Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: on pet cats / feral cats

[Patricia Nason (tnason04]

For a typical, tree-nesting bird, it is neither the adults nor the babies
that are most at risk from cats, but the fledglings.  Most birds go through
a period of a few days between when they leave the nest and when they are
really effective fliers, much of which they spend on the ground, hiding in
the vegetation.  Some studies have shown as many as 80% of the fledglings
can be killed by outdoor cats.

Tricia

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 2:27 AM, Naomi Anderegg <naomi_anderegg [at] 
yahoo.com>wrote:

>
>
> Richard wrote:
> "Before we moved in, our tentative pet policy said that cats could not run
> free.
>
> Then we were told that if our cats weren't out, the neighborhood cats would
> take
>
> over the territory (does anyone know if this is true?).
>
> So then we modified the policy so that cats could run free."
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> If you have rodents, like the rest of the world, then you'll have
> predators.
> Probably not wolves, which presumably kept the rodent population in North
> America in check at least through the early 1900s. We've decimated their
> population, along with native feline species like the Florida Panther, in
> most
> parts of country. You could have bobcats or coyotes or foxes, I suppose,
> but
> they really don't like to be around people by my understanding, whereas
> rodent
> populations flourish close to human populations. So, you're looking at
> domestic
> cats, feral domestic cats, snakes, or possibly hawks & owls filling that
> niche
> in the ecosystem. Domestic cats (feral or not) are well suited for it--with
> all
> the cat bashing I've done a little reading and they're much more suited
> towards
> hunting rodents than birds. They're also relatively comfortable around
> human
> populations in comparison to the other predators. And the statistic that I
> found
> was that 80% of cat kills were rodents, but I don't really know how
> accurate
> that is. I suppose I can see cats being a concern if you have a threatened
> population of ground-nesting birds in your part of the country. (My area is
> mostly wooded and with a significant density of large trees, and there just
> aren't any ground-nesters small enough to be significantly threatened by
> domestic cats that I know of.) I'd rather have cats (feral or pet) than
> snakes--but perhaps I'm just prejudiced against snakes.
>
>
> There are some interesting articles about this at www.alleycat.org--an
> national
> organization that advocates managing feral cat populations through "trap
> neuter
> return" programs. They have research quoted on their website that would
> indicate
> that there will be a cat population if there are adequate prey species to
> support them.
>
>
> A few articles addressing bird species loss / effect on wildlife of outdoor
> cat
> populations: http://www.alleycat.org/Page.aspx?pid=324
> And there are some documented cases of attempts at eradicating feral cat
> populations in relatively small areas than indicate that the "vaccuum
> effect"
> (on feral cat populations) does, in fact, exist--removing feral cats is
> ineffective because new cats just move in to take their place. (See
> Richard's
> quoted "neighborhood cat" theory.)
>
>
> So. . . whether you allow outdoor pet cats in your community or not, you're
> likely to have some cat population. But, the cat population that can be
> supported by the wild rodent population in your community would presumably
> be
> lower/less dense than a domesticated pet cat population, since more people
> feed
> their pet cats than would feed "strays" and this food helps to sustain what
> would otherwise be an unsustainable density of cats.
>
>
> Naomi
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“Earth will regenerate. The rivers, the waters, the mountains; everything
will be green again.  Because the Earth has all the time in the world. But
we don’t.  Love the place you live in.”
--Oren Lyons, the Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation