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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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OCTOBER 2005
Feral exterminations
Scottish Natural Heritage, trying to extirpate feral hedgehogs from the Uist Islands off the west coast of Scotland since 2003, announced in March 2005 that it would augment trapping and killing them by lethal injection and gas with training dogs to flush them out to be shotgunned. Scottish Natural Heritage had killed about 500 hedgehogs, going into the fall 2005 campaign, while Uist Hedgehog Rescue has live-captured and relocated to the mainland circa 600. Scottish Nature Heritage withdrew the dogs-and-shotguns scheme on September 20. “These healthy animals simply do not need to be killed,” responded Uist Hedgehog Rescue. “Hedgehogs on the mainland are actually in decline.”
The Australian House of Representatives agriculture committee on September 26, 2005 recommended creating a new national agency specifically to kill feral species, including rabbits, burros, camels, pigs, mice, foxes, and domestic cats. Foxes and domestic cats are still the major predators and most effective controls of rabbits and mice despite more than 150 years of government efforts to eradicate them by means of poisons and introduced diseases. The agriculture committee recommendation came after an 18-month inquiry––and one day after the Tasmanian Farmers & Graziers Association called for compulsory cat licensing, blaming toxoplasmosis carried by cats for miscarriages among sheep, the most abundant introduced species in Australia. The agriculture committee rejected the suggestion of Animals Australia that “Species which are here to stay because we have made this place such an ideal habitat for them must be permitted to settle into their new niches and stabilize their populations with a minimum of human interference.”