Feral Cats and Dead Birds

From the Culture Wars to the Cat Wars

I have already paid more attention than I intended to the wars waging on campuses and had no intention at all of bringing up the subject of ‘cats’. But, just yesterday a new little kitten showed up under our bird feeder and a few days ago the cat from the house next door wandered away with one of the chipmunks we had been feeding dangling from his mouth.  I have tended to ignore the piles of bird feathers. Perhaps for these reasons I noticed this particular email with the subject heading “The Case Against Cats”. That is the title of an article by Colin Dickey in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Sept. 7, 2016. That is when I learned among other things that:

“The news that house cats are laying waste to wide swaths of biodiversity has not, like revelations about climate change or other ecological evils, led to some kind of scientific consensus about what was to be done. It’s led, instead, to the establishment of two warring camps: the cat people and the bird people. The bird people think that the wholesale slaughter of the world’s bird population is a problem requiring human intervention, namely the banning of feral and outdoor cats, forced sterilization, and euthanization. The cat people are aghast at these solutions, and argue instead that cats, being innate predators, should be allowed to fulfill their natural directive.”

The article is a review of this new book from Princeton University Press: Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, Peter P. Marra & Chris Santella. From the publisher’s site you will learn that:

“This compelling book traces the historical and cultural ties between humans and cats from early domestication to the current boom in pet ownership, along the way accessibly explaining the science of extinction, population modeling, and feline diseases. It charts the developments that have led to our present impasse—from Stan Temple’s breakthrough studies on cat predation in Wisconsin to cat-eradication programs underway in Australia today. It describes how a small but vocal minority of cat advocates has campaigned successfully for no action in much the same way that special interest groups have stymied attempts to curtail smoking and climate change.”

Some blurbs:
"We know that nature’s theater bristles with industrious carnivores and omnivores--hawks that pluck cardinals right off a bird feeder, squirrels that grab eggs from crows’ nests, and crows that grab babies from squirrels’ nests. What makes free-ranging cats such an exceptionally dangerous threat to birds and other wildlife? The book describes a number of factors."--Natalie Angier, New York Review of Books.

"Cats, most of them unowned free-ranging cats, kill as many as four billion birds in the United States each year. What, if anything, should be done about it? Cat Wars tackles this difficult dilemma. If you are a cat lover, a bird lover, a philosopher, an ethicist, or just anyone interested in gut-wrenching dilemmas, you will find this a gripping book."--Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

For the hard and hard-to-believe numbers of deaths caused by cats you can also see: The Impact of Free-ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States,” by Scott R. Loss, Nature Communications, Jan. 29, 2013.

The problem of feral felines is a large one. Now you know so my job here is done. For my part, I will start locally with my BB gun and my new NIMBY cat policy.