House cats have more impact on local wildlife than wild predators

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cat_predation_on_wildlife" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cat_predation_on_wildlife</a><p><i>&quot;As an invasive species and superpredator, they do considerable ecological damage. In Australia, hunting by cats helped to drive at least 20 native mammals to extinction, and continues to threaten at least 124 more. Their introduction has caused the extinction of at least 33 endemic species on islands throughout the world. Feral and domestic cats kill billions of birds in the United States every year, where songbird populations continue to decline.&quot;</i>

This, incidentally, is why I don&#x27;t take people who make the &quot;wind turbines kill birds&quot; argument seriously. It&#x27;s not false, but the number is very small compared to those killed by domestic cats and window collisions. So the loss is minimal provided they&#x27;re not in a breeding area for an endangered species.

The only effective solution I have found so far to prevent my cat from hunting too many small animals is to have her wear a bell. Is seems that prey are scared away and manage to escape. Before we put it on we used to find dead mice, lizards and birds everyday in the garden or in front of the door...

I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time living around wild cats, and I&#x27;ve yet to see a cat hunt a bird. Of course cats do hunt birds, but I&#x27;m very curious about how these figures are reached, in this case, how reliable those isotope studies are.<p>Incidentally, here&#x27;s a critical take of a study on the amount of wildlife cats kill that made headlines in 2013 cited in the article, also by NPR: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;13.7&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;170851048&#x2F;do-we-really-know-that-cats-kill-by-the-billions-not-so-fast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;13.7&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;170851048&#x2F;do-we...</a>

For this reason we walk our cat. With some training (and some - not all - cats) you can even get rid of the leash and let the animal roam whilst maintaining visual contact.<p>It&#x27;s very different from walking a dog. Ours usually hides in his favourite spot and just sits there for 20 minutes straight, then takes his usual route, sniffing and rubbing his face on places where apparently other cats have been.<p>The upside is that you only need to do that once every 2-3 days.<p>Now that we&#x27;re on quarantine he&#x27;s been calling out other cats from the balcony. Fortunately on Monday we&#x27;ll be allowed outside, so he&#x27;ll get the chance to catch up with his buddies - or actually - their scents.

Is there any ethical and easy way to keep cats out of my yard?<p>I live in an suburban single family neighborhood where the houses are close together. (5000sq lots) There are 3 or 4 different solitary cats I see slinking through my yard from time to time. They all seem like outdoor house cats as opposed to feral cats.<p>I try to hiss at them and scare them off but they come back. Is there a method that will encourage them to avoid my yard?

Vice Media did a video about the impact of the feral cat population on Australian wildlife, and the hunters&#x2F;trappers that are working to cut down on their population[1]. Some of the imagery can be a little brutal if you&#x27;re averse to that sort of thing, but I found it to be fairly interesting from a conservation methods perspective. It reminds me a little of the work being done in the American South on trying to keep down wild pig and python populations.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b93IBwJ_Yow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b93IBwJ_Yow</a>

The fact that cats hunt have been helpful to me in the past. Twice while I was living in an apartment building all of my neighbors had problems with mice. Once in New York and once in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts before my girlfriend came to live with me, I would see the mice. After she came to live with me with her cats, never saw them again. The same when we moved to NYC. While my neighbors all had rotten issues I never saw one mouse or rat in my apartment the entire 8 years living there.

I used to battle with mice all the time at my little cabin in the woods and then a neighbor moved in with a cat that &quot;hunts&quot; outside my cabin all night. Haven&#x27;t had a mouse problem in years. I&#x27;ve never seen a dead bird anywhere and the cat never seems to hunt during the day.

As a dog owner, i have always wondered why my indoor dog needs an annual license, while my neighbourhood is saturated in unlicensed &quot;wild&quot; cats??<p>Seems like utter crap, and it is clear the cats are killing the local birds.

Some may want to read this as well. From The Atlantic circa 2013.<p>The End of Cats: An Interview With the New Zealand Economist Calling to Eliminate All Kitties<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;the-end-of-cats-an-interview-with-the-new-zealand-economist-calling-to-eliminate-all-kitties&#x2F;272474&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;the-end...</a>

My cat doesn&#x27;t care about wild life at all. She spends a lot of time in the garden and birds even have learned that they can walk near her without any issues.

