Feral exterminations

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

Scottish Natural Heritage, trying to extirpate feral
hedgehogs from the Uist Islands off the west coast of Scotland since
2003, announced in March 2005 that it would augment trapping and
killing them by lethal injection and gas with training dogs to flush
them out to be shotgunned. Scottish Natural Heritage had killed
about 500 hedgehogs, going into the fall 2005 campaign, while Uist
Hedgehog Rescue has live-captured and relocated to the mainland circa
600. Scottish Nature Heritage withdrew the dogs-and-shotguns scheme
on September 20. “These healthy animals simply do not need to be
killed,” responded Uist Hedgehog Rescue. “Hedgehogs on the mainland
are actually in decline.”

The Australian House of Representatives agriculture committee
on September 26, 2005 recommended creating a new national agency
specifically to kill feral species, including rabbits, burros,
camels, pigs, mice, foxes, and domestic cats. Foxes and domestic
cats are still the major predators and most effective controls of
rabbits and mice despite more than 150 years of government efforts to
eradicate them by means of poisons and introduced diseases. The
agriculture committee recommendation came after an 18-month
inquiry–and one day after the Tasmanian Farmers & Graziers
Association called for compulsory cat licensing, blaming
toxoplasmosis carried by cats for miscarriages among sheep, the most
abundant introduced species in Australia. The agriculture committee
rejected the suggestion of Animals Australia that “Species which are
here to stay because we have made this place such an ideal habitat
for them must be permitted to settle into their new niches and
stabilize their populations with a minimum of human interference.”