I live about a fifteen minute walk from Bundoora Park, which has at least one resident pair of Boobooks. Saw a Powerful Owl once there too, and it’s full of Tawny Frogmouths.
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I know there are a lot of cat lovers out there and OK, I can understand it, but the cat has been the most devastating destroyer of Australia’s unique fauna ( along with the fox), over a long time. Councils try to stop people from letting their cats out at night, but they just do not take any farking notice.
It moved me to write this because I watched a really good doco last night called Quoll Farm.
The Eastern quoll is easily as cute as a meercat, playful, full of personality and is almost as good at getting rid of rats / mice as cats are.
They did cover the whole of SE Australia, but they are confined to Tasmania now, and seriously, what a loss to the character of our fauna.
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Quoll farm repeating on ABC2 in 15 mins.
Will tune in 
Two years ago l was living in WA and was told it is not mandatory to bring cats inside at night.
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It varies by council here in Vic, they’re the ones that make animal control regs etc.
I’d love to see inside-cats-only mandates spread. They’re absolute shockers for killing natives birds and other critters, and their saliva is so foul and disease-ridden that almost nothing survives an attack in the long run (natives don’t always react well to antibiotics)
Buy yourself a damn cat run and keep Fluffles inside, for pity’s sake.
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This appears to be the right time to plug my sister’s business, a cattery. She owns and runs Cats in Boes, in Hastings, and at present l work there as well. I know it isn’t probably the done thing on here, and there isn’t cause for Blitzers to travel right now, but when restrictions ease, your cats won’t get treated better anywhere else. Cheers.
Was beautifully made. Had no idea of the large differences between the quoll types. Had them licking pots and sneaking into the tent at freyinet 25 years ago. Absolutely captivating cheeky little things.
Show made me look this up.
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I watched it too was good and the quolls were so cute and interesting.
I agree re cats, I’m in Bendigo and there has been a cat curfew here for quite a few years.
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I’ve done a bit of work with quolls, at the Mt Rothwell sanctuary near Werribee. They run a captive breeding program for eastern quolls there. They’re interesting critters, pretty close to cat-like in how they behave, but not quite. There’s often talk of breeding them as native pets as an alternative to cats, not sure as how it’d work though. They can get accustomed to people given time, especially if they’re raised by humans, and they can even be genuinely playful. But their lifespan is only a few years, their fur is quite coarse, even when compared to a dog, much less a cat, so they’d be less cuddly. And most vets are woefully uninformed even about common wildlife, much less something as rare as a quoll, so getting them medical treatment would be the next thing to impossible.
The wild ones though - don’t try to grab one and take it home to cuddle, is all i’m saying. One of my enduring memories is watching an angry wild-stock quoll getting flea treatment. Three people were holding it - the professional quoll-handler who ran the sanctuary, my partner at the time who was an experienced vet who’d worked a lot with wildlife, and an AFL footy player who shall remain nameless who was there because he’d been told by his club to go do useful volunteer work in the community after an off-field indiscretion. The quoll was about the size of a soft drink bottle, and it beat the living hell out of all three of them. The picture of the raging quoll, hanging by its teeth from the vet’s arm, with all four sets of claws embedded in either the handler or the footy player, projectile crapping vengefully and indiscriminately all over the place, will remain etched in my brain forever. (Being the relatively useless member of the group, I was keeping records on a clipboard while this happened, my eyes bugging out slightly…)
I did get bitten by one at another time, but that one was just playing. He did bite clean through my blundstones later on when he got a bit overexcited with the game though.
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Who bit through the Blunnies, the quoll, or the footy player making amends for off field indiscretions?
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Filandia?
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Imagine what the much larger and supposedly more aggressive spot-tail/tiger quoll would do!
I was once in a potable office on a site in NT when there was a sound of rustling in the ceiling panels. Everyone looked up from their computers, then, when it went quiet, went back to work. A few minutes later a whole ceiling panel dropped, stayed horizontal the whole way to the floor, with a quoll surfing on top of it. It ran into a locker, and when prodded out of there got chased around the office a few laps until it found the opened door and scampered out!
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We had a cat hanging around here a few months back, I’d see it in our front years most nights, just loitering.
It managed to catch a ringtail, two tawnys and goodness knows what else. So frustrating. Haven’t seen it since, lucky for the cat as I had trap ready to go so I could pass it on to the council.
Keep them inside ffs! If my dogs were out roaming the streets they’d be caught instantly.
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The Quoll Farm doco did emphasise that the Quolls are predators, but they are not peak predators and mostly eat moths, small rodents etc, but HMs story indicates they are not as cuddly and cute as they were depicted in Quoll Farm. Apparently in the wild they live about 2 years. Maybe in the absence of cats they would survive a bit longer, but clearly life is tough in a country like Australia, where just one fire can make a species locally extinct.
I think they live to 5-6 years in captivity, though if quoll veterinary medicine was as well-researched as, say, cat veterinary medicine, that’d probably stretch out even further.
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Certainly making their continued existence highly problematic.
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We have had a cat park ever since we moved into the Marsh from the a rural block. They still get a bird or two each year, as some stupid little birds like to somehow get into the cat park or still on the top of it. Very effective killers are cats !!
I am not sure how a cat curfew works, as our Shire has just bought one in. Cats are suposed to be registered, but no-one ever checks cats and are there going to be Council Officers roaming around at night looking for cats at large ? I don’t think any law that cannot be policed is a good law.
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