Should all cats wear a bell-collar?
According to statistics, there are 8.1 million cats in the UK that kill 275 million “prey items” per year, with 55 million of those thought to be birds.
A book about the destructive impact of domestic cats on wildlife has sent fur flying, setting its authors at loggerheads with British conservationists over whether the country’s moggies should be kept under house arrest.
The book, Cat Wars, calls for the activity of cats to be controlled in a bid to conserve global wildlife and prevent the spread of infections and diseases such as toxoplasmosis. “From a conservation ecology perspective, the most desirable solution seems clear – remove all free-ranging cats from the landscape by any means necessary,” the authors write.
Author of the book, Dr Peter Marra, told radio listeners yesterday that cats are “cuddly killers”, and need to be stopped.
The view of cats as murdering menaces is shared by many, including the broadcasters Chris Packham and David Attenborough, who have previously called for owners to keep their pets indoors or kit them out with bell-collars to help prevent them hunting garden birds.
What are your views? Does your cat catch and kill birds or wildlife? Do cats, as natural predators, have a vital role in the food chain? Should cats be kept in at night? Should all cats wear a bell-collar to warn birds?
What are your views?
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Cats have always been used to kill vermin on farms etc. The reason that one of my cats can catch birds is that some of my neighbours feed birds on the ground making them easy prey for any hunter. If they were fed on a bird table or feeder then my cat would not be able to catch them so ban feeding birds on the ground!
Bea, very sadly you are so wrong. But I'll leave it there!
We interfere with the normal balance of nature to our eventual cost. Blair and his metropolitan elite banned fox hunting - you might have noticed none of them had ever witnessed a fox hunt so their law was flawed at a primary level. So much for sofa government!
Since fox hunting was banned we in these very rural areas have been inundated with foxes. They kill everything in sight. I just shoot them!!
Now we have another 'expert' telling us to cull feral cats. Let me tell you good people, when you have an expert's opinion the only problem you have is the expert!! They're nearly always wrong.
Cats, feral or otherwise, keep vermin under control. Here, in deeply rural Suffolk, I shoot vermin. We deal with the vermin problem ourselves but rely on feral cats as the main support.
As far as cats are concerned leave them alone. They do a good job.
An earlier poster said farmers are far more to blame for the loss of wild life. After most of my life out here in the wilds I can only agree. If you only knew what was done to the stuff you call food, well, starvation would be so common. And all this is deleterious to wild life.
Let's leave well alone. There'll be a disease coming along which wipes out cats when they get too numerous, just as there will be with humans. Just standby, there's more of us than the planet may support.
...Cat owners are not so ready to neuter their animals and thus they breed, four litters of four a year. Over an eight year breeding life that's 128 cats added to the population. Too many. But that's the responsibility of the cat owners. One may not blame cats.
My point is, whenever man intervenes in the natural cycles of nature it usually goes horribly wrong. By all means insist cats are rendered unable to procreate - we do that to humans too - but a cull would be a draconia measure, the outcome of which could well be like Blair's anti-foxhunting bill.
But in practice, in the remote areas I've lived, ans atill do so, Westminster is of little relevance. We just carry on as we always did. There'll be a Michaelmas fox hunt at the end of the month. Tally Ho!. love all the red jackets and bugles sounding. The dogs are a sight for sore eyes.
Let 'em do what God intended. When we try to micro-manage these things it always gos wrong!
Yes cats do catch birds - mice etc but that is in their nature - they are not the sole objects of the decline in our wildlife population - I think farmers have to some degree not helped wildlife - ploughing directly after harvest for next years crops- years ago they left the fields awhile giving wildlife food for the winter - they plough right to the edges of fields very rarely leaving a leaving a margin to grow wild ..
Then we have the scrubbing out of hedges to make fields larger and hedge cutting is done at the wrong time of the year leaving little room for birds to nest etc ..
So NO I think that our cat population is just fine as they are ....