While North Americans rightfully fret about overwintering songbird habitats going up in smoke with the rainforests of Central and South America, many turn a blind eye to their own cats' activities.
The car rumbles up the driveway and lurches to a halt. Doors fly open and a brown blur drops to the ground as the humans pile out. In a flash the cat pounces upon "Inty," a five-year-old female chipmunk who was standing on her hind legs watching with interest. She's used to cats slinking up the driveway or stalking the woods, and doesn't realize they can erupt from automobiles. Canine teeth sink with deliberate, increasing pressure until the bones of Inty's neck snap. Satisfied, the cat drops her on the gravel and looks around. It's over in an instant. There's no time to save my wild friend. After a perfunctory glance at her crumpled, dying body, my visitors turn to exclaim; "Isn't it a great day?"
Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice about a "harmless, necessary cat." William blew his adjective with "harmless." The science today is irrefutable. Domestic cats roaming outdoors have become a major wildlife predator in Canada, the United States, England, Australia and other countries where they are not on the menu for humans.
Most cat owners refuse to recognize the morbid aspect of their pet's personality. That reality in itself is a lamentable reflection upon human nature. Stanley Temple, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Wisconsin, spent four years studying the rural forays of 30 radio-collared domestic cats. He estimates that cats kill 19 million songbirds and 140,000 game birds each year in Wisconsin. Several grassland-nesting species (like grasshopper sparrows and Le Conte's sparrows) have seriously declining populations. Western meadowlarks are also vulnerable to cats and declining at an annual rate of about eight per cent. Temple states: "Cat owners demonstrate a lot of denial about the hunting achievements of their cats. In fact, they seem to have a certain pride in their cat's prowess and believe it to be 'neat' that their kitty cats can kill wildlife. Yet, they are convinced that their cats are harmless."
There is a long tradition. Egyptians were the first to tame African tabby wildcats as pets some 3,500-5,000 years ago. Also used as hunting retrievers, these cats were elevated to a protected status because of their ability to control mice, rats and other pests in vast food storage areas. For this role, Egyptian cats were considered sacred, temples were built in their honour, and killing a cat could mean a death penalty.
Pets make folks feel good. It's proven. But at what cost to wildlife? The cat's role as mouser is legendary. A factory cat in Lancashire, England, is reputed to have caught 22,000 mice in its 23-year lifetime. House cats sailed to North America with early European settlers in voyages that also brought the Norway rat and house mouse. In a similar manner. cats have been unleashed upon native wildlife populations over much of the world. They have been particularly damaging when inflicted upon islands with wildlife inhabitants that evolved without a significant predator. The introduction of cats brought extinction for the Choiseul crested pigeon on the Solomon Islands in 1910. The Guadalupe storm petrel was wiped out of its island near San Diego in the 1890s by cats. The Stephen Island wren in New Zealand suffered a similar fate, while cats were deliberately introduced to St. Francis Island in Australia in the late 1880s to eliminate the potoroo, a small wallaby that reminded people of rats.
A Humane Society official has estimated that about five million house cats live in Canada. A similar number are found in Britain. The United States houses about 65.8 million cats, with 10 to 28 million additional homeless (or feral) felines. Each house cat in the USA consumes more beef than the average Central American human. The numbers of cats in rural and urban sites vary. Temple's study revealed that 78 per cent of rural residents in Wisconsin possessed more than four roaming cats. Some counties were crawling with 22 cats per square kilometre (57 cats per square mile). Other studies have found even higher urban densities: 132 cats/sq. km (344/sq. mi.) in Warsaw, Poland; and 500 cats/sq. km (1,295/sq. mi.) in Madison, Wis.
