Why Is There A Feral Cat On The Tasmanian Flag?

The red feral cat on the Tasmanian flag is obviously an African lion, but why does an island in Oceania use an animal from a continent thousands of kilometres away as it's symbol?

Of course the flag of Tasmania also has the flag of a another country in it's top left corner, but that is normal for remnants of the British Empire, and is consistent with an island named after a mental illness (TasMania). 
The 'other flag' also recognises the services to humanity carried out by 'Great' Britain in thoughtfully using 75,000 convicts to displace the indigenous population of Tasmania. This 'genocide' must go down as one of the great anthropological foot-shots in history and forced the British to miss out on 40,000 years of local knowledge. They had to graft (no pun) English customs onto an island on the Australian continental shelf. Apparently, the British did not regard Tasmania's indigenous people as human so they didn't charge each other with murder. The symbolism of the feral cat is becoming clearer. In the wild the carnivorous African lion is at the top of the food chain and strangles it's prey before ripping it apart. Pretty much how the British settled Tasmania.

Although Charles Darwin was British and visited Tasmania, his appreciation for the natural world was not shared by the career soldiers and bureaucrats that managed 'HM Prison Tasmania'.

In order to avoid competition with their chosen feral cat, the Tasmanian Government funded the extermination of the marsupial Tasmanian Tiger. No way would a Tassie Tiger ever make it onto the Tasmanian Flag but interestingly, it is used as a 'trophy symbol' by Service Tasmania.

An ever-present reminder to all Tasmanians that you pay your fees and charges to a government that excels in the extinction of rare and threatened species. This proud tradition continues today although Tasmanians will wipe-out a species for no apparent reward. They kill for fun.

In more recent times the 'feral cat' Tasmanian government spent millions eradicating the 'feral fox' although it was never actually located here. This is the equivalent of asking frogs to drain a swamp, but thankfully the program was probably just a fraud developed by descendants of those 75,000 convicts whose DNA must now occupy the cells of most Tasmanians.

Actual 'feral cats' pose a huge problem for what remains of Tasmania's Galapagos Islands-like ecosphere but it's taken the Tasmanian Government 2 centuries to realise this. Maybe they were too close to the problem? As long as taxpayers somewhere else fund the 'feral cat government's' war on feral cats then the hunt is on.

Today it's not unusual to see a 'bleeding heart' cat story on the front page of a Tasmanian newspaper.

Somebody shot one with an air rifle only last week. This is the problem with cats. One minute they are cute and you lovingly serve them dead grazing animals that the TFGA poisons wallabies to grow, and the next they are 'feral' and you are paying them taxes.