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Did you know there are more than 4.9 million pet cats in Australia? With this number growing in recent years, it is important to consider how we best keep pet cats, and our native species, healthy and safe.

Our Work  |  Cats in Australia | Pet cats

Pet cats in Australia

While feral cats kill billions of animals annually, roaming pet cats are estimated to add another 340 million native mammals, birds and reptiles to that toll. The average individual pet cat allowed out to roam is estimated to kill 110 of those native animals every year. 

The reality is all cats are born hunters, and roaming pet cats do more hunting than most of us believe. While many cat owners feel confident their pet cat does not kill wildlife, studies involving video-tracking collars and scat analysis have found pet cats very rarely bring their kills home. One study found that pet cats only bring home 15% of the animals they kill.

Every Year Pet Cats in Australia Kill Over ...

Southern Brown Bandicoot
Photo: John O'Neill
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mammals

Superb Fairywren
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birds

Blue-Tongued Lizard
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reptiles

How much damage can a single cat do?

In 2018, a marine ecologist was studying a nesting population of a few hundred threatened fairy terns in Mandurah, Western Australia.

But as eggs began to hatch in November, chicks that were getting recorded as healthy one day started turning up dead the next morning.

Residents nearby the colony, including one neighbour who stayed up all night to watch over the colony, began reporting sightings of a white cat. By mid-December, the cat had been trapped and removed.

But it was too late. All 111 nests in the colony ended up completely failing to produce a single chick that made it to the end of the nesting season.

The white cat was discovered to have been desexed but not microchipped or collared, indicating it was an abandoned pet.

Photo by: City of Mandurah.

What's being done?

We are working to ensure there is mandatory microchipping and desexing for all cats by 4 months of age and 24/7 pet cat containment. Crucial to ensuring these efforts are effective is providing assistance to pet cat owners through initiatives like free desexing programs.

Securing pet cats indoors and in enclosures (cat containment) benefits native wildlife and also ensures their safety. Many Australian animal welfare groups and veterinary groups, like the RSPCA, have advocated for many years that pet cats are safer and happier at home.

The ACT Parliament has taken action and, as of 2022, broadscale cat containment is now law across the territory. Councils across the country are also adopting cat containment, including Bass Coast Shire, Greater Bendigo, Adelaide Hills Council and Brisbane City Council. Many more councils are keen to take action but some states have laws that make it difficult or prohibited to implement cat containment.

What you can do

  1. Write a letter or talk to your local councillors to implement stronger policies to stop owners from allowing their pet cats to roam and provide subsidies to support cat enclosures and desexing.
  2. Write a letter to the Minister for Local Government and the Minister for the Environment asking them to: support local governments to stop roaming pet cats, fund local governments to enforce responsible pet ownership legislation and increase investment in education and subsidy programs for: cat containment, desexing, identification and registration.
  3. If you are a cat owner, transition your cat to indoors (you can follow this helpful guide from RSPCA) and ensure your cat is desexed, microchipped and registered.
  4. If you have a neighbour who lets their cat roam, have a polite conversation about the benefits of keeping their cat at home or print and drop this flyer in their letterbox. 
  5. Sign our petition to show your support for better pet cat management.

Fact Sheet: The impacts of pet cats on Australian wildlife

A fact sheet developed by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub.

Photo by Charlene N Simmons via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.

Read more >

What you can do

Many of us believe our pet cats never kill animals because they only get let out at certain times or are too passive, lazy or slow to catch anything.
 
But even if your pet cat hasn’t brought native wildlife home, any cat allowed free-roaming time is almost certainly killing native wildlife. Research using tracking collars and scat analysis has established that the vast majority of animals killed by pet cats are not brought home. We also know 4 in 10 pet cats that are brought in at night sneak back out again to roam and hunt.
 
  1. Whether or not you have a pet cat, you can help us protect native wildlife and keep pet cats safe by pledging support for better management of roaming pet cats by governments across Australia. This includes ensuring all states and territories have laws that facilitate and promote mandatory desexing, microchipping and 24/7 pet cat containment.
  2. If you are a cat owner, there are many things you can do to help keep pets happy and wildlife safe, but the most important thing is to keep your cat securely contained at home or on a leash at all times just like a pet dog.  This will keep them safe from injury and disease and protect native wildlife in your local neighbourhood. You can transition your cat to a contained lifestyle by following this helpful guide from RSPCA. Responsible owners can also ensure pet cats are desexed, microchipped and registered.

What you can do

  1. Write a letter or talk to your local councillors to implement stronger policies to stop owners from allowing their pet cats to roam and provide subsidies to support cat enclosures and desexing.
  2. Write a letter to the Minister for Local Government and the Minister for the Environment asking them to: support local governments to stop roaming pet cats, fund local governments to enforce responsible pet ownership legislation and increase investment in education and subsidy programs for: cat containment, desexing, identification and registration.
  3. If you are a cat owner, transition your cat to indoors (you can follow this helpful guide from RSPCA) and ensure your cat is desexed, microchipped and registered.
  4. If you have a neighbour who lets their cat roam, have a polite conversation about the benefits of keeping their cat at home or print and drop this flyer in their letterbox. 
  5. Sign our petition to show your support for better pet cat management.

Lucky Leo, living the high life of an indoor cat

Don’t be fooled by his slightly grouchy face. Leo is a healthy, safe and contented indoors cat, and an adored family member.

Read Leo's story

What are the benefits of keeping pet cats contained?

Preventing pet cats from freely roaming not only helps reduce the impact on local biodiversity, it also helps protect pets from:

  • diseases,
  • injury (through fighting and vehicle collisions), and
  • accidental breeding. 

Pet cats allowed out to roam also transmit diseases to other cats, animals and, in the case of toxoplasmosis, even people.

Keep wildlife safe by keeping pet cats safe

Cats are natural predators. Even when cats seem to be ‘playing’ with wildlife, they can be causing injury and stress to other animals. It’s not the cat’s fault. When presented with an opportunity, they act on instinct and kill with or without bells on their collars. 

As well as being highly successful hunters, pet cats can also roam much further than owners expect. A recent University of South Australia study shows uncontained pet cats tend to roam two hectares around their home, but can travel much further. One example found a pet cat roaming over 30 hectares in just seven days!

One of the owner who participate in the study was shocked by these results. They were ‘100 per cent sure’ their 15 year old cat Snowy never left the property. However, the GPS collar revealed that Snowy was venturing out across streets within about a half hectare of the property.

We can’t change the nature of pet cats but we can keep them and our native wildlife safe through responsible cat ownership. 

Fact Sheet: Safe cat, safe wildlife

Fostering responsible pet ownership in New South Wales. A fact sheet developed by the Invasive Species Council, WIRES, the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, Birdlife Australia and the Australian Wildlife Society ahead of the 2023 NSW state election.

Read more >

Hear from us when it matters

Your support to protect critically endangered and vulnerable species from extinction is vital. Together, we can ensure governments prioritise action on invasive species and protect our wildlife and iconic places.

The Invasive Species Council was formed in 2002 to seek stronger laws, policies and programs to protect nature from harmful pests, weeds and diseases.

The Invasive Species Council acknowledges the Traditional Custodians throughout Australia and their connections to land and sea. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

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Dear Project Team,

[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.] 

I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.

The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.

The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.

This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.

Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.

Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.

Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.

I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.

Kind regards,
[Your name]
[Your email address]
[Your postcode]


Dear Project Team,

[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.] 

I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.

The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.

The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.

This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.

Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.

Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.

Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.

I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.

Kind regards,
[Your name]
[Your email address]
[Your postcode]