"Quick, reload, Martha!! Here come's Gene's cat again!"

Actually, Gene, my problem is that I don't like my neighbors' cats
chasing birds at _my_ feeder in _my_ backyard. Don't you think it's more
than a little presumptuous that cat owners allow their pets to come into
my yard to hunt and kill the animals that I consider my "pets?" Why
can't these cat owners realize that other people do not want someone
else's cute little predator invading their yards? I typically get a
shocked, self-righteous response from my neighbors when I ask them to
keep their cats out of my yard -- "Oh, Buddy never hunts birds." Then
why did he just race furiously across the lawn in pursuit of that towhee
under my fir tree?

You say that cats' impacts on wild bird populations are overblown, but I
know for sure that some cat owners are very inconsiderate. Please keep
your cat at home.

Bob Boekelheide
Sequim

>Hi tweets,
>
>I've been contemplating weighing in with a bit of skepticism on the old
>dread cat thread.
>
>It is now the "common sense" that domestic cats are a terrible scourge of
>wild birds, killing billions each year (the exact numbers vary considerably,
>but are typically astronomical). I've always felt these numbers might be
>somewhat inflated estimates extrapolated from a rather narrow base in fact.
>
>Anyway, I've reviewed "Cats and Wildlife: A Conservation Dilemma" by John S.
>Coleman, Stanley A. Temple, and Scott R. Craven, published in the Salem
>Audubon Society newsletter, the Kestrel, May 1997. They cite an estimate
>that between 8 and 217 million birds are killed each year by cats in
>Wisconsin! That's a rather wide range for starters, with the higher figure
>beyond belief, since one might extrapolate from that to the USA something
>like 10 BILLION birds per year. Really! How many birds are there in the
>world at any given moment? Cats can't have killed them all.
>
>How do they arrive at these figures? Well, they cite one report that a
>single feral cat may have killed 1000 birds in one year. In the next
>sentence they report another study that concluded that one population of
>"free-living, small-town" cats killed on average 14 "wild animals" per year,
>which translates to three birds per year, based on another study that showed
>that free-ranging cats prey is 70% small mammals (e.g., rats, presumably)
>and just 20% birds. Sounds like that one cat was the feline equivalent of
>Hitler. Was that one cat the basis of the extrapolation to the number of
>birds killed by the estimated 100 million cats in the USA? (Actually, no,
>because, if 100 million cats each killed 1000 birds per year that would be
>100 BILLION birds... an unlikely total, but just 10x that of the high
>Wisconsin estimate.)
>
>Another point noted in this article was the fact that, while more rural
>families own cats (60%) than urban families (30%), there are considerably
>more urban than rural families in the US. I am one of those urban families,
>and we currently have two cats, which from time to time are allowed out in
>the back yard (a bad move, I know, but it reduces the pressure on the cat
>box). Over the years we've had many more. Of the approximately 10 cats we've
>housed during the past 30 years, to the best of our knowledge only two ever
>killed a bird. The rest lay around the house, chased a squirrel or two (what
>they would have done if the squirrel had let them catch them, I don't know),
>snarled out the window at the neighboring pigeons, but we're never motivated
>to carry through on their feline instincts. Our current killer cat, Diva,
>just brought in a black rat yesterday. It was still twitching between her
>jaws as she approached the back porch with her prize. She gave a quick
>upward jerk of her head, tossed up the rat , and killed it by breaking its
>neck. So far this year she's brought in one other rat and two or three
>juvenile house sparrows.
>
>My point is, that most house cats live in urban areas. Maybe 10% of these
>kill any birds at all. Those that do kill birds probably kill mostly urban
>birds, like House Sparrows, which could benefit from a bit of predation,
>along with lots of urban rats and mice (which may well have been the
>original motive for their domestication, in Egypt 4000 years ago). So,
>perhaps rather than a blanket condemnation of pet cats, we should
>distinguish the potential impact of cats in urban versus rural areas. It
>would be best to keep rural cats inside, or cats with demonstrated predatory
>inclinations, or cats with access to feeders that attract birds whose
>populations are under some real threat.
>
>Granted, cats have extirpated populations of island endemics, but that is a
>very special case, one that requires agressive cat control measures.
>However, I remain unconvinced that domestic cats should be ranked right up
>there with habitat destruction, DDT, and mass commercial exploitation as
>primary threats to our native birdlife.
>
>Gene Hunn.
>
>