Is it time to end cats’ right to roam? – Pet cats kill songbirds by the million, as well as rodents and other wildlife

39 comments

  2. As someone who has set up my own garden as a feeding and bathing spot for wild birds with great success over the years I do have a number of the neighbourhood cats congregating in my garden too. I don’t know if it is the sound of the garden fountain pond that draws the cats in too, but, never are there signs of successful hunts.

    As long as the birds and cats both keep coming then i have no problem with either.

  4. >A study published in April estimated that UK cats kill 160 to 270 million animals annually, a quarter of them birds

    Really? As someone who’s owned a lot of cats over the years, I’ve dealt with more mice than I’d want to have, a few rats, some toads (that are never killed, just brought in as toys), a few slugs, a (grey) squirrel and 3 birds. Nobody’s worried about the rest of the deaths, but a quarter of their kills being birds feels high, or have I had a bunch of lazy cats who can’t jump that well?

  5. I think there are much bigger issues to address than what people let their cats get up to. Like insect populations being devastated by modern farming practices and loss of habitat. It’s true what they say about the state of your car after a long drive at night – 30 years ago mine was utterly plastered with insect splats after driving the M1/M6 at night. Now there really are hardly any. When I grew up it was near a few old disused mill lodges, which have long since been filled in and built over. There used to be dragonflies *everywhere* – now they’re a rarity.

    If you’re worried about bird populations, worry about the lack of things for them to eat and therefore not as many chicks being raised – not what may be eating them.

  6. I don’t understand all the downvotes frankly. I feel this issue will be very divisive due to people being biased either towards or against cats. I personally love them, but I would support not letting them roam. Better for the environment and for the animal, too. Less likely to be run over/ get poisoned etc. They’re also not like dogs and are not particularly attached to people but to homes and cats tend to visit neighbours who might not be so welcoming of a cat urinating and marking their garden and leaving their faeces there. Tomcats’ urine smells something awful. It would also lead to less unexpected pregnancies and less kittens being disposed of in cruel ways.

  8. This comments section is exactly the kind of dumpster for I expected.

    Also, note the upvote situation, currently there are twenty times more comments than the net positive upvotes. Sure sign of a divisive topic.

    It’s entirely expected that cat lovers would be so defensive and unwilling to listen to evidence. The same situation is happening with anthropogenic climate change. But not only are the stakes even higher, the required behavioural and social changes are much less palatable than just keeping cats indoors.

  10. As someone who lives above a restaurant I am completely happy with roaming cats. I don’t want even more mice running about our flat.

    Sounds like this was written by some privileged wanker who doesn’t have to deal with the realities of London.

  11. So they’re saying that although birds have suffered predation by wild cats for hundreds or thousands of years the difference is that there’s loads of pet cats.

    Yet they’re guesstimating that a pet cat kills 22 things a year (of which a quarter are birds). Which I would imagine is a shed load less than a wild cat that’s eating to survive.

    But I can’t find any info as to how predation from domestic cats compares to the predation birds suffered from wild cats before domestication.

    Plus the first study into American cats found the vast majority of predation by cats was carried out by feral cats. I can’t see where they take that into account in the UK study.

  13. The RSPB suggest cats only kill birds that wouldnt survive anyway.

    If anything shrews and voles being predated is more of a problem.

    These posts are pointless as it devolves into ‘do you have a cat’.

  14. Would be better off getting more people to neuter them, the amount of Tom cats who are just left to go semi-feral is obscene, and then you get their owners on Facebook going ‘Where is my darling little Tom, my kids are upset’. Chances are, love, your darling is miles away chasing a bit of skirt.

  15. Responsible cat owners could easily reduce this number by putting pair of copper bells on their cat’s collars. It is fairly noisy and extremely sensitive to movement, meaning they can’t even learn how to walk silently with them – they’ll still jingle.

    My cat hasn’t brought anything home in the 1+ year he has had such bells fitted.

  16. I’d have thought the widespread and excessive use of insecticide has more of an impact on bird numbers than the occasional lazy housecat.

  17. It should be law that all cats have to wear collars with bells on them. Owners who refuse should have the cats taken off them.

    A neighbour did this many years ago when they got fed up of their cats bringing home injured and dead birds and mammals. It dropped the total of dead creatures been brought in to one or two a month compared to at least five a week.

    It does make me laugh that so called animal lovers can keep an animal that kills so many other animals

  18. I know we’re importing a lot of bollocks from the states these days, but does the custom of imprisoning cats have to be one of them? They’re pretty passionate about doing so over there, and this article appears to be mostly based on the research of – you guess it, an American. Yknow, from a different continent. Where cats haven’t been around for centuries.

    Cats have roamed the land for centuries in Britain and surely by this point an equilibrium situation must have been reached by now between them and their prey – numbers like “Millions” sound impressive and scary, but there are millions of cats and millions of birds to match.

  19. There is no evidence of cats actually causing population declines of any species in this country. Zero.

    Come back when there is.

