Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L01747:reg:4:p28
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L01747
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 4 (pt 28/80)
Character Range: 81688–84725

Action Plan 2022-2032 ("First Nations-led recovery activities for threatened species and ecological communities are increased").

3. Programs to reduce cat impacts should use actions that are justified by optimising biodiversity outcomes, overall humaneness, and the sustainability of the action(s).

Cats occur across almost all of Australia and have impacts on many threatened species, so there may be benefits achieved from effective cat management almost everywhere. But there are particular places and species for which the management of cats will likely produce the most, and most enduring, conservation benefits. This plan should help inform such priorities and help ensure that the threat posed by cat predation is abated most strategically and effectively.

Ameliorating the impacts of cat predation could involve actions that: reduce the density of feral cats by lethal means (e.g. shooting, toxic baiting); indirectly lower feral cat density (e.g. reduce rabbit populations to lower the cat population); reduce the access of feral cats to food subsidies (e.g. refuse around towns, farms and settlements and tourist sites in remote / regional areas); or, that do not reduce cat density per se, but instead shift the burden of cat predation away from highly cat-susceptible native species to other species that are more able to persist with cat predation (e.g. managing fire to reduce the hunting success of cats on ground-dwelling birds and mammals).

In any situation, actions to reduce feral cat impacts will or may involve killing individual feral cats or other animals. Therefore, choice among the action options should be justified by seeking to optimise:

    * The biodiversity outcomes:

     -            To what extent will the action provide benefits to populations of native species, particularly threatened species, relative to taking no action?

     -            Are there co-benefits from the action that increase the environmental outcomes (e.g. managing grazing pressure to maintain structural diversity of the grass and ground layer is likely to lead to multiple benefits as well as reducing feral cat impacts)?

     -            If there are risks of perverse outcomes for native species from feral cat control, such as meso-predator release, are these manageable and / or acceptably low (i.e. the benefits outweigh the risks and the native species are ultimately better off)?

    * The overall humaneness of the action(s), to:

     -            Individual cats (including the benefits to pet cats that arise from containment).

     -            Individuals from other, non-target species potentially affected by the control action.

     -            Individual native (or introduced) animals that may have been injured or disease-affected by cats but would be less likely to be so affected if feral cat densities, and/or pet cat roaming, were reduced.

    * The sustainability of the action:

     -            Actions that result in enduring benefits (e.g. eradicating feral cats from an island) and