Outdoor cats threat to other animals, themselves

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Teresa Chagrin / People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Do you know where your cats are? If they’re lounging on their cat tree, batting a toy around the living room or curled up on your lap, great! If they’re wandering outside, please find them and bring them inside — before someone gets killed.

That isn’t an exaggeration. A recent study published in the journal Nature Communications found that cats allowed to roam outdoors eat members of more than 2,000 wildlife species, of which nearly 350 are vulnerable or endangered. And the number of species cats kill may be even higher because, as the study notes, cats don’t always consume their victims. Previous research has linked free-roaming cats to the extinction of at least 60 species globally.

Even if humans feed cats, these animals instinctively maim and kill birds, amphibians, small mammals and members of other species. Billions of terrified individuals endure violent deaths inflicted by cats’ teeth and claws every year. And if you think your cat kills “only” mice (who feel pain and fear just as keenly as any other animal does), think again. Cats are by far the most significant cause of human-related bird deaths. Vulnerable wildlife stands no chance against these non-native and highly efficient predators.

Letting cats roam outside threatens more than wildlife; it typically cuts their own lives tragically short, often by a decade or more. Most cats survive only two to five years outdoors, compared to 12 to 15 years for cats who live indoors. Every year, countless cats who are allowed outdoors unsupervised or dumped on the streets in trap-neuter-(re)abandon programs are killed by vehicles, poison, contagious diseases, weather extremes, predators or cruel humans.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-outdoor-cats-threat-to-other-animals-themselves/

[samnsara]

1. Grrr i live in a forested canyon with about 7 other homes and some weekend cabins

..and years ago someone had some cats and now their descendants roam the hills and twice those little shits have killed full sized adult wild turkeys and left a mountain of feathers and a bloody carcass just right on the other side of my fence. Boy this sure excited my Goldens who barked like crazy trying to get me to give them all the blood left overs. I hollered and yelled at the cats and banged pot and pans. I feel awful as I LOVE cats and I dont want to scare them...but they cant prey on the wild life.

The lady across the canyon claims them and feeds them but none are ever spayed or neutered.

The wild cat population is thinning out some and I'm afraid the young ones are getting eaten by predators

[MontanaMama]

2. Domestic cats are hell on birds.

They have decimated wild bird numbers in some areas and, they are responsible the death of 2.4 billion birds annually in the US alone. They are the #1 human caused threat to wild birds. Imagine how many more wild birds we would have if people kept their cats inside?

https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/#:~:text=Predation%20by%20domestic%20cats%20is,of%20millions%20of%20outdoor%20cats.

On another note, I’m in Hawaii at the moment escaping the cold in Montana, and for a state that only has one native mammal (the hoary bat) cats roaming wild are terrible for bird populations. Two nights ago, while taking photos of a sunset near the lava fields, I counted 22 cats in my periphery in that 10 minute period.

[demigoddess]

3. yes, but years ago, our cat at the time I saw him inches away from a bird.

He just watched the bird hop around and never touched it. But he would beat up dogs on a regular basis.

[Igel]

4. That's how species spread works.

English sparrows are a bane. And mourning doves?

Wild horses are invasive.

Rats ... Don't get me started.

And brown snakes on Guam. Or rabbits in Australia. (Or cane toads.)

Goats on Catalina. I think I heard they managed to exterminate them.

At some point it has to be recognized that a species has spread. Maybe we did it (cats, snakes, rats, horses, sparrows, and mourning doves). Sometimes we didn't (a species or two of mosquitos in NE Africa). Things happen.

Take kudzu. It was spread with the best intentions--but those intentions paved a path to a particular environmental hell.

But once spread, the question has to be as to how conservative we want to be. Must things be kept in a kind of stasis, unchanging for all times, because of some idyllic past? Didn't things change in the past--or is human-mediated change tainted because the change was caused by foul humans?

I mean, take grackles. They're a native species. But they've spread quite a bit in the last 50 years--the wiki article doesn't mention this. They are suited to urban and suburban environments where other native species are less suited, so their range has spread (hopping mostly from urban island to urban island) and their percentage of the avian population's increased where they originated. How do you fix that? But they're pushing species to endangered species status.