The Aussies are extreme at the best of times, but now pet cats in several of Sydney’s suburbs will be forced to curl up inside their homes from dusk to dawn under a new curfew rule that hopes to curb overnight attacks on native wildlife.

Domestic cats, though tamed, love a good hunt whenever the opportunity presents itself. This deeply ingrained killer instinct has been wreaking havoc on Sydney’s wildlife conservation plans, and deeply upsetting the locals, who feel that the time has come to implement change.

The “curfew” will be difficult to enforce for obvious reasons but was introduced by the Leichhardt local government area on the inner west side of Sydney after deputy mayor Michele McKenzie’s son rescued a Brushtail Possum and its baby from a cat attack.

McKenzie explained:

It’s a small thing to ask people to keep their cats indoors if it means protecting our native wildlife.

After all, they were here first, we’ve introduced domestic pets, so we have a responsibility to control them.

It was reported that 564 Ringtail Possums, which are also on the cards to be reintroduced to the area, have been attacked in the last year alone and that the problem had become a serious threat to local wildlife.

As the Aussies do, an education and information program will be sent out by the local government and will propose that cat owners keep their pets indoors between dusk and dawn, monitor their cat’s activities during the day and attach not one, but two bells to their collars.

McKenzie continued:

[Cat owners] don’t imagine, because they feed their pets, that they are attacking wildlife. But it is a natural instinct, cats will prey on wildlife – and because they can actually get up in the trees they are a bit more dangerous than dogs.

Dogs will do terrible damage to a possum, but they don’t get them quite as often because they don’t climb trees.

Wildlife protection agency WIRES claimed that over a 5 year period, there had been 16 775 attacks by all types of domestic pets on native wildlife.

[Source: Yahoo]