If it saves a good number of birds that are otherwise predated by outside cats, then it's just brilliant!

Let me know when humans stop eating birds. Dumb-dumbs is another word for hypocrites, some might say. It's the trifecta here.

Shame on murdery friends you say?

LOL!

I do eat eggs that my boss's daughter raises.

I have chickens who lay wonderful eggs, which I do eat.

I also have a wonderful pair of geese and a wee tribe of ducks.

My cats do not hunt. Only had one (way back in my Florida days) who hunted. He killed snakes and rodents. He always brought me his kill, and he never ever brought birds. RIP Casper - what a treasure of a cat he was.

I felt sorry for the snakes, but there ya go.

Don't let them roam free. They disturb birds and gardens and plants, they get in fights, get infections, get hit by cars, taken by good people and bad people. Cats do not need a lot of stimulation to be happy. They live happy, longer, and healthier lives indoors.

(If you leash your cat with you while you're outdoors, say working in the garden or painting the porch, be sure the cat can't jump up/over a fence or railing, because they can hang themselves that way.)

it's been 5 years since my boy, manny, was allowed free range. he loooooved being outdoors, but the last time he was out, he got sick, and my other cat followed suit, to the tune of $900 in vet bills. that was it for me, strictly indoors.

manny has escaped a couple of times, but i was hot on his trail and caught him shortly. he takes any chance to go out, but i'm committed to keeping my cats healthy, so in they stay. my female cat has no interest in the outdoors - she's content to watch the birds from the window.

"...be sure the cat can't jump up/over a fence or railing, because they can hang themselves that way."

Not if you have them leashed on a harness, which you most certainly should. Leashing a cat to a collar is cruel and unusual punishment, even if it survives the experience.

This is cute.

Small creatures are killed and eaten by bigger creatures, which are killed and eaten by even bigger creatures. When you kill off the natural predators, you soon wind up with a disastrous over abundance of the prey which they were eating. Part of the reason that coyotes have become such a nuisance is that we have eliminated the wolves and big cats which used to kill and eat them.

I have not noticed any drastic shortage of birds. If we were not losing those 3.7 billion birds, they would be producing offspring and we would have a net gain of something like 7 billion birds the second year, 14 billion the third year, 28 billion in year four... We would be up to our knees in bird poop by 2025.

in the last 50 years.

But nice try.

But nice try.

except when they are being fucking lazy LOL

They are an imported species, in the same way that foxes are an imported species in Australia, or tree snakes are an imported species in Guam. And in Australia and Guam, those imported predators are slaughtering native populations.

I have. The number, and diversity, of the birds I see today is far from what it was only 20 years ago, when I first started birdwatching as a teen. Native songbird populations are down, with other invasive species such as starlings filling the gaps.

And researchers have noted it as well:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130621-threats-against-birds-cats-wind-turbines-climate-change-habitat-loss-science-united-states/



Clearly, other factors, such as habitat loss from expanded monocrop farming and herbicide applications, plays a large role. However, removing billions of birds per year to unnatural predation doesn't in any way improve the situation.

But don't blame the cats. They are just being cats. They are doing what nature designed them to do. It should not deserve a death sentence.

Keep them indoors, and spay and neuter them.

no they aren't.

And before cats there were the bobcats & foxes who preyed on the birds but are now gone due to suburban sprawl.

The problem isn't cats. It's 100% human.

"I will rise to your challenge, human-sama."

before they trick you, lol. But you said it much better!

That cat even looks pissed!

for a smaller part of the problem.

Might as well be a self-righteous hypocrite while one is out saving the world, eh?

How do you know he's not also advocating for human population control via b.c.?

addressing the idea for control brought forward by the author of the piece, who is suggesting a very pretty way to strangle unattended cats (those elastic bands will do just that). But, again, just a distraction.

Also, because we choose to indiscriminately let cats breed and pay a huge industry of "shelters" and "rescues" to pretend to address the problem while they profit from it, I think any article that doesn't start with how humans have shaped the problem for their own ease and greed is disingenuous and likely not worth considering.

