Dogs part pf arsenal in Kangaroo Island cat eradication program

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Dogs are being unleashed on Kangaroo Island’s Dudley Peninsula in a bid to get rid of feral cats. They have become a big problem, eating native wildlife and spreading disease in sheep.

Transcript

00:00A new report by the cat team using scientific modelling has found there are only around

00:12one to two hundred feral cats left on the Dudley Peninsula.

00:18But these are the more tricky ones.

00:21Enter the island's eradication guru Brendan Florence, who has already helped get rid of

00:26feral goats and deer on KI, and played a big role in the pig eradication program, which

00:32is in its final stages.

00:35Cats are hard, I'd say, always use the word a hundred times harder than everything else

00:41I've done, purely because of how smart they are.

00:46But it's still a big area to cover on your own.

00:49How do you know where you're going?

00:50With all the technology and the cameras we've got out there, I get what we call a hotspot

00:54map.

00:55If you look at this map here, this is information that's come from the camera array.

00:59So this is all cats that have been past a camera in the last week.

01:03With two hundred and sixty cameras set up across the peninsula, that's a lot of clues.

01:08What's that?

01:10That one there, we reckon that's a wallaby.

01:17And one thing that's come a long way in helping him see what's out there in the dark is thermal

01:22technology.

01:23If you look in this tree here, you can see that, that's a possum.

01:27Hey dogs.

01:30And there's one more weapon Paul's been privately training up, which he now has approval to

01:36unleash.

01:37When they know that they're on a good scent, they make an enormous roar, and then you basically

01:43read that roar.

01:44It's like they're talking to you.

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