Controlling Australia’s feral pests means using 1080 baits – or wildlife will suffer
We may not like it, but killing feral animals is an action we need to take if we truly care for Australia’s environment and wildlife.
As an island nation with a trove of unique wildlife that evolved in isolation, Australia is highly susceptible to invasive species.
They are the leading threat to our native animals, and our national parks, bushland and farmlands are being ravaged by introduced species that should never have taken root.
Day after day, and every night as we sleep, native animals are suffering from predation by feral animals including cats and foxes.
Every night, feral cats are killing thousands of marsupials, including threatened bilbies, numbats and mountain pygmy possums, often torturing and playing with their prey before killing them.
The numbers add up: each year, feral cats alone kill 1.5 billion native birds, mammals, frogs and reptiles, driving our native species to extinction.
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We need urgent interventions to preserve Australia’s unique biodiversity, and the scale and urgency of the problem means we must use the most effective tools at our disposal.
The sad reality is this means the culling of large numbers of feral animals. For feral cats and foxes, it often means baiting with lethal 1080 pesticide.
The use of 1080 baits to suppress or eradicate introduced predators has allowed the reintroduction of threatened native species into the wild, particularly on islands and in fenced reserves. It has enabled the eradication of foxes from Phillip Island, achieved in 2017, to protect ground-nesting seabirds such as the little penguin.
In South Australia, a subspecies of tammar wallaby was reintroduced to southern Yorke peninsula in 2004 after intensive fox control using 1080. That wallaby population has become selfsustaining.
Bush stone curlews reappeared after 40 years of no sightings and populations of threatened malleefowl, hooded plovers and Rosenberg’s goannas stabilised or increased. The area is now a safe haven for native animals and this year 100 brush-tailed bettongs (woylies) were reintroduced as part of the Marna Bangarra conservation project.
In addition to woylies, nationally threatened mammals that benefit from 1080 baiting for foxes are numerous but include numbats, southern brown bandicoots, long-nosed potoroos, greater bilbies, western quolls, yellow-footed rock-wallabies and golden bandicoots.
Baiting feral animals with 1080 is a vital part of the land manager’s toolkit for saving Australian species and for helping species to recover from catastrophic bushfires, when recovering native animals are easy targets for predatory foxes. A similarly effective alternative doesn’t exist.
Any use of toxins must be justified. It should seek to minimise suffering and have clear conservation and national heritage benefits. We must also continue to invest in research to develop new methods and technology to tackle invasive species. But our native wildlife can’t afford for us to wait – they are at a crisis point.
If we care about Australia’s biodiversity, we need to act now using the best tools available, so our native wildlife can survive and thrive.