Can you love your cat and the birds?
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I am a cat lover. They are wonderful companions, don't need walked five times a day and are generally self-sufficient -- as long as you feed them regularly.
But they are predators and they are not native to North America.
I have not had an outdoor cat for a very long time. One of the reasons is the fact the outdoor cats live much shorter and more dangerous lives. The other is that cats are not native to the Americas and they kill an astonishing amount of wildlife.
Studies show that hunting by house cats can have a large effect on local animal populations because they kill more prey in a given area than similar-sized wild predators. This effect is concentrated relatively close to a pet cat's home, since most of their movement was within a 100-meter radius of their homes, usually encompassing a few of their neighborhood's yards on either side.
Researchers from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences collaborated with scientists and citizen scientists from six countries to collect GPS cat-tracking data and prey-capture reports from 925 pet cats, with most coming from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
Because they are fed cat food, they don't kill as much prey each day as wild predators, but their home ranges were so small that the effect on local prey is really concentrated. House cats have a two to 10 times greater impact on wildlife that wild predators. They are amazing hunters.
The research focused on the ecological impact of house cats -- as opposed to feral cats -- and enlisted hundreds of pet owners to track their cats to see where they went and report on the number of dead animals and birds that they brought home.
Inexpensive GPS tracking devices measured distances traveled by these house cats, which spent their days both indoors and outdoors.
Some estimates show that cats in North America kill from 10 to 30 billion wildlife animals per year. One study showed that a house cat kills and average of 14.2 to 38.9 prey per hundred acres per year.
"Because the negative impact of cats is so local, we create a situation in which the positive aspects of wildlife, be they the songs of birds or the beneficial effects of lizards on pests, are least common where we would appreciate them most," said study co-author Rob Dunn, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Applied Ecology at NC State.
"Humans find joy in biodiversity, but we have, by letting cats go outdoors, unwittingly engineered a world in which such joys are ever harder to experience," he said.
For more on cats and wildlife, go to Ohio Bird Conservation Initiative at http://go.osu.edu/loveohiobirds .
Scudier is an Ohio State University Extension Master Gardener Volunteer in Mahoning County.