And generally just tear through native populations of birds and small mammals. I honestly think it's irresponsible to have outdoor cats in places where they're not native (which is effectively everywhere).
My indoor-outdoor cat only catches small animals if they run between her paws. But she did chase a rather large raccoon around the house once, as I did.
In my suburban neighborhood, we occasionally have coyotes. They are known to prey on fat cats (the feline kind).
My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.
I also feel that small wild cats were likely native everywhere. Birds were probably not their primary prey; small reptiles and mammals, i.e. animals that don't fly, nest in trees, or live in flocks.
> My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.
It’s just something we’ve all been told all our lives, with the people doing the telling never point to any evidence to back it up.
Even when cats are wild and native, their hunts aren’t particularly successful, except the desert sand cat[1] which is so small it would perish if its hunts were low rate success.
And if you watch videos of collar cameras on cats, they seem to spent all their time doing a perimeter check, having a quick social interaction with other cats doing the same, and maybe brushing up against a frigidly neighbour human.
The idea that a house cat that has warmth, food, water, bedding, would bother to waste time killing small birds and mammals that have hardly any meat on them anyway is fairly unbelievable.
Feral cats are a different story. But don’t blame responsible cat owners for that problem.
I had a neighbor once that had 2 cats. The only thing they seemed to care about was catching birds and chasing squirrels. They only caught birds but they did catch them often. Many cats are exceptionally good at catching mice and bringing them back home. Some seem to enjoy torturing them. Also in some countries like Australia they absolutely decimate the native population if left unchecked, and that’s according to actual data about the presence of cats and the level of wild animals.
I was at a wildlife sanctuary in Tasmania, about 50 minutes drive from where I live.
The tour guide said something like: every year 250,000 native animals are killed every year on Tasmanian roads.
And I just blurted out: and they just keep coming.
Because, obviously, if it was a problem then that number wouldn’t be sustained. It’s kind of self evident that the deceased animals free up resources and territory for the living animals, who then go on to have more offspring.
I feel the same about cats: if they were a problem for the native fauna, we’d expect that problem to have auto-resolved by now, as in the cats would have killed all the native fauna.
But, like all environmental problems, it’s perennial: the problem always needs more funding, more restrictions on human activity, increased red tape for developers, and home owners who want to manage their land. Like you can cut a tree down until after it falls on your house and kills your infant.
Again, I don’t believe it’s well fed house cats that are allowed outside that are the problem, it’s the ferals that need to kill to survive.
And there are ways to solve that problem, or at least greatly curtail it.
That tracks for sika deer. Those are the "sacred deer" that used to be venerated in Nara, and are still protected under Japanese national treasure laws. They are allowed to roam free throughout Nara, and you face big penalties for hurting or messing with them. You are allowed to feed them special deer crackers which local shopkeepers sell, but woe betide you if a deer sees or smells deer crackers on your person! You will be followed or chased, and may be at risk of being gored on a buck's antlers, until you give up the goods. They're attitude on four cloven hooves, those deer.
That's an Iberian lynx. They were nearly extinct around the year 2000, but since then they've been reintroduced and relocated and nurtured with rabbits until the population grew 20 times bigger. Cuteness is not irrelevant to that in my opinion, but anyway it exists because humans decided it should, because it fits our idea of what nature would have done if we hadn't already interfered. Therefore ... it's OK that we arranged for it to be there torturing a rat, I guess. But it takes the edge off the guilt about domestic cats somewhat. The whole thing ends up being a battle about taste and aesthetics in the giant wildlife park we've inadvertantly created.
Sure, but now we've strayed far from the starting point which was that cats are bad because they torture small animals. In fact most animals are bad. The question becomes which animals do we want around the place.
Cats have completely deleted the rabbit populations in a lot of suburbia. I feel like it got worse around 2020 for some reason. I had to move to the middle of the woods to start seeing them again.
Got lots of rabbits in my town, on a tiny nature reserve beside a footpath that goes from some office complexes to an industrial estate. It's ten minutes walk from the houses where people keep cats. I guess all those fluffy neutered cats have dedicated their attention to actual cat food and to the sport of infringing on the territories of other cats, and just aren't very rabbit-centric. If the cats were feral and breeding the rabbits might be in trouble.
