VA Thompson, Byron Bay
For too long we’ve been told to blame cats for the disappearance of our wildlife. The truth was revealed in the recent Australian government’s five year Threatened Species Strategy that shows we have been conned.
It states that ‘Habitat loss is politically sensitive because its main driver is the clearing of land to make way for economic activities such as agriculture, urban development, and mining.’ The strategy mentions feral cats more than 70 times, but habitat loss is mentioned just twice and land clearing not at all.
Australia has one of the world’s worst rates of land clearing, which has recently increased in some regions. The clearing of native vegetation in NSW rose by 800 per cent between 2013 and 2016.
Let’s get this straight, ‘Habitat loss is the number-one threat to Australia’s species’.
