the wildlife balance all worked out before cats came along, and to argue that cats are somehow helping the environment by this wholesale slaughter is nonsense.

Pet cats are well fed and don't often kill to eat. But they do kill to hone their killing skills, which means that what they do to the birds and mice is painful and prolonged: in effect, lethal torture.

The fact that they also like to empty their bowels in my flowerbeds doesn't exactly endear them to me either.

I know it's not strictly environmental, but while I'm on my killing spree can I please rid the world of all coat hangers? If there is fear and detestation involved here, I've got it. I know the lack of coat hangers would mean lots of clothes of the floor, but hey, I can step over them. Coat hangers make me seethe and sweat. I utterly, utterly hate them.

I hate the way they tangle themselves and fall on the floor. I hate the way their hooks catch your skin, clothing and paintwork. I just hate the way they look and feel, and I want rid of them.

The counselling starts next week.

If you were worrying about Macquarie Island, incidentally, the pounds 11m solution is to kill the rabbits, mice and rats all in one go, starting in 2010. Helicopters will drop poisonous bait that targets all three pests. Later, teams will shoot, fumigate and trap the remaining rabbits.

CAPTION(S):

FELINE FINE: But I just can't see how the world could be worse off if every domestic cat disappeared from the face of the planet this very moment