Just as the lines connect the cat’s tail to its head, the image connects internet users worldwide, freezing us in a moment of shared hilarity. It’s a simplistic moment that distracts us from the deeper, more complex worldly issues beyond our digital screens. The social environment, when it comes to dogs, is different – there is a social expectation that dogs should be kept under control, kept on your property or, if they’re off the property, they should be on a leash,” Legge says. “Whereas we don’t have that same social expectation when it comes to cats.” Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population. The world is just a cat playing with Australia’ phenomenon has proliferated into more than just a funny sentence, with widespread agreement on the fact that the world is a cat playing with a ball commodifying the phrase. That said, there is an inherent value in something seemingly trivial. Particularly during times of social upheaval, and in our modern age where humans are more digitally connected yet isolated than ever, these kinds of pareidolia and witty observations serve a buoyant purpose.

This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats. The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’. It may seem random, but these kinds of perceptions are more common than you think. It’s called pareidolia – the inclination to identify a connection between completely unrelated or random things. My cat is 18 years old; she’s lived her whole life indoors,” he says. “She’s none the wiser of what goes on outside. And I guess I feel like it’s not like the cats’ [fault]. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morningOn the regulatory side, Legge says laws enforcing cat containment need to be harmonised around the country, instead of the “patchwork” of different rules we have from state to state, or even council to council. The bigger job is dispelling the idea that cats need to be free to roam for their health and happiness – a misconception, Legge says. And then we have to update ideas of what responsible cat ownership looks like. Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park. Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species. Have you ever thought ‘The world is just a cat playing with Australia’? Unless you’ve seen the image below, you’d probably be wondering how on earth a cat finds associative belonging next to the World and Australia. Photo by newsaustralia.org What does ‘the world is a cat playing with Australia’ actually mean? It’s not just feral cats that are the problem. When kept exclusively inside the home, pet cats like Bauer’s beloved Titian pose no threat to wildlife. But the majority of Australia’s 5 million pet cats are allowed to roam and, on average, each roaming pet cat kills 186 reptiles, birds and mammals a year. Not to mention the pet cats that go missing, or are born into litters that are abandoned, which can then seed into the feral population.

Tanya Plibersek is shown a feral cat trap in a courtyard at Parliament House in Canberra. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Well, it’s a light-hearted and creative perspective that the shape of the world map and its organisation of countries look just like a cat playing with a ball (with Australia on the bottom right of the map being the ball). Cats are beautiful animals; they’ve got a good design. And that design [means] they’re really good at killing animals. Unfortunately, for the cat, they’ve been introduced to an area where they don’t really belong – the Australian ecosystem.” It is something that a lot of people find funny or weird,” he says, laughing. But Bauer doesn’t feel particularly conflicted about owning a cat and arranging to have cats killed.