How to train rare animals to avoid predators

MORE THAN a score of Australian mammals have been exterminated by feral cats. These predators, which arrived with European settlers, still threaten native wildlife—and are too abundant on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small islands which were previously infested with them. But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with the problem. As she writes in a paper in the , she is giving feline-awareness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction programmes, in order to try to make them cat-savvy.Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are confined to fragments of cat-free habitat. That offers the possibility of taking colonists from these refuges to places where a species once existed but is no more. This will, however, put the enforced migrants back in the sights of the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using stuffed models and the sorts of sounds made by cats, has proved expensive and ineffective. Ms Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large naturalistic enclosures with a scattering of predators might serve as a form of boot camp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-ridden homes.