Researchers know that happy cats with full stomachs still kill wildlife. Regular feeding has no bearing on their hunting instinct. One well-fed cat in a Michigan study brought in 1,660 mammals and birds in an 18-month period. Temple's work, which found 82 per cent of the owners feeding their cats daily, comes in the wake of a 1987 study where researchers Peter Church and John Lawton chronicled the carnage created by 77 house cats in Bedfordshire, England. Church and Lawton used the results of an earlier study that determined that well-fed house cats in Illinois brought home about 50 per cent of their quarry to present as trophies to their owners. The 77 cat owners agreed to bag the booty for Church and Lawton. Sixty-four per cent of the prizes surrendered were wood mice, field mice, shrews, and less frequently rabbits, weasels, and bats. The balance (36 per cent) were birds-primarily sparrows, thrushes, robins and blackbirds. Applying the village results across the country, Church and Lawton estimated that Britain's five million cats annually kill some 70 million animals. Of these, about 20 million would be birds. I suspect that Canada, with a similar cat population, affords its felines more hunting opportunity.
The number of owners who let cats outside while maintaining bird feeders is astounding. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York State wrote in 1991 that cats were second only to sharp-shinned hawks as predators at bird feeders in the United States and Canada. Backyard bird feeders can quickly become death traps. Bird feeders of cat-free folks are targeted by Garfields as well. Using the feeder as bait, they startle and horrify occupants of the house when paws snake out of evergreens to maul and toy with winged visitors. Feeders should be designed and fitted into the landscape with cat-detection zones around them. But this is rarely done.
It should be abundantly clear to anyone with neurons still firing that Canada's house cats kill many millions of birds and small mammals each year, a death toll that is likely contributing to the decline of many vulnerable wildlife species. Church and Lawton's calculations point to feline responsibility for as much as half of all sparrow mortality in England. The sheer numbers of cats are overwhelming. "Kittens and puppies are born at the rate of more than 3,000 per hour in North America, which is about seven for every human born during the same hour," notes David Waltner-Toews, a veterinarian at the Ontario Veterninary College in Guelph, ON. Population control seems unlikely. Too many owners do not have female cats spayed and males castrated. Temple estimates that cats kill about 47 million rabbits across the United States each year-more than hunters take for food.
What is the effect of this feline consumption on other wild predators? In the natural world, prey abundance influences the number of predators. If well-fed domestic cats substantially reduce the numbers of wild animals available to native predators, populations of foxes, hawks, owls and other species decline.
Various forms of feline restraint have been attempted. A cat curfew was adopted in Sherbrooke, Australia, after the Shire Council realized that rare superb lyrebirds were being stalked in the nearby forest. Owners can be fined $100 for nighttime truant tabbies. This might solve the situation for roosting lyrebirds in Australia, but other wildlife species around the world are vulnerable day and night.
Placing a bell around the neck is generally useless. Birds and rabbits are unlikely to realize that a bell means a predator. Belled cats learn to stalk without ringing. Declawing doesn't save birds either-cats learn to bat down their prey. By far the best solution is confining the cat. That idea is rarely accepted by cat owners, who respond that they "have to let the cat out, or it will go crazy. The truth is that cats are highly adaptable and can be as happy in a one-room apartment as on a 1,000 acre ranch. Outdoor cats transmit tapeworms, fleas, cat-scratch fever and toxoplasmosis to people. They get flattened by cars, and recycled by coyotes, bobcats and owls.
Indoor cats live longer, don't catch the tapeworms and other parasites, while avoiding exposure to feline leukemia, rabies and other diseases. They learn to be wildlife watchers instead of killers.
While North Americans rightfully fret about overwintering songbird habitats going up in smoke with the rainforests of Central and South America, many turn a blind eye to their own cats' activities when these birds migrate here for a vulnerable breeding season. Young-of-the-season are frequently naive and particularly susceptible to predation by domestic cats. The Wisconsin researchers found that 94 per cent of cat owners wanted songbirds around, 83 per cent wanted game birds, but only 43 per cent were willing to reduce their cat numbers for wildlife. Helga Fritzche, a German pet book writer, suggests it would be more appropriate to categorize cat owners as "co-cats." Owners who are also anti-hunting, animal rights activists are cat-bloodied hypocrites.
Several Atlantic communities have attempted to introduce new legislation in recent years to deal with overpopulations of cats and their predatory habits. This really brings the "co-cats" out. The lack of rationality which humans display about this relatively simple issue of their pet's outside hunting activities offers insight as to why global efforts aimed to address the major problems of our civilization continue to be neither adequate nor sensible.