America’s cats, including housecats that adventure outdoors and feral cats, kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds in a year, says Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., who led the team that performed the analysis. Previous estimates of bird kills have varied, he says, but “500 million is a number that has been thrown around a lot.”
For wild mammals, the annual toll lies between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion, Marra and his colleagues report along with the bird numbers January 29 in Nature Communications. The majority of these doomed mammals and birds fall into the jaws of cats that live outdoors full-time with or without food supplements from people.
“Cats are a nonnative species,” he notes, and multiple studies have shown that their hunting often targets natives. In his own research, Marra has shown that hunting cats can transform places that would normally be sources of young birds into sinks that drain birds from neighboring populations.
University of Wisconsin–Madison conservation biologist Stanley Temple says “this huge problem awaits a practical and widely acceptable solution.” The practice of catching free-roaming cats to neuter in hopes of shrinking populations is “simply too difficult, time consuming and expensive,” says Temple, a senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. “Even if Herculean efforts made it feasible at very small local scales, from a conservation perspective, [the trapping and neutering approach] maintains free-ranging cat populations that will continue to harm native wildlife.”
An alternative policy of repeatedly rounding up cats and killing them hasn’t worked, says Becky Robinson, president of Alley Cat Allies, based in Bethesda, Md., a national advocacy group for protecting cats and reforming animal control.
“The big message is responsible pet ownership,” Marra says. Even though full-time outdoor cats may be the bigger problem, he says, cats with indoor homes still catch some 1.9 billion wild animals a year.
Cat hunting catches have not gotten the serious conservation attention they deserve, he says, because policy makers often dismiss cats as a minor threat compared with the other mortal dangers that wildlife faces. However, the new estimates outstrip assessments of annual bird deaths from pesticide poisonings or from collisions with windows, communication towers or vehicles.
Marra says he hopes to provide science to encourage dialog, instead of bitter fights, between wildlife conservationists and advocates for cat welfare. “The irony here is that you’ve got people who love animals on both sides,” he says.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cats-kill-more-one-billion-birds-each-year
For wild mammals, the annual toll lies between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion, Marra and his colleagues report along with the bird numbers January 29 in Nature Communications. The majority of these doomed mammals and birds fall into the jaws of cats that live outdoors full-time with or without food supplements from people.
“Cats are a nonnative species,” he notes, and multiple studies have shown that their hunting often targets natives. In his own research, Marra has shown that hunting cats can transform places that would normally be sources of young birds into sinks that drain birds from neighboring populations.
University of Wisconsin–Madison conservation biologist Stanley Temple says “this huge problem awaits a practical and widely acceptable solution.” The practice of catching free-roaming cats to neuter in hopes of shrinking populations is “simply too difficult, time consuming and expensive,” says Temple, a senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. “Even if Herculean efforts made it feasible at very small local scales, from a conservation perspective, [the trapping and neutering approach] maintains free-ranging cat populations that will continue to harm native wildlife.”
An alternative policy of repeatedly rounding up cats and killing them hasn’t worked, says Becky Robinson, president of Alley Cat Allies, based in Bethesda, Md., a national advocacy group for protecting cats and reforming animal control.
“The big message is responsible pet ownership,” Marra says. Even though full-time outdoor cats may be the bigger problem, he says, cats with indoor homes still catch some 1.9 billion wild animals a year.
Cat hunting catches have not gotten the serious conservation attention they deserve, he says, because policy makers often dismiss cats as a minor threat compared with the other mortal dangers that wildlife faces. However, the new estimates outstrip assessments of annual bird deaths from pesticide poisonings or from collisions with windows, communication towers or vehicles.
Marra says he hopes to provide science to encourage dialog, instead of bitter fights, between wildlife conservationists and advocates for cat welfare. “The irony here is that you’ve got people who love animals on both sides,” he says.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cats-kill-more-one-billion-birds-each-year
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spay and neuter your pets, brehs. Theyre like an invasive species right now.
