MadmanWithaWhistle wrote:Please, please consider keeping your cat indoors unless you have a completely enclosed property and no interest in wildlife!
From your linked abstract: "Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality." This distinction is not insignificant: a well-fed kept cat does not have to hunt for its survival. More on that in a bit.
You'll notice that I did try - and I always have. For me, keeping a cat indoors is always the preferred mode, both for the cat's health and safety, and for the sake of any wildlife it might otherwise catch. Some cats do very well completely indoors, or can be fine going outdoors with a harness and lead, but others simply cannot. My last was one such, no matter how I tried. In the end I couldn't justify making him profoundly unhappy and neurotic just to spare rabbits, starlings, sparrows, robins, shrews and mice, which make up the overwhelming bulk of wild species where I live, and are not in the least endangered. Now, lest you think that means I adopt a blasé attitude about it, I do not. But in Lester's case his emotional well-being was clearly at stake, so keeping him indoors proved the less ethical of two choices. And I did not make the choice easily, because it meant that in letting him out into a busy urban environment, I put him in harm's way, moreso I believe than in the countryside. I worried about him every day. But when you keep a pet, it cannot always be all about you.
Of course I would rather that my cats not hunt, but not every cat let outdoors is going to be an habitual and wanton killer. My cat previous to Lester liked watching wild animals, but she couldn't be bothered to hunt; at most she would go after beetles and moths, and those were seldom. I know this because we always went out together, and she stayed within sight when not in close proximity, serenely inspecting the grounds. After Lester's initial and impressive display, he himself ramped it down in short order and concentrated mostly on squirrels - also unendangered, by the way - simply because they presented a challenge, and a challenge was something Lester could never resist, because he always had to beat the house. Easy things quickly bored him. Based on circumstantial evidence, he would have finally caught just one squirrel that I know of, and squirrels being fierce when cornered, it's no surprise that it beat Lester up but good: it bit a rodent-style square chunk out of his ear and clawed up his face, big-time. I fully expect the squirrel got away hardly scathed, because Lester had nothing else to show for it other than having his ass handed to him, and his embarrassment. Did that stop him? No - in fact, it tightened his resolve all the more, but the squirrels always had the upper hand: not only are they nearly impossible to catch, they're dangerous if you succeed. I mean, c'mon; there are far easier pickings if all you want is to kill something. So for him, it wasn't about the killing
per se, but about the challenge to his skills. That much would be obvious to anyone who was paying attention. But as I mentioned, most of Lester's interest was in socializing with humans, and with their pets as well. Although he was good at it, hunting was not his primary pursuit; a cat chasing merrily after joggers, socializing with bewildered dogs, and going gaga over babies has other fish to fry.
One thing I would point out is that the study you cite admits that it is making statistical estimates - always subject to interpretation, and I'm not going to bother challenging the figures - but I strongly dispute some of its conclusions as presented, especially the assertion that "predation is independent of whether cats are fed by humans." Now, maybe that's just another way of saying that it depends entirely on the cat, for each cat is different. But if that
is the intended meaning - and it could be - it is easy to see that the study's wording is ripe for misinterpretation, and one must wonder at some point whether that might not have been by design. So either way, it's too flawed for me to ignore. Anyway, the study's standard was based instead on time spent outdoors, which sounds reasonable enough, but here again the study continues to lump cats together as if they were all alike - admittedly this is inevitable in statistics, but that is also its Achilles' heel - and that, plus the scant regard for biome differences as well as the wordings used, makes me frankly very suspicious of plain, old-fashioned bias. Rain or shine, whatever the season, Lester spent an average of four hours per day outside - plenty of time for mayhem - but most of that time was occupied with visiting and playing with people, and I know this because not only did I see it, I also got phone calls almost daily letting me know where he was, or from new people asking if it was okay for Lester to be visiting them. Needless to say, the whole neighborhood got to know him very well indeed, and a cat can't do that if it spends a lot of time hunting. In sum: One size does not fit all.
I don't dispute the devastation caused by cats introduced to islands where the wildlife developed in isolation with no survival strategies to cope with the pressure, and those species are often rare and unique. Introducing cats to those environments has been an ecological disaster from the start, and it's a dirty shame people didn't think ahead. But in an environment such as mine it's an entirely different situation, and here, at least, outdoor cats are so few that their predations, such as they may be, have negligible impact: We're still blessed with an abundance of rabbits, starlings, sparrows, robins, shrews and mice, as well as squirrels. Of course one does not rejoice in the kills, but neither does one have cause to worry about the long-term impact of cats on my area's fauna populations. In another environment, the story may be very different. This is not to suggest that I would think my locale is immune to global ecological impacts; far from it. I am simply pointing out the local ecology as it stands in relation to cat predation. There is a place for broad statistics, and a place for the immediate realities of locale.