“I spent 15 years removing cats from fenced reserves and national parks,” Katherine Moseby was saying. “And then, all of a sudden, I was putting them back in. It felt very strange to be doing that.”
“I spent 15 years removing cats from fenced reserves and national parks,” Katherine Moseby was saying. “And then, all of a sudden, I was putting them back in. It felt very strange to be doing that.”
It was a hot, intensely blue day in the Australian Outback, about 350 miles north of Adelaide. I was tagging along with Moseby as she checked the batteries on the motion-sensitive cameras that dot Arid Recovery, an ecosystem restoration project she and her husband launched in 1997. The project sprawls over 47 square miles of red earth and scrub. It’s entirely surrounded by a six-foot-tall fence, which is designed to keep out feral cats and foxes.
Inside the main fence is a series of smaller fenced-in paddocks. Several years ago, Moseby decided to start adding cats into some of these. Her reasoning was simple and, in its own way, radical. The outback ecosystem had been so fundamentally changed, that, if the native animals were to survive, they would have to change, too. Perhaps they could be trained to avoid cats, which were introduced to the country by the British colonists and now can be found virtually everywhere in Australia, including most islands.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
