Nowadays we shouldn't be allowing cats to be outside unsupervised in any case, they can be devastating to local wildlife, including these clever cockatoos.
Former multiple cat owner here, every cat I have owned hunted successfully with multiple bells on their collars. My neighbours cat has bells and hunts in my yard. Bells don't work or don't work reliably enough.
The chipmunks around my house are dumb af. They get scared of the cat, but after 2 minutes of sitting still they're running right by him again. It's almost like they evolved to be food.
> Bells don't work. Cats are more than comfortable staying still enough to keep them silent.
Saw this with the neighbours cat, little sod is so smooth he doesn't ring the bell until he pounces and by then the bird already knows it's in deep shit.
My pair are indoor cats - they live longer and we are near a very busy road.
One might think so, but I saw a neighbor's declawed bell-laden cat routinely catch prey. The bell surely didn't help the cat, but the birds, mice, shrews, snakes, etc. needed more than a bell to save them.
Fully depends on the local wildlife. If the local fauna naturally devleoped alongside wildcats, such as in the UK, then outdoor cats are of very little concern to wildlife populations.
If they didn't, such as in Aus, then yeah they can be devastating.
In all its 13 years (and counting) our cat has taken maybe 5 birds, this includes the swallow he noticed flying by at ~1.5 meters height upon which he jumped straight up in the air and caught it. Sad for the swallow but it was quite a feat of cat-dexterity. Anyway, he doesn't catch birds since there are more than enough voles, mice, rats, squirrels and weasels - no idea why he catches those but he's done so several times - around to keep him satisfied. He eats nearly everything he catches but tends to leave the weasels mostly uneaten. He also does not like squirrel tails which became clear when I cleaned up under the stairs where I found 5 of them.
Maybe I should add I live on a farm? If it were not for the cat we'd have to take care of the vermin he dispatches in some other way so hooray for the cat.
Very few of the catches are usually known to the owner.
It’s tricky to study since you pretty much need to introduce cats to areas with stable bird populations. We’ve had birds relocate and start new nests elsewhere because they see cats around though, and even magpies are extremely reluctant to eat food put out for them near the yard where the cats sometimes hang out.
> In all its 13 years (and counting) our cat has taken maybe 5 birds
reminder: what you see is not what you get.
cats kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds a year, study says. Outdoor cats are the leading cause of death among both birds and mammals in the United States, according to a new study, killing 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion birds each year.
The mammalian toll is even higher, concluded researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, ranging from 6.9 billion to 20.7 billion annually.
The study found each feral cat kills an average 576 native birds, mammals and reptiles per year, while pet cats kill an average of 110 native animals every year – 40 reptiles, 38 birds and 32 mammals.
In Australia 3.7 million domestic cats kill 230 million native birds every year.
OP numbers are in the realm of not being plausible, unless the cat lives in a cage.
As a cat owner I could believe in 5 in a year, or one every 2-3 months, that's possible, low but possible. I can't honestly believe in 5 in 13 years, for a normal, non disabled cat.
Numbers I gave you are consistent with the 100 million cats that live in USA (15-30 birds killed by each cat every year on average)
The posters cat likely spends much more of its time on mammals as targets than on birds (the post does imply it takes a large harvest of vermin mammals).
I estimate 83k coyotes in north american urban areas. (Extrapolating from 2014 estimate that 2,000 coyotes lived in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.)
Cats are 20-40% of urban coyote diets. Wild ass guess that a 40lb coyote needs to eat about 5lbs per week (based on recommended food allowance for captive coyote). For yearly total of 260lbs. Average cat weighs 10lbs? So each coyote eats 5.2 - 10.4 cats per year.
So let's say coyotes eat 83k * 5.2 = 431,600 cats per year.
A comment above says a domestic cat eats ~38 birds per year.
So urban coyotes save 16,400,800 birds per year.
(Too little is known about wild coyotes and cats for me to even guesstimate.)
Yes, but the cat is fed inside the house as well, leading to a huge overpopulation of predators. That's not the natural order of things.
A normal predator that devastates the local ecosystem because there are too many will run out of food and then go down in numbers until some sort of equilibrium is restored. Doesn't happen with pets.
On top of that cats are actually not local to most places in the world. So they are an introduced predator which the local wildlife didn't develop defenses for.
I also wonder if you would accept the same argument if the neighbors dog would maul your cat (or even your child)
The cats are provided as sacrafice to protect the children, once the coyotes get a taste for the flesh of children the rest of humanity will be in danger.
I know that cats eat a lot of birds, but I wonder how often cats really is the limiting factor of the population. Other things like scarcity of food or nesting places might often be more important.
The situation in australia is very different from other regions, in a previous discussion on HN we've already established that for central europe, domestic cats have a negligible effect on wildlife. (As in, orders of magnitudes below the next higher causes, which are mostly wild cats and pesticides).
And i'm sure mining for coal, building ever expanding suburbs or driving cars doesn't contribute to killing any bird or mammal.. I'd need the figures but i'm convinced that human activities are far more dangerous for other animals than the activities of our pets.
When you look at the numbers, it is very, very, hard to deny that free-ranging unowned cats are the largest limiting factor to the population. The size of the cat population causing a mortality swing of 24% in birds, is not some small number that might be masked by another closesly related statistic.
The number of cats in an area should be pretty closely related to the number of people living in the area. The more cats, the more people, and it would not be hard to believe that having more people in an area might lead to more environmental destruction and displaced habitats.
The control featured in the paper is Europe, where the domestic cat is younger and not as well adapted, environmentally, as that in America. There is significantly less environmental destruction, despite the controls featuring similar numbers of the animals. Simply having cities has not had a similar effect.
"I know we messed with the environment and the result has been devastating, but we should remember the environment is a harsh place and likely lots of stuff would have died even if we didn't meddle."
Cats in Australia kill a total of 377 MILLION birds per year[1] (99% of which are native species)
Of course it would. About 43000 people die in car accidents in the US every year. That is apparently considered acceptable in a population of 332 million people. If the population was one million people, what would most likely be considered horrendous.
I admit that my standards regarding death of critters are somewhat different than death of people, but the total population do matter there too. 6 million deers are shot in the US every year in a population of 25 million. People don't seem to be very upset about that, but rather concerned that the population still is rising. Many people are very upset that any rhinos at all are killed.
And as the example with deers show, you can cull some populations quite heavily without any apparent ill effects.
