It’s a Dog-Eat-Cat World: Could Dingoes be used to control Australia’s feral cat problem?
By Benjamin LeBarron
A Tale of Two Critters
Some people are cat people. That’s understandable. They’re cute, they’re cuddly and they’re just adorable little balls of fuzz. Unfortunately, they’re also adorable little balls of death. Cats, specifically outdoor cats, are the scourge of ecosystems across the globe. An estimated 1–3 billion birds and 7–20 billion mammals fall prey to outdoor and feral cats each year. Now I’m sure your little Mittens would never do such a terrible thing, but the feral cats of Australia certainly will.
Some people are dog people. How couldn’t you be? They’re friendly, loyal and would never eat your neighbors’ pet swamp wallaby or brushtail possum. That is, unless it happens to be a Dingo. The Dingo is the king of the Australian outback. As apex predators they sit at the top of the food chain. The “top dog” so to speak.
Fighting like Cats and Dogs
Before you go and get too upset, no, Dingoes don’t actually eat cats. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t have any effect on each other. You could argue that they are competitors but that’s not quite correct either. While Dingoes are apex predators, feral cats are mesopredators. Mesopredators aren’t at the top of the food chain but aren’t at the bottom either. They both hunt and are hunted. The problem in Australia is that they’re doing a lot more of the former and its wiping out populations of small and vulnerable native species. This is where Dingoes come in to theoretically save the day and they will do it not by eating but by scaring the cats away. Apex predators such as the Dingo are capable of creating a “landscape of fear” where their mere presence can change the distribution and behavior of the smaller mesopredators. Scientist hope to use the presence of Dingoes to exclude feral cats, thus creating a refuge for the smallest prey animals that Dingoes don’t eat. Could this be an effective management strategy? That’s what Browyn Faccourt, a researcher at Australias NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, set to find out.
A Town Named Dingo
In the Northern Brigalow Belt bioregion of central Queensland you’ll find the aptly named town of Dingo, Australia. This is where the study was to take place. The main question of the study? Does the presence of Dingo activity exclude or suppress the activity of feral cats. Several study sites were determined, and Camera traps were set. A camera trap is simply a discrete camera set to automatically take a picture when heat or motion is detected. Several were set out in plots. The idea was to use the cameras to see if the Dingoes and Cats occurred in the same plots of land and were active at the same time. Some camera traps were set with fish oil lures to increase the time the camera-shy critters spent in front of the trap.
A Waste of Tuna
The fish oil lures proved to have no effect on the animals time spent near the trap when compared to non-lured traps. What a shame.
This Ain’t It, Chief
Sadly, the tuna news isn’t the only disappointing discovery of the study. After about 2 months of surveys the results were in. It turns out feral cats are purr-fectly fine with living alongside the Dingoes. After analyzing the data from each plot, the researchers found no evidence of dingoes excluding cats. Dingoes did not influence the probability of cat presence nor did they cause any change in when the cat were active. Dingoes may not be capable of protecting small animals by scaring away cats but that doesn’t mean the study was a waste. When dealing with pest management, it is important to consider the efficacy and ramifications of each particular plan before setting it into action. It is also important to take into account the fact that Dingoes themselves were an introduced species once and introducing them to more new areas could have unforeseen negative effects on native wildlife. There is one final thing that may be considered a bit of an oversight in this study. Dingoes were introduced approximately 2000–3000 years ago and now flourish across the entire continent. Feral cats were introduced much more recently. If Dingoes could truly be used to control feral cats, how did the feral cats become a problem in the first place?
Reference
Fancourt, B. A., Cremasco, P., Wilson, C., & Gentle, M. N. (2019, October 16). Do introduced apex predators suppress introduced mesopredators? A multiscale spatiotemporal study of dingoes and feral cats in Australia suggests not. Journal of Applied Ecology, 56(12), 2584–2595
Retrieved from https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.13514
