Over my cold odorless litterbox.
Ferel cats are very bad.
Those numbers are just wildly off. Hundreds of millions of mice and a good number of chipmunks, I could believe.
But even wildly successful outdoors kitties catch birdies less often, and most of our outdoors cats today are lazy, overfed, not in their prime years, house cats at heart anyway.
I agree. Feral cats, protected by animal-loving kooks, slaughter tens of millions of song birds every year.
They should be trapped, and eliminated.
Ed
uh-oh.
I’m presently feeding a feral kitcat.
I did notice the mouse population dwindling.
I haven’t noticed less birds.
Seriously, how many birds can a cat eat per day?
Mrs. BCC and I are signing our cats up for political correctness classed, post haste!
... possible consideration for your cold blooded, homicidal, psychotic, blood thirsty kitteh ping. LOL!
ping!
It aint home without one...
The references read like a who’s who list of the top zealots. They are anti-cat, wildlife advocates. And the Smithsonian is the one that hired Nico Dauphine to run her kitty cam project - she’s the one that was found guilty of poisoning food left out for feral cats at her apartment complex (cats in a managed TNR program).
They’ve just found a new way to inflate the numbers of birds and mammals cats kill.
This is Peter Marra’s research history: http://www.voxfelina.com/2011/03/catbirds-cats-and-scapegoats/
I prefer the UK wildlife conservation organisations. They actually read the science, and understand the problem of extrapolating cat predation studies from one area to state- or nationwide estimates:
What none of the predation studies takes into account (cat scat predation studies, stomach content predation studies, etc.) is whether the cats hunted the animal it ate, or whether the animal was dead - or sick or dying.
There are studies of cat predation in birds that clearly indicate cats more often than not hunt sick birds.
The astronomical figures of these reserachers alone raise questions of credibility. If the breeding population of North American landbirds is 4.9 billion, then the 1.4–3.7 billion mortalities reported by Loss et al. (which the authors argue throughout their paper is a conservative estimate) represent an astonishing 28.5–75.5 percent of the total population. That’s on top of the 21 percent Arnold and Zink attribute to collisions with towers and windows.
While some species are, unquestionably, on the verge of extinction, the entire population of North American landbirds most certainly is not
My two torbies completely ignored a junco nest that was built at ground level in some juniper bushes out back. I question the birds’ judgement in building there, but there was no carnage.
Maybe my two girls are just lazy.
I use to live on top of a hill that was infested with the varmints. We got a cat and soon he was chasing down the gophers. He killed all of our gophers and then cleared out the neighbor's yards.
Cats,Coyotees,Racoons.......
My kitty does a great job keeping the mice and gophers down. And last summer she even brought me a rabbit for stewing :)
I don't know of any community in this country that requires its residents to license their cats.........