Hi I was reading the paper the other day and came across this article about cats, and it was really mean. i will post it here:
A CATASTROPHE FOR WILDLIFE
It's late spring and another avian massacre is under way. the victims are birds - songbirds, mostly - and the culprits are household pets. the sight of tiny featherd corpses has been known to pit neighbour against neinour. Does it have to be this way?
Domestic cats on the prowl outdoors wreak havoc each year on North American wildlife, according to data recently compiled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There are an estimated 75 million house cats in the United States and about seven million in Canada. Of that total of about 82 million, two-thirds are allowed outdoors at least part of the time, Fish and Wildlife Service data shows. The hunting activities of these creatures result in the deaths of more than 100 million songbirds and game birds each year in the United States. Canadian cats probably add another 10 million to that annual toll.
These figures may be low. A 1987 study by Peter Churcher and John Lawton of Bedfordshire, England, showed that five million housecats killed about 20 million wild birds a year. Then there's a four-year study headed by Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin, involving radio-tagged house cats. It found that they were killing about 19 million Wisconsin birds a year. Urban and rural cats were equally destructive, the study found.
And this is not even counting the destruction wreaked by wide-ranging feral cats. Some estimates of North American avian losses because of cats say the total could top three billion little bodies annually. These losses are huge. And they are largely avoidable. Stephanie Shain of the Humane Society of the United States says it's a myth that cats must go outside to find feline happiness. Cats crave wide-open spaces only if they have grown up having frequent outdoor jaunts. Otherwise, they're happy to stay inside.
Before you let your cat skip out the front door, consider this: about 30 percent of their diet consists of wild birds. And well-fed house cats kill birds just as vigorously as do hungry cats. That's because hunting bird is, for cats, a form of amusement. Indeed, studies confirm that hunting for food and hunting for fun are controlled by separate parts of the cat's brain.
Yet, according to a recent National Wildlife magazine report, any cat owners are in denial about the impact their their pets have on local birds. Or on local humans, for that matter. Because neighbours have become fed up with having someone else's house cat killing birds in their gardens, several several Australian municipalities have imposed a cat curefw, with large fines for violation.
Some cat owners insist that letting their pets go outdoors helps rid gardens of mice. Several studies confirm that if this is the case, it is at the expense of local hawks and owls that would otherwise feed heavily on those rodents. Hawk nesting is dramatically reduced in areas where house cats feed extensively on mice.
And lest you think that belling your pet will help matters, putting a bell on a cat's collar does not protect birds from cat attack. That's because birds do not instinctively associate the sound of a bell with impending doom. Housecats are not native to North America. Native birds do not therefore have instinctive strategies to avoid being caught by cats. Birds are especially vulnerable at feeders and baths (although one can always erect chicken wire around the periphery of such sites to keep cats awy).
Can legislation help the situation? Not really. While all native birds are protected by federal, provincial or state laws in North America, there are no specific provisions prohibiting cats from killing birds. Still, the annual loss of more than 100 million songbirds, which are protected by the Migratory Birds Convention signed in 1918 by Canada and the United States, raises troubling questions.
According to Gary Brown, compliance specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, it is impossible to lay charges against a cat for killing a protected bird. As for charging the cat's owner, that's complicated. The cat owner can always argue that the household cat was allowed out to kill mice, not birds. And it's unclear that a landowner has any right to destroy someone else's cat for trespassing on his land and killing birds.
True, many jurisdictions have laws that allow landowners to destroy animals in defence of livestock and poultry--it's a case of protecting private property. But wild birds are not private property. Since time immemorial, they have been deemed to belong to no person, nor to any government. The status of wildlife ownership in Canada derives from Roman law. Wild animals are ownerless. They become property only after they are dead, in which case they belong to the owner of the land on which they happened to die. that situation has changed little since the time of Emperor Justinian, who lived around 550 A.D. So let's not look to the law to do much to help rid a landowner of a neighbour's bird-killing cat.
Although the magnitude of bird mortality because of cats is enormous, cat control is not a focus of bird conservation agencies. Controlling cats is as hard as, well, herding cats. Since ancient Egyptian times, cats having had a special place in human hearts, and government are loath to embark on cat control. Cat registration is not mandatory in most of Canada, and is not provincially required. Even so, a few municipalities have recently opted to register cats, not as a matter of bird protection, but to cut cat damage to gardens.
It's time we gave more thought to what cats do to wildlife. Domestic cats are the principle predators of wild birds in much of North America, and the chief threat to some bird populations, especially grassland birds. Domestic cats have been implicated in the population declines of several endangered species, including the piping plover, least tern and burrowing owl. But it's not too late to defend other bird populations. Let's ask pet owners to broaden the scope of their affection for animals, and consider how to keep the blood off their little darlings' claws.
Globe and Mail Article, June 14, 2003
by Robert Alison, a consultant biologist, is a former senior biologist for the
ONtario Ministry of Natural Resources.
