The Australian government wants to kill two million feral cats by next year — and it wants to do it by airdropping poisonous sausages. There are currently an estimated 2 to 6 million free-roaming cats across the country, and officials say they are threatening native wildlife populations.
According to the Australian government, the goal is to "reduce the impact of feral predators and increase the resilience of our native species," because cats "damage the productivity of Australia's farming sector." The government wants to kill two million wild cats by 2020, which it says are a major contributor to the extinction of at least 27 mammals since their introduction to the country by Europeans, possibly in the 1700s.
Part of the plan to cull the rising cat population is to bait the cats with lethal sausages made of kangaroo meat, chicken fat, herbs, spices and a poison called 1080, which is deadly to animals, according to the New York Times. The sausages are dropped from airplanes into areas with high stray cat populations. The cats allegedly die within 15 minutes of consuming the sausage.
