Fawn,
This is just one of many articles that can be found about the impacts of cats on wildlife. It is very easy to find them if you wish. It is hard for me to believe that all the studies are wrong. If you choose to bury your head in the sand well, so be it. As I said earlier, loving your pet is one thing but loving something to the exclusion of all else is insanity!
Subsequently, Stanley Temple from the University of Wisconsin gathered some stronger data for Wisconsin. He estimates that there are over 100 million cats in the United States. These include house pets as well as rural, free-ranging cats that are not considered house pets. The latter cats include “barn cats,” left to fend for themselves. From U.S. census data, we know that over 30 percent of the households in the United States have at least one pet cat. In the United States, Temple found that 70 percent of the prey killed by cats are small mammals, particularly rodents. About 20 percent are birds and the remainder are other types of animals. In Wisconsin, Temple found that most house cats on average kill 14 animals per year. Rural cats kill far more.
Temple coupled his information on predation rate with estimates of the number of cats in Wisconsin. He estimates that Wisconsin cats alone kill somewhere between eight and 217 million birds each year with 39 million birds per year being the most reasonable estimate.
Extrapolated countrywide, Temple’s studies suggest that cats are important sources of bird mortality.Ê Temple argues that cats are one of the most important causes of extinction for some birds and small mammals; he claims cats may be second only to habitat destruction as a cause of death. For example, cats have been implicated in the decline of Piping Plovers, Least Terns and Loggerhead Shrikes as well as Marsh Rabbits in the Florida Keys.
Based on Temple’s work, significant tension has developed between groups that seek to neuter feral cats and let them roam free and others who favor the capture of all feral cats. The people in the former camp believe that most bird mortality can be pinned on humans (buildings, pollution, habitat destruction) and that cats are scapegoats.
Regardless of your position, everyone who owns cats should do all we can to minimize the number of birds our pets kill. The best solution is to keep your cat indoors. If your cat does roam outside, put a foot-high fence around your bird feeder. When the cat jumps over the fence, the birds have enough time to detect the cat and escape.
ANd they are all crap. The statistics are always gathered by bird lovers and tell me how many of them do studies on pesticides and urban sprawl, windmills, windows, cars, electric wires, etc. I’ve seen TONS and TONS of these articles and if you go to the cat sites, you will see opposite stats. Tell me, how do these people know feral cats kill birds? Who goes around and counts them? It’s bogus. All of it. And a lie. Tell me...how many raccoons steal bird eggs every year? Find me that stat.