Two issues: Domestic and feral cats are not native to the Americas; pet cats are generally well fed - they hunt instinctually and don’t consume their prey. Nothing natural about it.
Sucks to be a bird. Adapt or die.
However mice, which carry serious diseases for humans, and Grizzly Bears, which tend to eat humans now and then are both native species.
So it’s perfectly natural to get sick and end up as grizzly poop.
Still does not make it a good idea, like having a house cat.
Plants and animals migrating from one part of the planet to another is as old as life itself and about as natural as natural gets.
Every cat I’ve had, none feral, hunted and killed whenever they were able, and always ate it too. They only exception was the one who caught a squirrel and only ate half of.
My cat eats the hell out of his prey. Two months ago my family and I were all sitting on our patio watching him go. Within 40 minutes he got a bird, a rabbit, a lizard and a cricket. Ate every last bit of fur and feather.
He’s 16 pounds, has an unlimited supply of Purina cat food and gets moist dog food as a treat every day. (The damn animal snagged a half a cucumber off the counter while my daughter was making a salad a couple of years ago and ate the whole thing.)
The point you have to take from the first story is that there were enough prey animals available for him to easily catch within a 40 minute time period. In the seven years that we lived in TX, we only had ONE mouse in the house. He kept down snakes (loved to eat baby rattlers), squirrels, mice, rats and insects. And he never ran low on supplies. Rabbits, birds and squirrels abound.
And was was, by far, not the only cat in our area. If it weren’t for cats, we’d be overrun in no time.
Are the alternatives of property destruction, chemical pesticides or kill traps better than a cat? What about the diseases spread by prey animals?
I just took a break to take a call from my mom and she reminded me of an incident that we witnessed about 25 years ago.
We lived in a trailer court in Wyoming that was overrun with feral cats. The city decided to capture and put down the cats. They caught over 100 cats in just a couple of months.
About two months of being practically cat-free the prey animals started multiplying. We all got mice in our houses. Poop everywhere.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Two mother skunks brought in their babies and some males followed the mamas. (The babies grew fast.) Next came in the raccoons and the opossums. (The cats had deterred the opossums - now we had kissing, fanged marsupials in our garbage cans.)
One neighbor got blasted by a skunk when she was headed to her car. A child was attacked by a raccoon. (Just scratched, but it scared the heck out of everyone.)
For the first time in our lives, we were sincerely afraid of rabies.
We lobbied the city to stop the cat-capturing program and won. For awhile, we discussed capturing and releasing feral cats from other parts of the city, but they came back on their own once we stopped trapping them.
Cats were not part of the North American ecosystem, but they sure are now. Nature has adapted well.
You see, things cannot revert to the way they were - WE are here. We bring garbage and food storage. THAT is not natural. The cats balance out OUR impact.
Without them, prey animals would find a ready source of food from the waste and storage of human beings and multiply in an unnatural manner. We need them and have for thousands of years.
(If you ever watch a colony of mice eat a live pig, you’d root for the cats.)
Tell that BS to my Cat. Fed 2 times a day, and hunted and ATE everything she hunted including the full grown Rabbit that kicked her in the face.
Took her awhile of laying in wait but she got it, AND she ate it.