Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:03:36 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Gail Mackiernan Subject: Re: Keeping Cats Indoors In-Reply-To: <000701c2d8b5$b72bb3d0$7a9afea9@francishlkcx5s> Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Frank, at the risk of this dissolving into the "dreaded cat thread" you should know that there is ample research to show that free-ranging cats have a profound impact on bird populations, especially in the suburban and rural islands of habitat that now exist. Cats are estimated to kill between 300 million to 1 billion birds in North America a year. They also kill millions of native mammals which should be supporting our native predators, such as raptors. Cats are an exotic (non-native) predator that exist in numbers 100s of times greater than any native predator and is "subsidized" by being fed. Check out the ABA web site. Cats are also estimated to kill 35 million songbirds in Great Britain each year, this based on peer-reviewed research, and are implicated in the decline of several species. Cats probably kill more birds than building strikes (estimated to be about 100 million birds a year in North America) and probably, transmission towers. If you do not want to keep your cats inside, then get one of the several available cat-containment fencing systems which are advertised in cat magazines. They will, at least, confine your cats to your property. This is the last time I am going to post on this subject, as we know from previous experience that it soon deteriorates. I wouldn't blame Norm for calling a halt, in fact. But imho, any one who professes to love birds and lets their cats run loose is in denial. There are obviously a lot of serious threats affecting birds, most of them due to human activity. If we have the power to remove one of them, let's do it. Gail Mackiernan Colesville, MD gail@mdsg.umd.edu on 02/20/2003 2:57 AM, Frank Boyle at ravenfrank@EARTHLINK.NET wrote: > Keeping cats indoors? Oh please!! > Do we really think that passerines are going > to become an endangered species because of housecats? I can think of > many other immediate concerns i.e. habitat destruction, disease, etc. > that have a far greater toll on birds than my cats. They will continue > to roam their neighborhood territories, sitting under the feeders in > hope of a tasty morsel. > > ******************* > Frank Boyle > Laurel, MD > ******************* > > ======================================================================= > To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com > with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey > ======================================================================= > ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================