Free ballin'

Anyways, to carry on from yesterday's rant: Australia has a well-known problem with invasive species, and for a moment let's forget the dongo question and simply say that this problem includes legions of feral cats and dogs. When you've got few extant large native predators (even the local snakes aren't the kind you'd use as a metaphor for a good man's tackle; the amethystine python, the longest here, can stretch up to almost nine metres but it's not what you'd call girthy), this means you've got two new apex predators and that's serious. Feral cats and dogs are destructive, that's unarguable.

What is shocking and so very fucking Australian about the situation is that this destructive situation has resulted in a number of extreme, expensive, and morally questionable measures - dogless and catless communities or zones, catch-and-kill ranger policies, poisoning, trapping, etc. - but it has not resulted in any meaningful control of the pet breeding and sales industry, or even of a fuckin' subsidized desexing programme.

That's the 1) point - the first thing of the two I meant to list yesterday which has made it less likely we'll stay here. There is a real moral black hole in Australia, which allows what are essentially humanitarian and ethical issues - how do we deal with the impact of having released two new apex predators into the ecosystem? - to be dismissed by tough-sounding, politically appealing methods - we'll kill'em to keep the Aussie bush Aussie - when there is a less tough, cheaper, less bullshitty, way to deal with it that you'd need to do to let the first method be at all effective anyways - subsidize the desexing of companion animals so that the inevitable new rounds of abandonments don't simply fill up the vaccuum left by the catch-and-kill programmes.

You also see this sort of disgusting politicization of a humanitarian issue here very blatantly and disturbingly in all the party posturing over refugee claimants, but I'm angry enough over the strays today, so I won't get into it. Anyways I'm trying to make my peace with this first issue because I understand it's hardly unique to Australia.

Anyways, it seems that this lack of a subsidized desexing programme is due to a quite conscious effort to discourage one on the part of the AVA - see thier own statement about it. The lady at the shelter ascribed this to vets' desires to make sure their income streams and profit margins stay broad and it's hard for me to see that she's wrong. With all the assurance of an insane retard trying to fill in an oasis with gold bricks while he doesn't have enough money to irrigate his nearby farm, they claim with bare-faced cheek, in a country that carries out catch-and-kill programmes, that subsidized desexing programmes are too expensive and haven't worked anywhere they've been tried.

And no doubt they are believed, because of this really, REALLY Australian trait, which is quite unique, and the second thing that is making it less likely for us to live here permanently, and which I'll go on about tomorrow, having ranted all over the place once more today.