Animal species recognition is one area in which a limited amount of research has been undertaken. Especially in the pest control domain, basic primitive technologies are still used, such as identifying species in a tracking tunnel by capturing ink footprints on paper. These traps only differentiate various species by varying the baits used in the trap. This is not a reliable method.The main aim of this research is to develop a species recognition system for traps. This system uses an eigenface based identification technique. This imaged based sensing application is focused on feral rodents such as possums, cats and weasels.Traditionally, the eigenface technique is used in the human face recognition domain. This technique is novel in animal species recognition domain. When the technique was applied to animal images with different backgrounds, it had 55%, 33% and 45% successful detection rates for possums, cats and weasels respectively. Once the background is removed from the training images the detection rate increased significantly to 65%, 52% and 64% respectively.