New Zealand Plans to Kill 2.5 Million Feral Cats by 2050 Using Poisoned Sausages
New Zealand's Conservation Minister Tama Potaka stood in front of cameras in November 2025 and said what every ornithologist in the country had been begging to hear for decades: feral cats are "stone cold killers," and the government is finally going to do something about it.
Feral cats have been added to the Predator Free 2050 target list, joining stoats, ferrets, weasels, rats, and possums on New Zealand's official kill list. This is the first addition to the program since it launched in 2016. The methods on the table include poisoned sausage bait and tree-mounted poison-dispensing devices designed to spray toxicants directly onto cats.
The Body Count
An estimated 2.5 million feral cats roam New Zealand. They kill between 10 and 20 prey animals per day each. Do the math on that and the scale of native wildlife being consumed daily is staggering.
The worst documented incident happened near Ohakune on the southern slopes of Mount Ruapehu, where a single male cat killed over 100 short-tailed bats in one week. Conservationists found 156 individual bat wings and 22 intact bodies at the base of two roost trees. These were lesser short-tailed bats, Mystacina tuberculata -- an ancient species found nowhere else on Earth, and one of only two land mammals native to New Zealand.
On Stewart Island, feral cats nearly wiped out the entire population of southern dotterels. The subspecies Charadrius obscurus obscurus now breeds almost exclusively on that one island, and predation pressure from cats pushed them to the edge of total extinction.
Public Support Is Overwhelming
The Department of Conservation received nearly 3,400 public submissions during consultation, and over 90 percent supported tougher feral cat management. That number is unusually high for any conservation policy.
Potaka was clear that domestic pets are excluded from the program. "New Zealand is full of proud cat owners, and domestic pets are not part of this Predator Free target," he said. The focus is on desexing, microchipping, and keeping pet cats away from wildlife areas.
Why It Took This Long
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon actually promised during a 2023 election debate to add feral cats to the list, then failed to follow through. It took RNZ reporting on that broken promise for the government to finally act. The revised Predator Free 2050 strategy is expected in March 2026.
New Zealand's native birds evolved for millions of years without mammalian predators. They have no instinct to flee from cats. Every day the government delays is another day those 2.5 million feral predators eat their way through irreplaceable species. The poisoned sausages cannot come fast enough.
Watch: RNZ coverage of feral cats added to Predator Free 2050