Don’t bell Australia’s cats. Just make it illegal to own one

February 20, 2026 — 2:30pm

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In Australia, it is illegal to own a pet tortoise. It is illegal to import an exotic bird. It is illegal to buy foreign Sea-Monkey eggs with your Sea-Monkey aquarium.

And yet, you can import your cat. You can phone up a cat breeder and buy one. You can keep your cat in your garden and let it roam the neighbourhood. I saw one on my street yesterday, a corpulent thing, slinking between cars, no doubt fattened mightily with the corpses of my local birds, mammals and even insects. This is insanity. It is an environmental catastrophe.

I am a zoologist. I love animals. I have even known a cat or two that I liked very much. But I’m also an evolutionary biologist. Cats kill more of Australia’s native species than any other exotic import. It’s time we outlawed pet cats, just as we outlaw other exotic animals inappropriate to the Australian environment.

Last month, there was a little dust-up in the scientific community over the role of domestic and feral cats in Australian mammal extinctions. A paper in late 2025 that had tried to cast doubt on cats’ role in the devastation........

© Brisbane Times