Dogs are being unleashed on Kangaroo Island’s Dudley Peninsula in a bid to get rid of feral cats. They have become a big problem, eating native wildlife and spreading disease in sheep.
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00:00A new report by the cat team using scientific modelling has found there are only around
00:12one to two hundred feral cats left on the Dudley Peninsula.
00:18But these are the more tricky ones.
00:21Enter the island's eradication guru Brendan Florence, who has already helped get rid of
00:26feral goats and deer on KI, and played a big role in the pig eradication program, which
00:32is in its final stages.
00:35Cats are hard, I'd say, always use the word a hundred times harder than everything else
00:41I've done, purely because of how smart they are.
00:46But it's still a big area to cover on your own.
00:49How do you know where you're going?
00:50With all the technology and the cameras we've got out there, I get what we call a hotspot
00:54map.
00:55If you look at this map here, this is information that's come from the camera array.
00:59So this is all cats that have been past a camera in the last week.
01:03With two hundred and sixty cameras set up across the peninsula, that's a lot of clues.
01:08What's that?
01:10That one there, we reckon that's a wallaby.
01:17And one thing that's come a long way in helping him see what's out there in the dark is thermal
01:22technology.
01:23If you look in this tree here, you can see that, that's a possum.
01:27Hey dogs.
01:30And there's one more weapon Paul's been privately training up, which he now has approval to
01:36unleash.
01:37When they know that they're on a good scent, they make an enormous roar, and then you basically
01:43read that roar.
01:44It's like they're talking to you.