Have you ever wanted to just drop your current boring job and be your own boss in the form of a feral bounty hunter?
You get to lock up crims, work your own hours, and live out the life of all those awesome anti-heroes you’ve seen on TV and movies. Plus, you get to call yourself a goddamn bounty hunter which is just badass.
Well good news, folks! You can legit be a bounty hunter in Australia. Sort of.
Now you can smoke cigarettes and strike cool poses, legitimately!
Now before you get excited over travelling around Australia, hunting down outlaws, and slamming down bounty posters onto a sheriff’s desk in demand of payment, people are off-limits if you decide to be a bounty hunter in Australia.
No, what you’ll be hunting are – wait for it – cats. Feral cats to be specific.
The Banana Shire Council up in Queensland is offering bounties on the presentation of feral cat scalps and are willing to pay you $10 per scalp. Yeah, it’s not quite as lucrative of a business as you think. If you’ve got a soft spot for cats and/or need higher paying bounties, you can hunt down wild dog and dingo scalps for $30 a pop. If this sounds like your schtick, then make sure to stick to only the Banana Shire region because that’s the only place they’ll let you hunt down feral cats and dogs.
Hey, bounty hunting is a tough business and you should know that from all the TV shows and movies you’ve seen.
You’re under arrest! Okay fine, I’ll let you off with a warning in exchange for some snuggles.
So why is bounty hunting for feral cats, wild dogs, and dingos legal in Australia when catching crims isn’t? Well, the short answer is the country has a big pest problem in the form of those aforementioned three animals.
Ever since feral cats were introduced to Australia, they’ve been responsible for the decimation of the native wildlife. While they’re the same species as your pet cat, the difference is feral cats are forced to hunt to survive and this has led to a worrying decline in mammal species and bird numbers. Australia is aiming to cull around 2 million feral cats by 2020, which will be a big chunk of the country’s total feral cat population of about 6 million.
Now we’re not condoning the killing animals or anything here, but at $10 a scalp and a 2 million target to hit, that’s $20 million in feral cat bounties to claim. There’s a lot of bounty hunting to do in the next few months but hey, bounty hunters need to hustle for their dinner and there’s plenty of targets roaming around. Just make sure you stick to the Banana Shire Council area or you won’t get paid.