Posted on 07/01/2015 8:36:24 AM PDT by Rio
Your cat is a killer. And we're not just talking about the hit to your soul when Fluffy stares right past you despite your sweetest cooing.
Cats, no matter how adorable, are predators. They stalk, they pounce -- and then they snap the neck of whatever little flying or skittering thing they've just caught.
Most of us view this as a good thing. We're all better off with fewer rodents around, and if some pretty little birds get caught up in the killing spree, we can live with that.
Biologists, it seems, aren't so sure. Domestic cats aren't a natural part of most wildlife ecosystems: that is, they're an invasive species, brought in by their human companions/enablers. Though researchers can't nail down solid data, they fear cats are throwing your neighborhood's natural wildlife biodiversity out of whack, damaging the long-term prospects of actual wild predators that don't have the option of chowing down on a can of Friskies at the end of a hard day.
This might sound familiar to you. Back in January 2013, the New York Times published a story called "That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think" that topped its most-shared list for ages.
The upshot of that story: "scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States -- both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it -- kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat."
It concluded that "the domestic cat (is) one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation."
The world read that sentence and went, "Whew! The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (whatever that is), the Fish and Wildlife Service and the New York Times have all gone nuts."
The world's opinion hasn't changed in the past two years.
A new study published in Ecology and Evolution found that "owners fail to perceive the ecological footprint of their cat, and have shown that their opinions on the general problem are not influenced by the predatory behavior of their cat."
In short, people who own cats and let them go outside do not believe their cute furball could possibly be damaging the ecosystem. (They do have a little better understanding of how the outdoors can damage their cat, giving it diseases and subjecting it to bigger, meaner animals and fast-moving automobiles.)
The Ecology and Evolution study tracked both cat-owner attitudes and 86 free-roaming cats themselves in two British towns. The pet owners were generally opposed to keeping their outside cats in the house, either entirely or at nighttime when cats are widely (and erroneously) believed to do most of their killing.
The study found that cats kill "up to three times more prey than they bring back (to the home), either because they consume or abandon their kills at the capture site." How many kills are typically racked up every week varies widely from cat to cat, but suffice it to say, these domesticated pets are prolific hunters.
The researchers determined that cat owners were not "influenced by ecological information" that documented the impact of their pet on the wider world.
"The opposing roles of cats, as both human companions and wildlife predators, are likely to drive divergent interests between cat owners and conservationists and may develop into a socially intractable problem should mitigation strategies be required," the study concluded. It mentioned the possibility -- perish the thought! -- of "Cat Exclusion Zones" to help distressed ecosystems right themselves.
The most unsurprising finding in the study: that the cat owners weren't clear about who was in charge. Wrote one human participant: "My cat chooses for herself whether to stay in or go out."
And Mommie if you were about 50 pounds lighter I’d kill you in my sleep!
We have a bird dog too. Brody is a imperial Rottweiler. He was my son’s bird dog when hunting ducks and geese in Idaho. Brody has now retired from being a hunting dog and he now lives with us in Northern Nevada. But he is still a hunting dog. He regularly kills pigeons, doves, various songbirds, rabbits, and mice.
I do concede to your point... but that would make it..”What came first, the warming or the p....? “
Good job boys!
Ignore the ill informed who want to be the ones to pick nature’s winners and losers.
Oh come on...most cats never leave the inside of the home.
We have four cats, and they do not go outside.
For one thing, we do have a lot of birds in our yard and up in the trees. They’re pretty, and they fly around a lot.
But the main reason we don’t let the cats out is that there are very large predatory birds, hawks, and most important,
the eagles from Guilford Lake come here and roost in our very tall trees.
They would make a quick snack of any one of our cats, so the cats are not allowed outside. At all. Ever.
DANG!
My cats are indoors. They just pounce on each other.
My friend with the Jack Russel has a Rottweiler too.
What a coincedence, and yes he was telling me it was a bird catcher.
My dog is a black lab border collie mix dark and shaggie smelly and all about love and the pack (her family).
She won’t even chase a ball or pick one up because, balls are not food, but she is great to walk without a leash.
She’s old and getting hard to walk now. Take meds.
“Cat Exclusion Zones”
except for the “Gay” Mooselim cat!!
Wonderful Cartoon!!! Thank you.
That looks like my Janus pronounced Yannus, she was born indoors, and spent the first year indoor. She was then moved to a farm. She is in hunter heaven. She loves mice, and grasshoppers. She’ll eat the mice after we pull them out of the trap.
Evidently moles don’t taste good. She and all the other farm kitties will kill the moles but they will not eat them.
I only steal the best.
There have been many times where her on deck patrol have allowed her to catch voles wandering around the base of the deck as well as several baby bunnies. I even observed her leap thru the deck railing to nab a goldfinch that had landed on one of my black eyed susan seed pods..........
Unfortunately she immediately brings them into the house and drops them on floor....
OMG, I didn't think anyone would believe me. I'm sitting on my friend's deck enjoying a beer when his Rottie - big, goofy, loving, slobbering dawg - is sitting in the middle of the yard looking around. "Watch this," my friend sez. Took a robin right out of the air. "He goes after bees too," he sez...
I love my two cats...and cats in general...and I’ll support them all no matter what they kill. That’s what God put them on the earth to do.
As for cats, I have a Manx point siamese female that was declawed before I got her. She is an indoor cat and has a whole toybox full of “critters” to catch. She wanders down the hallway carrying a critter while yowling “look at me!” Then she drops it at our feet and gets some praise petting.
Now the other one who does go in and out all day is a lanky slinky lean orange tabby with a long, long, tail now...he should be a good hunter but...he’s not very smart... he tries and misses a lot!
I think he is “special”.
The West Nile disease did a job on them. Crows,blue jays, rain crows (cuckoos), night hawks, whippoorwills and others practically disappeared. The crows & jays seem to be making a little bit of a comeback here in east central Illinois. I suspect there are a lot fewer cats since most farm homesteads no longer exist. Each probably had about a dozen or so.
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