(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡 ┻━┻

Save a life, become vegan!

 

Agree 10, 000%. I love cats, but cats destroy wildlife. Cats kill millions and millions (and millions) of songbirds a year.

And with the spread of coyotes, your beloved pet becomes an easy meal if you have coyotes in your neighborhood. So protect your native songbirds, protect your cat.

 

But it's OK for birds to slaughter worms by the trillion, right?

 

If that is sarcasm, well played. If not....I can't imagine any amount of explanation would influence your, ahem, logic.

Over a billion birds a year are killed by cats in the continental U.S. alone. Many of these are species already in decline as a result of numerous other anthropogenic factors.

 

@Michael Beverage
This is the first I've heard of cats killing birds being any kind of real threat to the avian community. I don't doubt you, because I have literally no knowledge in that area. I'd look into it right now, but I just checked out that "why do birds toy with their prey" thing last page, plus I'm anxious to get back to my Batman game. I'll probably look into it later.

#wormlivesmatter

 

We have this same discussion going in two of our neighborhood newsletters. I believe that our world has become a very edgy place for any kind of life and I have no easy answer that would stand up to any kind of real world logic, so I would suggest that everybody take a moment and think about Warner Brothers Cartoons. Air heads with guns, bunnies in drag, coyotes with big wooden mallets, really, really fast birds and a cat with a speech impediment; a balanced world of interdependence that exists only in two dimensions and in our imaginations. TF, where was I going with this? Ah, never mind.

 

@poysntixels
That basically sounds like every story my grandpa has ever told.

 

Fair enough. But just keep in mind, worms kill birds sometimes too.

http://insider.si.edu/2012/02/earth...ds-in-northern-midwest-forests-study-reveals/

I do like that hashtag you came up with.

 

Odibex, I like your grandpa already.

 

Cats are a big problem here in Australia. One study says that cats are preying on 75 million native animals a day.

 

That's interesting. Biodiversity is such a precarious thing. Honestly, though, I thought an "Ovenbird' was something Butterball sold around Thanksgiving time.

I'm definitely seeing some some info about cats killing birds in big numbers, but there's also a few pieces saying the studies that indicate that aren't accurate and the whole things overblown. The article below is also referenced in an NPR piece that follows roughly the same angle:

http://www.alleycat.org/page.aspx?pid=945

Also, some non-'cat advocate' sites are saying roughly the same thing. The following are excerpts from a piece by the The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which strictly speaking, is talking about the issue in a UK-based context, but probably still has some relevance.

"Despite the large numbers of birds killed, there is no scientific evidence that predation by cats in gardens is having any impact on bird populations UK-wide. This may be surprising, but many millions of birds die naturally every year, mainly through starvation, disease, or other forms of predation. There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds."

"It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season, so cats are unlikely to have a major impact on populations. If their predation was additional to these other causes of mortality, this might have a serious impact on bird populations."

So, just to clarify, I don't really have a horse in this race, but just from my initial survey, this seems like a less than a cut and dried issue,

 

Unfortunately baby birds fall under "weak and sickly." It sucks seeing a dead nestling with a broken neck in your yard.

 

Yeah, I can understand that, but does the fact that they're in the yard suggest they fell out of the nest or something?

Maybe not...

 

I would agree it's not a cut and dried issue in terms of the precise number....extrapolating from small studies can lead to erroneous results. But even if you take a conservative number for the continental U.S...say a "measly" 100 million....it's preposterous to simply allow a non native species to have that kind of impact on wildlife that is already in steep decline.

The house cats could theoretically be controlled more or less if owners would be responsible, but feral cats are like any other smart invasive species (wild hogs, etc.), they are hard to capture and reproduce fairly quickly.

I know you don't have a strong feeling on this either way, but others who want to defend cats' rights (there are a lot of them out there) are minimizing the right for many wildlife species to exist at all. Cats are obviously not the only factor driving their decline, but another stressor in the panoply of causes.

Sorry to rant...I'm a biologist and I feel like the loss of biodiversity trumps most, if not all, of our mainstream political issues these days.

#wormlivesmatter

 

Cats play a large role in culling the number of birds around the world, but habitat loss is also a very important factor. Specifically development into breeding areas. I worked for the Department of Environmental Conservation of NY State last semester doing research and site observations on raptors and waterfowl. One species of concern (which obviously cats would not factor into) was the Short Eared Owl which used to be all over this region. I found only 4, looking twice a week traveling all over Western NY last winter. Wrote a paper on it for my GIS project and determined it was habitat loss as emerging herbaceous wetlands and grasslands which they count on for food and breeding shrank significantly over the last 10 years.