  22. Is it time to end ~~cats~~ humans right to roam? – Pet ~~cats~~ humans kill songbirds by the million, as well as rodents and other wildlife…..

  24. My cats are not allowed to roam. They have a huge garden with featherboard fencing topped with angled mesh. It’s safer for them.

    They still chitter at birds and chase shadows, but in the 4 years they’ve been confined we have only had one bird murder instead of 2-3 a week. They’re happy, I’m happy and I always know where they are.

    I lost 2 cats to poisoning, 1 to the road and 1 I never got back because a neighbour put his body in the bin. I will never have a roaming cat again.

  25. Anyone citing “nature” as a defence of cats should keep in mind that only the wildcats in Scotland are part of UK’s “nature”. Domesticated cats are more akin to an invasive species.

  26. I live in a basement flat the local fox and neighbour’s cat catch the rats from the drain. My cat’s are indoors if they go out we watch them. Also one cat is scared off anta the other be happy to eat anything that crawls in front of it.

  27. I built mine a catio and she adores it, in there almost all day, its her space and she doesnt have to worry about other cats taking it and I don’t have to worry about her. I would have let her go outside free but after finding steel bb’s in the garden I decided against it.

    She still hunts and brings in those massive house spiders tho lol

  29. I feel like you cant stop cats doing what they would have done even if there were no humans. Nature is nature it happens with every predatory animals not just cats.

  31. Usual Guardian dribble. Cats are native to the UK and no evidence has ever been found that they are endangering wildlife. It’s a stupid American idea that people are applying to here.

  32. Cats: domesticated and roaming this country for centuries.
    Insects: declined massively over the last 40 years.
    Birds: declined massively over the last 40 years.
    Small diesel engines: proliferated massively over the last 40 years.
    Neonicotinoid insecticides: proliferated massively over the last 40 years.

    Must be the cats.

  33. From RSPB No doubt they don’t help but our most in decline species never see cats… basically stop destroying habitat!

    “No scientific evidence

    Despite the large numbers of birds killed by cats in gardens, there is no clear scientific evidence that such mortality is causing bird populations to decline. 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.

    We also know that of the millions of baby birds hatched each year, most will die before they reach breeding age. This is also quite natural, and each pair needs only to rear two young that survive to breeding age to replace themselves and maintain the population.

    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.

    Those bird species which have undergone the most serious population declines in the UK (such as skylarks, tree sparrows and corn buntings) rarely encounter cats, so cats cannot be causing their declines. Research shows that these declines are usually caused by habitat change or loss, particularly on farmland.”

    ​

    [https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden-birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/](https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden-birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/)

  34. I thought even the RSPB had said they didn’t think cats were a significant contributor to decreasing bird populations? Also, you’d have to offset protecting birds (by keeping cats in) against a likely increase in rodent population (which cats are pretty good at controlling – they kill a lot of small rodents like mice and apparently, though they kill fewer large rodents like rats, the scent of cats is enough to encourage rats to move away from populated areas). Regarding cat faeces, they are at least usually buried (unlike dog crap) and you can discourage cats from visiting your gardens by leaving citrus peels on the ground if it’s becoming an issue.

  35. The RSPB says no, and if I can find this out this easily so can the the Guardian. So this is just contentious clickbait.

    “Despite the large numbers of birds killed by cats in gardens, there is
    no clear scientific evidence that such mortality is causing bird
    populations to decline. 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.”

    https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden-birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/

  36. No, they dont.

    Domestic cats have existed in the UK for at least 3000 years when they were brought over by the persians, though wild cats couldve existed here for over thousands of years prior.

    ***Turns out, we still got plenty of birds and their numbers increased over those 3000 years.*** Any loss of bird population today is more likely explainable by lack of food due to the plummeting insect populations due to agriculture and chemicals and such, global warming, or urban expansion leading to habitat loss. This isnt america. Cats are more or less native to our ecology now. They arent the reason.

    Also wild cats =/= domestic cats, domestic cats blamed for wild cat kills. Domestic cats do not hunt many birds. At all. A typical domestic cat will hunt like 10-20 things a year, 1/4th of those are birds, and all of those birds are going to be ones likely not making it far in life regardless.

    Right now I have around 80-100 little brown birds in my bushes and trees, who feed from my window. None hunted by any of the half dozen street cats.

    THIS ARTICLE EVEN SAYS SO. The RSPB says the same – that in the UK, cats are a non issue when it comes to birds (despite the big looking numbers), and largely only catch birds that weren’t gonna make it anyway.The RSPB is much more concerned about agricultures impacts on birds.

    Title is misleading.

  38. No I don’t think so. And I think killing rodents is definitely not the right way to convince anyone 🤢

    We need to focus on undoing the effects of humans. Cats have been roaming for hundreds of years.

  39. 2 cats breezed into my house the other day as if they owned the fucking place. I perversely admire their arrogance.

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