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The original of the following text was on the Alley Cat Allies web site in February of 2000. PLEASE HELP US END THIS ANTI-CAT CAMPAIGN! Alley Cat Allies (ACA) has been very concerned since American Bird Conservancy (ABC) launched its anti-cat campaign under the guise of saving birds. The ABC’s Cats Indoors! Campaign looks innocent enough. But in fact it targets all the millions of feral cats and farm cats who are being RESPONSIBLY cared for in cities and barns all across America. While we are not opposed to domestic cats being kept indoors, this campaign especially targets feral cats. We feel that the ABC and other environmental groups and, sadly now, some humane organizations, are supporting the American Bird Conservancy because they do not support nonlethal control of feral cat colonies. And they are simply wrong about this issue, for the following reasons: 1. Most feral cats are city cats. City ferals are scavengers and are also supplied food by compassionate human providers. 2. Cats are rodent specialists. Even when they rely solely on hunting for food, birds make up, on average, only 4 percent of their diet. 3. The major city prey residents are the introduced pigeons and rodents – the large pigeon is too big for most feral cats to kill. This is one reason city pigeons are sometimes in ill health—they have no real predator to keep their populations in a healthy balance there are far more important and urgent reasons our wildlife population is in peril. And the main culprit is the destruction done by humans. Urban sprawl, building huge shopping malls and golf courses, and our animal-based agriculture—these are the real causes of the loss of wildlife and birds. ABC constantly uses a University of Wisconsin “study” of cat predation. Dr. Gary Petronek in the Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association (January 15, 1998) states that the extrapolation : “of the mean number of prey caught from small studies of nonrandomly selected cats to larger units of the cat populations is problematic, and likely to yield imprecise estimates.” ABC also states that a 1989-90 study “showed that the domestic cat was a significant predator at feeders.” Again Dr. Petronek noted that this study showed that the number of birds killed by predators was “similar to the estimate of birds killed as a result of window collisions.” The English Churcher/Lawton study is often quoted as well. This small study also extrapolated the data across Britain and stated that cats were killing 100 million birds and small mammals each year. Roger Tabor, British biologist, says of this study: “It is not realistic to multiply the numbers of catches of these (70) rural cats by the entire cat population of Britain. Most cats are town cats with small ranges, and catch fewer items of prey than the village cats of this survey. The mesmeric effect of big numbers seem to have stultified reason.” Tabor says that the survey found that the house cat is a significant predator, but NOT that the cat was devastating Britain’s bird population. Although a quarter of the towns’ house sparrows were consumed by cats, after each breeding season the sparrow population doubled. In winter people feed birds, while nest boxes and domestic buildings provide nesting sites and in this way bird populations are kept well above “natural” levels. Most international biologists agree with biologist C.J. Mead that: “Birds in surburban and rural parts of Britain have coexisted with cats for hundreds of generations, and they may now be under less pressure from cats that they were in the past from the assorted natural predators. (Who no longer exist). Any bird population on the continents that could not withstand these levels of predation from cats would have disappeared long ago.” Please ask this humane organization who is supporting the ABC in their anti-cat campaign, to please stop, as this is very dangerous for the status of ALL cats---to become the scapegoat for our environmental ills. You can send them email messages through their website.
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