‘Super-cat’ tale

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32639, 22 June 1971, Page 24

‘Super-cat’ tale

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) ADELAIDE, June 20. Australia has never been known as a fruitful country for big-game hunters, but a South Australian kangaroo shooter may have changed the tide with wild-cat safaris. Mr Bill Hambly-Clark predicted this as he described 251 b "super-cats” which he had shot on the sprawling Rose Hill cattle station, 36 miles south of the South Australian-Northern Territory border recently. He said that these domestic cats turned wild are breeding so proliflcally that in a few years time big-game hunters may be stalking them for trophies. They were twice as heavy as the average domestic cat.

The cats were killing small native fauna—including the marsupial mouse—and "might become the biggest plague since the rabbit problem before the war?’

On one property, he said, , wild cats had killed off. alj • the quail and plovers. “They r will eat beetles, frogs, small I birds, pull rabbits out of & holes—anything. B “They are living like kings, 1 and because they have no j natural enemies they are e able to rear the whole of their litters.” 1 The Secretary of the Animal Welfare League of ' South Australia (Mrs J. j Mills) said that the average “ female cat had 100 to 150 ® kittens in a lifetime. But in | 10 years one cat, through its ? offspring reproducing could “ produce 10,000 cats. V “The amazing thing about these cats is that they are ~ not petted, groomed or any- ® thing, but are in beautiful v nick,” said Mr Hamblys Clark. r “Their fur coats would s probably make good rugs.”