Well said. Thanks.

Btw, I adore and loves cats and kittens and everyone of my gang of 4 were neutered indoors cats. Too bad we can't do that for many humans.

Huge industry of shelters???????????????????

As someone very involved in animal rescue, not one single group is making a profit.

people, and policy, are only intended for those who want to see measured results and progress, not feel-good talk.

Have you noticed that (some) people here get offended when they hear the wealthy tell us that if people are “poor”, it is their own fault? The wealthy ignore the fact that their behavior and denial of resources leads to and exacerbates the problem. They pocket those opportunities in many ways, and THAT has more to do with keeping poverty alive than ANYTHING the people do.

The pet shelter\rescue industry is largely the same. Instead of putting the resources into making sure the pet owners can get some respect, can take care of their family member, their friend, there is a whole industry dedicated to vacuuming the pets up and redistributing them. To justify that, they call the owners “irresponsible”.

No different from the rich and their paternalistic and incorrect view of those with little money.

I started helping decades ago, but then started reading up on what effects the industry was having. Up until about 25-30 years ago there was measured progress, but then they plateaued, and instead of doing the things that need to be done to resolve it, the resources are diverted to municipal jobs, shelter org salaries, and nonprofit salaries for orgs that don't even run a shelter.

There are places where the work has actually changed things. In Montana, a nonprofit “The Montana Spay/Neuter Task Force” got together with pet owners and arranged for cooperative spay/neuter “events”.

http://www.montanaspayneutertaskforce.org/statistically-speaking/

(Puppy huggers try this and most often turn it into free s/n in a shopping center, which rips the heart out of the model, disrespects the people, etc. The philosophy behind this is working with people because you respect them enough to believe in them. That is extraordinarily hard for most people. Especially people who think that last sentence doesn't describe them.

Along the way I found a town, where animal control meant they were taken to the woods and shot. I started a non-profit, raised the funds, we hired two vets, did 144 s/n surgeries in one weekend. They did not take an animal to the wood for over a year - said that had not happened in their recent memory, and attributed that to their event. And not one animal needed to go to a shelter.

There are ways, and it can be done.

This guy: http://blogs.bestfriends.org/index.php/2011/04/01/new-hampshire-a-leading-light-for-no-kill/
figured out how to reduce their intake to near zero by providing s/n at no cost. But instead of continuing the investment, the state now seems to prefer to pay for employees and watch the problem grow, as in most cities. Much more profitable, they think. Same people argue that single-payer is cheaper, but seem brain-dead in the economics of pet ownetship.

In Calgary the director, Bill Bruce, thinks that an animal getting into their facility is a failure on someone's part, and works to keep that from happening. http://shelterreform.org/blog1/2012/03/04/the-calgary-no-kill-model/
http://www.straypetadvocacy.org/sterilization.html

Is everyone a bad person? Of course not. It's just that if they want to keep fooling themselves, they should stay away from me, because I quit lying to myself a long time ago.

If they aren't ending pet overpopulation they are profiting from enabling it. Whether it be a job, some profit, stroking and massaging their ego.

I agree with one of the above - we will never adopt our way out of this.

Where I live, I see more and more woodlands, buffer strips, and hedgerows ripped out every day, so that farmers can squeeze a few more dollars out of their acreage. The "environmentalist farmer" is dead; today it's all corporations and factory farmers plowing massive land holdings.

GPS-guided tractors allow farming within a foot of the property line, leaving no room for habitat. GM crops and herbicides allow farmers to eliminate every weed in the field, leaving a desert of corn and soy.

Recently, our governor suggested it might be a good idea to legislate leaving 50-foot buffer strips alongside streams, lakes and rivers to prevent erosion. The farmers all cried and screamed about it, even though it's FUCKING COMMON SENSE.

These days, I'm almost relieved when I see farmland converted into suburban housing developments. At least there will be some trees, some shrubs, a little more habitat than before.

