Australasian Animal Studies Association

Fiona Probyn-Rapsey on Australia’s war on feral cats

Last week in Canberra I attended the Threatened Species Commission Community roundtable on the ‘feral cats’ strategy – the plan to eradicate 2 million feral cats by 2020, announced by Environment Minister Greg Hunt in July last year. Otherwise known as the ‘war on cats’, the plan is devised to tackle cats as the ‘single […]

Rowena Lennox: Safe Place (Dingoes)

On 21 June 2016 brief news reports appeared online stating that six dingoes had been found dead at Orchid Beach on Fraser Island (K’gari). All the reports (ABC, The Courier-Mail, Yahoo!7News and Sky News) noted that one dingo’s body was found in a shallow grave. Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS), who manage most of […]

Roogate

David Brooks ‘Roogate’
Shot under cover of darkness, buried in mass graves in the forest. But this isn’t Srebrenica in 1995, this isn’t Poland in 1942. The shooters aren’t rogue militants or members of the SS. They are sub-contractors paid by the government of the Australian Capital Territory, and the victims are not humans but a different species of animal.