Wildlife rangers building electric fence to protect endangered animals

The 115-mile electrified fence is going up in Australia’s Outback where the turned-wild moggies threaten native marsupials. Feral cats have become Australian conservationists’ number one

enemy, with as many as 11 million of the predators eating their way through a host of small creatures unable to defend themselves against the opportunist killers. One cat can kill up to

seven small creatures such as numbats, bettongs and bilbies in a night. The electrified fence is being put up on a former cattle ranch near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory and will

enclose an area of 266 square miles. Once completed, an estimated 400 feral cats inside the fenced off area will be caught and humanely destroyed before the process begins to re-introduce

native species such as rock wallabies, rufous hare-wallabies and burrowing bettongs. Australia’s Cat Wars have long divided animal lovers and conservationists. WILD CAT KILLS 24 ENDANGERED

PENGUINS IN CAPE TOWN > Feral cats are the single biggest threat to our mammals >  > Commissioner Gregory Andrews The federal government is spending the equivalent of £3 million to

reduce the feral population from 11 million cats to two million by 2020. Singer Morrisey famously described the Australian government’s plans as “taking idiocy too far”. When completed, the

Australian Wildlife Conservancy’s predator-proof zone will be the largest fenced off area of its kind, says the country’s Threatened Species Commissioner Gregory Andrews. He said: “The

science is crystal clear that feral cats are the single biggest threat to our mammals and many of our threatened species will benefit from this new area."  Once the six-foot high

electrified fence is complete, Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) will begin releasing at least 10 rare species from islands and protected locations into their new home, doubling some

populations that have crashed into the hundreds. AWC chief executive Atticus Fleming, said: “Basically, anything that is a small-to-medium-sized mammal, particularly in inland and central

Australia, has crashed dramatically. GETTY Feral cats threaten rare marsupials with the invasive species threatening the native populations “What feral cats and foxes, in particular, have

done is robbed the country of our native wildlife so that much of inland central Australia is now a marsupial ghost town.” Mr Fleming is hoping the project will turn back the clock to the

time before settlers brought their domestic pets and non-native species to Australia’s unprepared Outback. He added: “It is a choice between cats or bilbies and we are for the bilbies. “What

this all adds up to is, in three or four years you will be able to go out to this place and visiting this area will be like stepping back in time. GETTY The 11 million feral cats in the

country are Australian conservationists main enemy “You will see the Australian bush as it was a couple of hundred years ago. It will be alive with these native mammals that were there until

the cats removed them.” Australia has turned to fences before to stop animal attacks. In 1885, the famous 3,500-mile dingo fence was built across three states to stop the wild dog getting

into sheep farming country. Pressure to tackle Australia’s feral cat problem has never been greater after the publication of a new academic study earlier this year. Research undertaken by

more than 40 of Australia’s top environmental scientists and evidence from nearly 100 studies across the country showed how cats have all but taken over the country, with the numbers of

animals soaring up to 6.3 million individuals. What worries conservationists is the fact that cat densities are as high inside protected nature areas such as national parks as outside. Urban

areas are witnessing the highest cat densities, sometimes 30 times greater than wild areas, and could be helping to bolster the number feral felines moving into the brushlands. The new

research was published in the journal Biological Conservation and left its lead author, Dr Sarah Legge from the University of Queensland, warning: “Our study highlights the scale and impacts

of feral cats and the urgent need to develop effective control methods, and to target our efforts in areas where that control will produce the biggest gains. GETTY The fence will protect a

266-square-mile area in the Northern Territory “At the moment feral cats are undermining the efforts of conservation managers and threatened species recovery teams across Australia. “It is

this difficulty which is pushing conservation managers into expensive, last resort conservation options like creating predator free fenced areas and establishing populations on predator-free

islands. “These projects are essential for preventing extinctions, but they are not enough - they protect only a tiny fraction of Australia’s land area, leaving feral cats to wreak havoc

over the remaining 99.8 per cent of the country.”