Now it seems we have forgotten that you can't just refrain from eating your seed corn and expect to survive. You also have to actively invest in it to grow new stuff, or you wither away just as surely.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-really-know-that-cats-kill-by-the-billions-not-so-fast

Do We Really Know That Cats Kill By The Billions? Not So Fast

- snip -

And yet there are serious reasons to suspect the reliability of the new, extreme cat-killer statistics.

The study at issue is a meta-analysis, an overarching review that aggregates data from previously published sources. The accuracy of meta-studies in health and medicine raises some concern, and it's easy to see why: for a meta-analysis to be solid, wise choices must be made among the available sources of information, and results that may vary wildly must be weighed fairly.

In the Nature Communications study, authors Scott R. Loss, Tom Will, and Peter P. Marra needed to incorporate into their model the number of "un-owned cats" (such as stray, feral, and barn cats) in the U.S. As they note in an appendix to the article, "no empirically driven estimate of un-owned cat abundance exists for the contiguous U.S." Estimates that are available range from 20-120 million, with 60-100 million being the most commonly cited. In response to this huge uncertainty in the numbers, they performed mathematical calculations using what they feel to be a conservative figure (specifically, they "defined a uniform distribution with minimum and maximum of 30 and 80 million, respectively.&quot

At this juncture, the authors note that local analyses of cat numbers are "often conducted in areas with above average density." That is an obvious problem, yet when they estimated the proportion of owned cats with access to the outdoors (and thus to hunting), of eight sources of information, "three [were] based on nationwide pet-owner surveys and five based on research in individual study areas." Are the local studies representative of the national situation? For that matter, are the different owner surveys administered in a consistent enough manner to allow them to be aggregated?

Of course, the authors make statistical perturbations designed to increase the reliability of their conclusions, but it seems to me there's an unsettling degree of uncertainty in the study's key numbers.

It seems this way to others also.

Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, had this to say in response to the study: "It's virtually impossible to determine how many cats live outside, or how many spend some portion of the day outside. Loss, Will, and Marra have thrown out a provocative number for cat predation totals, and their piece has been published in a highly credible publication, but they admit the study has many deficiencies. We don't quarrel with the conclusion that the impact is big, but the numbers are informed guesswork."

If even animal advocates admit "the impact is big," why do the specific numbers matter so much? Because when people start thinking of cats primarily as murderers, it then becomes the cats' lives that may be seriously endangered. Of concern are not only extremists like the man in New Zealand who recently suggested a ban on pet cats; cat advocate organization Alley Cat Allies says that the study is so "biased" that it amounts to an invitation to "ramp up the mass killings of outdoor cats."

MORE

I've had cats all my life. Only one was a hunter, and he used to kill snakes and rodents.

Never did he bring me a bird.

My other cats simply have spent their lives lolling in the sunshine and sitting on whatever book I'm trying to read.

You would literallly walkikng on bird carcases and feathers and blood on every sidewalk and alley LOL...

I think cats should be indoors and assholes shouldn't abandon their pets, so that would eliminate the problem...unfortunately, that won't happen since there will always be assholes. The people who quote this study seem mainly to be groups like the Audubon Society, assholes if there ever were, who would be thrilled if every cat in the world were killed.

A cat never shat on my car, as Dr. Seuss might put it.

He needs a floppy hat and a lute, though. "Patches! More wine, more mirth, and bring me my hossenfeffer!"

I have now discovered that if you want to find pictures of the most miserable-looking cats on the internet, search for "jester kitty gif"



(jolly? yeah, right)

and they are certainly plotting revenge.

Last edited Fri Mar 27, 2015, 11:25 AM - Edit history (1)

The day would be spent finding a way to rip it right the heck off.

Ask me someday about the time Bella wedged her jaw open trying to get a bell collar off her neck.

gawd-awful mewling, whining noises. I found him under the couch with his lower jaw stuck in his collar. Dipshit.

My fault for not snugging it down enough, actually, but if he hadn't been such a little butthead he could have left well enough alone. Nowadays I'm not even sure he notices that he even has a collar.