The NPR headline is catchy but the underlying study is dogged by questions.<p>The cited study (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1111&#x2F;acv.12563;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1111&#x2F;acv.12563;</a> sci-hub.tw has a copy) has some methodological flaws:<p>* The cat studied were were not randomly selected; they were chosen by &quot;local volunteers&quot;. There may be confounding variables that explain part of the effect and so turn the observed effects from being statistically significant to not being statistically significant. * The data on kills was self-reported, allowing bias to creep in. * All the cats were English-speaking. * Only 10 un-neutered pet cats were studied. I don&#x27;t know if being neutered would increase, decrease, or have no effect on the kill rate, but the subject is not discussed.<p>I also question the conclusion that cats have a significant impact on local fauna.<p>* The average kill rate for a pet cat was (roughly) less than two animals per week, which doesn&#x27;t seem very high. I&#x27;m left with the feeling that the authors had to resort to killings&#x2F;area to make the results impressive. * The authors did not report on the total size of the home ranges of cats compared to total area. So, for example, if the ratio was 1:1000, then so what? If the ratio was 1:20, then house cat might have a significant affect on local fauna.<p>Finally, I have a question about the presentation of the data: Figure 2b does not indicate that &quot;75% of cats spent 90% of their time in disturbed habitats&quot;. The graph indicates that 500+ (out of 875 cats) spent between 95% and 100% of their time in developed habitats. Perhaps the y-axis is mislabeled, but even if it is, the graph does not match what the authors say.

Then again how many types of birds are invasive species in the Americas? Pigeons, doves, starlings, sparrows, finches and I&#x27;m sure many more.<p>For mammals some mice, rabbit and squirrel species are invasive species too.<p>Invasive cats killing invasive animals. It seems cats like small birds and mammals that tend to be invasive.

Of course animals like cats will kill more in a given area if they don&#x27;t stray out. I also don&#x27;t see very much of a problem with that, given that most densely populated neighbourhoods have a want for large amounts of rodents and birds.

It&#x27;s yet another problem that relies on each individual to make decisions that benefit the whole.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;stay-home-back-to-work-a-dog-and-cat-debate-re-opening-america-11587138058" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;stay-home-back-to-work-a-dog-an...</a>

It&#x27;s amazing how adoptable cats are both to domesticated life and to life in the wild. Is there a way for evolution to work its magic and for species hunted by cats to develop countermeasures?

&gt; &quot;The big concern is where we have an overlap of people and cats with native species that are small and vulnerable,&quot; Kays said.<p>Kind of the key question here. Does your local jurisdiction have native species that live in towns and cities that are vulnerable? Some places are different than others. In some places the typical small city bird may even be an introduced species.<p>In New Zealand for example yes absolutely. Other places maybe not so much...<p>It is absolutely wild to me how laissez faire Kiwis are about the right to have their cats roam while at the same time being so militant against other mammals (including dogs!).

Can confirm, my cat kills all the time. Birds, rabbits, frogs. If something moves in my backyard, it will eventually be killed. In the summer when doors are open she actually drags in dying, bleeding animals from time to time. And under prey drive she&#x27;s a completely different animal, scary and aggressive AF.

You ask how much wildlife there is in urban and suburban areas to begin with. The wildlife that lives there is all generalist, if a cat takes a mouse, squirrel, starling or blackbird it&#x27;s a bit bloody but not really important in the great scheme of things.

The title was truncated (&quot;predators&quot; to &quot;pred&quot;).

What is this mass psychosis of feeling the urge to own a dog or cat anyway? And how it comes, that environmentalists don&#x27;t get loud on the harm on nature caused by domestic cats and dogs?

It&#x27;s a cat, so it can do no wrong. If the cat is pleased by killing wildlife, the wildlife has to die.

Kill all feral and free roaming invasive, domestic cat species. Domestic cats belong indoors and not outside.

Apparently cats can catch novel Coronavirus - there is a danger they may become natural reservoirs, in which case we may have to get rid of them.

If you find it concerning work on cat to human covid-19 transmission.<p>Governments seem to be ignoring this because politically it would be a nightmare.<p>If it transmits cat-cat(seems proven) and cat-human, killing all the cats would save lives, how many cats hang out at nursing homes?

Maybe I&#x27;ll say what a lot of people are already thinking but may not want to say out loud:<p><i>I don&#x27;t care</i><p>Until someone can show me strong evidence that cat related hunting of this wildlife has a short or even long term affect on humans (through biodiversity loss of keystone species for example) than I think that the utility gained from enjoying the company of the local feline hunters is worth it. Frankly, I don&#x27;t give a damn about pidgons or whatever else they&#x27;re hunting until it impacts me directly. Shun my egoism with your Christian inspired morality all you want but at heart the vast majority of people are egoists in denial anyway.<p>Maybe I got the parasite as a serial cat owner and that&#x27;s what&#x27;s motivating me to talk this way but there seems to be an opposite parasite going around since many here are <i>openly</i> calling for folks to murder domestic house cats who are allowed to roam outside.<p>Part of what I&#x27;m articulating is based on my fundemental belief in anthropocentrism which I&#x27;ve never understood to be a bad word. Humans have more value-to-life than wild animals. The animals humans care about (like pets) have more value-to-life than pidgons. The alternative to this view (animal and human value to life is comparable) is veganism and you see how often that view shunned by the public at large.<p>Admittedly, nature is pretty messed up and it&#x27;d nice if house cats would be better about not causing their prey to suffer on the way out - but nature doesn&#x27;t seem to care about morality so I&#x27;ll give cats a pass as &quot;not being ethical actors&quot; on this one...