I think this guy is a bird lover.
A CATASTROPHE FOR WILDLIFE
It's late spring and another avian massacre is under way. the victims are birds - songbirds, mostly - and the culprits are household pets. the sight of tiny featherd corpses has been known to pit neighbour against neinour. Does it have to be this way?
Domestic cats on the prowl outdoors wreak havoc each year on North American wildlife, according to data recently compiled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There are an estimated 75 million house cats in the United States and about seven million in Canada. Of that total of about 82 million, two-thirds are allowed outdoors at least part of the time, Fish and Wildlife Service data shows. The hunting activities of these creatures result in the deaths of more than 100 million songbirds and game birds each year in the United States. Canadian cats probably add another 10 million to that annual toll.
These figures may be low. A 1987 study by Peter Churcher and John Lawton of Bedfordshire, England, showed that five million housecats killed about 20 million wild birds a year. Then there's a four-year study headed by Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin, involving radio-tagged house cats. It found that they were killing about 19 million Wisconsin birds a year. Urban and rural cats were equally destructive, the study found.
And this is not even counting the destruction wreaked by wide-ranging feral cats. Some estimates of North American avian losses because of cats say the total could top three billion little bodies annually. These losses are huge. And they are largely avoidable. Stephanie Shain of the Humane Society of the United States says it's a myth that cats must go outside to find feline happiness. Cats crave wide-open spaces only if they have grown up having frequent outdoor jaunts. Otherwise, they're happy to stay inside.
Before you let your cat skip out the front door, consider this: about 30 percent of their diet consists of wild birds. And well-fed house cats kill birds just as vigorously as do hungry cats. That's because hunting bird is, for cats, a form of amusement. Indeed, studies confirm that hunting for food and hunting for fun are controlled by separate parts of the cat's brain.
Yet, according to a recent National Wildlife magazine report, any cat owners are in denial about the impact their their pets have on local birds. Or on local humans, for that matter. Because neighbours have become fed up with having someone else's house cat killing birds in their gardens, several several Australian municipalities have imposed a cat curefw, with large fines for violation.
Some cat owners insist that letting their pets go outdoors helps rid gardens of mice. Several studies confirm that if this is the case, it is at the expense of local hawks and owls that would otherwise feed heavily on those rodents. Hawk nesting is dramatically reduced in areas where house cats feed extensively on mice.
And lest you think that belling your pet will help matters, putting a bell on a cat's collar does not protect birds from cat attack. That's because birds do not instinctively associate the sound of a bell with impending doom. Housecats are not native to North America. Native birds do not therefore have instinctive strategies to avoid being caught by cats. Birds are especially vulnerable at feeders and baths (although one can always erect chicken wire around the periphery of such sites to keep cats awy).
Can legislation help the situation? Not really. While all native birds are protected by federal, provincial or state laws in North America, there are no specific provisions prohibiting cats from killing birds. Still, the annual loss of more than 100 million songbirds, which are protected by the Migratory Birds Convention signed in 1918 by Canada and the United States, raises troubling questions.
According to Gary Brown, compliance specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, it is impossible to lay charges against a cat for killing a protected bird. As for charging the cat's owner, that's complicated. The cat owner can always argue that the household cat was allowed out to kill mice, not birds. And it's unclear that a landowner has any right to destroy someone else's cat for trespassing on his land and killing birds.
True, many jurisdictions have laws that allow landowners to destroy animals in defence of livestock and poultry--it's a case of protecting private property. But wild birds are not private property. Since time immemorial, they have been deemed to belong to no person, nor to any government. The status of wildlife ownership in Canada derives from Roman law. Wild animals are ownerless. They become property only after they are dead, in which case they belong to the owner of the land on which they happened to die. that situation has changed little since the time of Emperor Justinian, who lived around 550 A.D. So let's not look to the law to do much to help rid a landowner of a neighbour's bird-killing cat.
Although the magnitude of bird mortality because of cats is enormous, cat control is not a focus of bird conservation agencies. Controlling cats is as hard as, well, herding cats. Since ancient Egyptian times, cats having had a special place in human hearts, and government are loath to embark on cat control. Cat registration is not mandatory in most of Canada, and is not provincially required. Even so, a few municipalities have recently opted to register cats, not as a matter of bird protection, but to cut cat damage to gardens.
It's time we gave more thought to what cats do to wildlife. Domestic cats are the principle predators of wild birds in much of North America, and the chief threat to some bird populations, especially grassland birds. Domestic cats have been implicated in the population declines of several endangered species, including the piping plover, least tern and burrowing owl. But it's not too late to defend other bird populations. Let's ask pet owners to broaden the scope of their affection for animals, and consider how to keep the blood off their little darlings' claws.
Globe and Mail Article, June 14, 2003
by Robert Alison, a consultant biologist, is a former senior biologist for the
ONtario Ministry of Natural Resources.
I think this guy is a bird lover.
