How it cost taxpayers £2k just to catch a cat!
A BIZARRE conservation project has seen a hunter hired to catch cats – at a cost of £2,000 per animal.
In an move designed to safeguard the distinctive Scottish wildcat, a trapper armed with cameras, scented lures and baited cages was sent out to capture feral cats that try to mate with their wild cousins.
Such inter-breeding dilutes the purity of the wildcat bloodline, making it ‘soft’ and less able to cope with Scotland’s unforgiving landscape.
But a three-month project, backed by £20,000 of public cash, trapped just ten cats, of which one was identified as a wildcat then freed.
Another was in such poor health that it was put down, while the remaining eight feral animals were neutered, vaccinated and released back into the glens.
Project manager Dr Roo Campbell admitted the figures were low, saying: ‘We are reviewing it. We will sit down and look at other work we are doing in other areas. Cats can be quite difficult. Some discussion is going on over how we can improve things.’
The £20,000 for last winter’s pilot initiative is a fraction of the £250,000 apportioned by Scottish Natural Heritage for a five-year plan to preserve the genetically separate species that is the wildcat.
Hunters were recruited to scour the Angus Glens north of Kirriemuir for signs of feral cats which live wild but are not ‘wildcats’.
Camera trails were set up using 50 cameras and 40 separate traps, but only 30 cats were detected by cameras and of these only a third were identified as potentially feral. But Dr Campbell said he was pleased with the result, adding: ‘There is a difficulty to trapping and neutering feral cats. These are cats living in the wild, rather than wildcats. We did not trap any domestic pets and we’d always encourage pet owners to microchip their cat, in case it gets lost.’
A spokesman for Scottish Natural Heritage said: ‘The Angus Glens are remote, have relatively poor road access and have few people from whom we can draw volunteers to assist in the trapping of feral cats.
‘Our strategy of specifically targeting feral cats living wild alongside Scottish wildcats means numbers of cats we will be targeting will be fewer than if we were to go into the nearest town and hoover up the feral cats living there. We are committed to our work aimed at conserving this shy and elusive species.
‘Without this, the Scottish wildcat is likely to become extinct.’