Thread: Cat hunter wanted.

We are surrounded by a cat owners, every few hundred metres there is a house with a cat or two. All owners have been schooled in what will happen to their pussy should it go onto neighbouring properties, especially the farm opposite us which is an award-winning native regeneration block with a zero tolerance policy (where I shot the goat yesterday). On our house block it will die either in a trap or by being Staffied.

Most of the non-cattish properties around here are running kill traps up in trees, catching both possums and cats and the occasional ferret. To date only one person has been uppity about the risk of their cat being disappeared, everyone else has been fine. It pays to be a matter of fact and straightforward.

The observation is that both domestic and feral cats are hunting rats & mice around buildings, birds relatively high up in trees (especially at this time of year) and rabbits & rats out on the farm. Cat sightings are followed up usually by me, firstly in an effort to shoot it and secondly to try and find evidence of what it’s been up to. I’ve found three small populations of feral cats within about half a kilometre radius of my house since 2016. In a dry culverts, under old building rubble and in the foundations under old dairy shed. I would say I shoot a cat in the open roughly every eight or nine months or so. Not a lot, way more are trapped then shot, primarily by the guy opposite us.

He uses the Alan SA2 trap. There’s no need to drown the cat after it’s been caught in one of these.

https://goodwood.nz/products/steve-a...trap-mechanism

Something that I’ve realised over the years is that farmers here in New Zealand are infamous for having their own private uncontrolled rubbish dumps, so they don’t have to take their rubbish into town. They dig a pit with the tractor and fill it up and try and burn it, which always fails and then they cover it up and dig another one. A lot of them are even happy just to throw the dead carcass over the bank just far enough away so that she can’t smell it indoors.

you know it’s true.

If you take a trail cam and go and check what is happening on your private rubbish dump at night, you will be unsurprised to learn that it is the favourite place of the NZ feral cat. Chockablock with rats and cats & ferrets chasing the rats. Pig dumps are the other favourite.

Sometimes I think that some of our farmers are deliberately trying to prop up the feral cat population… Man it gets up my nose.