Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 14:58:25 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Gail Mackiernan Subject: Re: Keeping Cats Indoors In-Reply-To: <38BA34ACF3E0D311B4230000F803503603D07330@VHAPEREXC1> Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Chris-- I only have one question -- how do you know that your cat has never taken a bird? Since it spends most of its time outside, you certainly are not watching it even a small % of the time... Serious cat fanciers (and I know a number of them) universally recommend keeping cats inside or in well-secured outside areas (as I said, a number of cat-containing fencing systems now are available commercially) because of the dangers from disease (FAIDS, leukemia), larger predators (dogs, and, increasingly in our area, coyotes) plus cars, kids, other cats and the occasional cat-hating adult. Cats are considered by wildlife biologists to represent a very serious threat to birds and native small mammals and as such, we who profess to love the natural world should do our best to minimize their impact on it. Sorry Norm, I am not going to post on this thread again... Gail Mackiernan Colesville, MD on 02/20/2003 9:24 AM, Chris Starling at Christopher.Starling@MED.VA.GOV wrote: > Frank wrote: > > :Keeping cats indoors? Oh please!! I do believe that a little effort in > placement of feeders can go a long way towards minimizing the impact of > outdoor housecats on backyard birds" > > I totally agree. I love cats and think it is more inhumane to keep them > indoors. Our cat does everyting but sleep outside and it has never taken a > bird (chipmunks are another thing), but birds- no way. I little planning > (like keeping feeders away from bushes were cats can hide) and the birds > will be fine... > > -Chris Starling > > ======================================================================= > 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 ======================================================================= =========================================================================