Songbirds (i.e smaller birds you would find at your feeders, that you hear singing, might be in your backyard) are the main birds that cats prey on, and overwhelmingly cat predation is the cause of their demise.

Also read this:

http://www.stateofthebirds.org/2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/SotB_16-04-26-ENGLISH-BEST.pdf

 

Well, you certainly seem more knowledgeable than I on the matter, so I'll yield to your take on it. And, I get that cat advocacy groups maybe aren't the most unbiased source for information on this, which is why I found it interesting that that UK bird advocacy group (who's a member of Birdlife International, a global bird conservation group) would say something to the effect that most birds killed by cats would have died before that got a chance to breed anyway.

I would tend to disagree, but you're probably used to that.

 

I agree habitat destruction is a big factor but invasive critters can affect the whole chain, an owl cant eat a mouse if there is none to eat

quote from article mentioned above ...
‘Just earlier this year I was cutting open some cats. Some of them had large snakes, king brown snakes probably about four foot long, juvenile perenties—which are the largest lizard in Australia, the goanna.’

‘[They] eat falcons and cockatoos, bats, centipedes, scorpions. I imagine that they would have a hard time pulling down a saltwater crocodile, I imagine that cassowaries would be pretty safe, but virtually every lizard, every snake, every frog, every bat, just about every bird in Australia and any mammal smaller than a large kangaroo, at least when they are joeys, are all susceptible to cat predation.’

 

Well, it sounds like you've got a major cat problem in Australia. I mean if they're eating falcons and four foot snakes it certainly sounds that way. I'm not sure what you have going on there can necessarily be extrapolated out to other parts of the world, though.

 

Of course it can, because there have been a number of peer-reviewed studies documenting the effects of cats on wildlife. This is like taking the side of the global warming naysayers when the preponderance of data supports the fact that it is happening. Cats kill a shit ton of wildlife all over the globe. The exact numbers will vary but the damage they cause is real and widespread. Don't spread misinformation just for the sake of it.

 

My information is based on what a normal Google search included, and I quoted and linked to several articles that called some of the research and prevailing wisdom into question. This included NPR (which I would hardly put on par with climate change deniers), and the The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Both of whom I mentioned by name mentioned early. You haven't linked or quoted anything other that that piece about worms killing birds, which, while amusing, was not relevant to the topic at hand. I then stated that what's going on in one local ecosystem doesn't necessarily apply to another. How exactly am I spreading misinformation again?

 

I'm not even saying that this isn't a real thing, but the fact that you would take a "worst case example" like Australia and say that that situation applies, or will apply, to every other region in the world suggests you have an agenda.

 

The fact that you have gone down this rabbit hole to defend your comment about worms is ridiculous. When I have time I will try and link a bibliography of peer review articles on the subject. A simple Google search does not solve these arguments, and merely dumbs down society if taken as a credible defense for your viewpoint. I am basing my position on my conversations with professional wildlife biologists/ornithologists/expert birders who have studied this issue in and out of academia with peer review research.

A simple Google search really doesn't mean jack shit when it comes to these issues.....

I was not saying cats kill wildlife all over the world at the rate they do in Australia. But there is similar documented evidence in other parts of the world, especially the U.S. Do you think cats just decide to behave nicely in other parts of the world? Under what circumstances would they have a diminished negative effect on wildlife if their populations were to remain unchecked?

 

Google is not your friend when looking at specific scientific studies on these issues. Anyone can write an article on it and get shotty data or speculate what is going on. Google scholar helps and peer reviewed literature with actual data and methods from studies found in scientific publications such as ecology journals, scientific american etc etc is the way to go. Studies that actually examine the issue, propose a hypothesis, use scientific method to collect data, and have been reviewed by the scientific community have far more weight. This isn't a jab at anyone not using peer reviewed literature just a mental note that if you claim things as scientific fact- that's where all the real actual science exists. And this is not to say all of the data in peer reviewed publications is fact. Many uncertainties can still exist, and bad methods to formulate conclusions are found in some papers. I've argued before that the methodology to come to points A, B, and C is simply rearranging and massaging data to get that outcome.

But yeah researching many many scientifically peer reviewed journals on topics are the way to go in coming to proper conclusions (if not doing the experiments yourself).

 

All the bird and cat shit aside I'm unsure on why it'd be okay to basically mock a movement with that hashtag.

 

I was just thinking of the use of that hashtag in relation to the ecological relationship of birds, cats, and worms, taking a step back I can see how this could be taken as highly offensive Leili. My apologies good sir..