When Cats Stay Outdoors

A recent assessment report highlights the role of domestic cats, revealing that Australia's pet cats alone kill over 545 million mammals, reptiles, birds, and frogs annually. In light of this, the Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) listed predation by feral cats as a key threatening process under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1999 (EPBC Act) in 2008, launching the threat abatement plan (TAP), which in their 2015 draft aims to cull approximately 2 million feral cats by 2020. This policy went through multiple drafts over the years, with their most recent one coming from late 2023. For this paper, we will be going over the TAP, as it raises common yet contentious ethical questions regarding wildlife management. We will explore arguments for and against this policy, evaluate the ethicality and risks of population control methods, and draw insights from similar case studies and diverse schools of thought. We will then conclude by examining a set of international principles that can be used to help formulate proper policy around introduced species control.