Wildlife Conservation in the Urban Environment : are Pets a Threat?

Ric Nattrass

Abstract

If the maintenance of natural biodiversity is the key to a sustainable, healthy environment, then wildlife conservation is as important in the urban and peri-urban environment as it is anywhere else. Whilst "wildlife" in its best meaning includes all life forms in both the plant and animal kingdoms, in reality it is the vertebrates which attract the most attention. Recently there has been a greatly increased concern about the threat to vertebrate wildlife from domestic pets, in particular predation by domestic cats and dogs. Whilst predation by cats and dogs is shown here to be reasonably widespread both in terms of species and numbers, this study tends to indicate that, from a strictly conservation point of view, the predatory effect of cats and dogs is of less significance than has previously been portrayed. It also seems likely that land management practices necessary for the keeping of pet horses constitutes a far greater threat to wildlife conservation than the more obvious toll extracted by the behaviour of the essentially carnivorous cat and dog. Aside from this largely academic consideration of species conservation however, there is the equally legitimate issue of wildlife welfare and from this point of view any reasonable measures designed to reduce or eliminate wildlife predation by domestic dogs and cats must be encouraged.

About the author

Ric Nattrass
Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service
PO Box 42
KENMORE
AUSTRALIA 4069

Ric Nattrass has been a Wildlife Ranger with the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service (QNPWS) since February 1984. For all of this time he has been employed in the Wildlife Management Section at the Moggill Centre in Brisbane concentrating primarily on wildlife conservation in the mainly urban environment of south-east Queensland. He has published material on a number of local species including magpies, brushtail possums, brush turkeys, bandicoots, koalas and snakes. A major interest has been wildlife welfare and in June 1988 he established an after hours emergency service for wildlife using trained volunteers to augment the existing volunteer wildlife groups in the area. He is the QNPWS representative on both the Lord Mayor of Brisbane's Conservation and Environment Advisory Committee (CEAC) as well as the Redland Shire-based Koala Council. In 1990 he founded the Brisbane Frog Society. Besides a love of frogs, his other hobbies include dragonfly watching. He confesses to an intense personal dislike of both cats and dogs.

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