If you've ever seen your own cat pounce on a toy mouse in your living room, you've had a little preview of a much bigger story being played out on the other side of the world. According to the historical study, ‘The spread of the cat, Felis catus, in Australia: re-examination of the current conceptual model with additional information,’ by researcher Ian Abbott, published in Conservation Science Western Australia, cats arrived in Australia with British settlers in 1788 and had spread over more than 90 percent of the continent by 1890.
Abbott found 33 other journals of expeditions or accounts of excursions before 1895, and none of them mentioned cats in country beyond the settled frontier, the paper says. He also found almost 150 new records of cats elsewhere in Australia, which he says still fit the chronology of spread outlined in his earlier model, with only one small revision for northeast Queensland. Research by the Australian National University, Charles Darwin University, and the University of Sydney estimates that cats in Australia kill more than 1.5 billion native animals every year.
It could be a hard number for American readers to picture. Cats are among the most popular pets in the U.S., curled up on couches from one coast to the other. But in Australia the same animal has become a major threat to the continent’s wildlife. The story of how that happened starts more than two centuries ago, with a fleet of British ships and their cargo holds full of rats.
How cats hitched a ride to a new continent
When the First Fleet landed in Australia in 1788 to establish a British penal colony, cats came along for a practical reason. Ships had to have something to keep rats and mice away from the food stores, and so did the earliest farms and settlements, where grain and supplies had to be protected. Nobody probably planned for what happened next.
Abbott pieced together sightings of cats by researching old expedition diaries, farm journals, and 19th-century newspapers. Her research found the spread happened region by region. Cats were feral around Sydney by about 1820 and reached Perth and southeastern Australia by about 1840. They colonized north-west Australia by about 1870 and by 1890 covered over 90 percent of the continent. That’s a very quick takeover for an invasive predator travelling across a landmass the size of the contiguous United States.
