In defence of pussy cats (not that they need it)

Writing in the Telegraph, Andrew Brown launches an attack on the pussy cat. Or more precisely on the owners of pussy cats.

What cats do, as everyone knows but some prefer not to think about, is kill wild birds – millions every year, according to the RSPB.

Here are these two birds bringing up their families in our garden, feeding their bleating chicks, and along comes the domestic cat, a ruthless hunter introduced by humans to mess up the natural order of things.

“Belling the cat” (that is, hanging a bell around the animal’s neck, as in Aesop’s fable) ought to be the minimum cat owners do.

At least that would warn birds of their presence. I would go further – cat owners should stop their pets reproducing indiscriminately. It would also be better if cats were kept indoors at night.

If you own a cat, what it gets up to it is your responsibility. If your pet goes out and slaughters millions of birds and chicks, it is your business.

This bloke has a serious problem with your pussy cat. And all because he's noticed that a couple of local cats have been stalking the long-tailed tits nesting in his garden. Our writer is terribly excited about the fact that these birds are nesting there but less excited about the other perfectly natural thing going on - the cat stalking the nesting birds.

Now one thing is true, domestic cats kill a lot of birds every year - about 55 million according to the RSPB. And in the scale of things this seems an awful lot of predation. However, the reality is that predation by cats isn't responsible for any decline in bird populations. Here's the RSPB again:

Despite the large numbers of birds killed, there is no scientific evidence that predation by cats in gardens is having any impact on bird populations UK-wide. This may be surprising, but many millions of birds die naturally every year, mainly through starvation, disease, or other forms of predation. There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds.

It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season

We also know that of the millions of baby birds hatched each year, most will die before they reach breeding age. This is also quite natural, and each pair needs only to rear two young that survive to breeding age to replace themselves and maintain the population.

It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season, so cats are unlikely to have a major impact on populations. If their predation was additional to these other causes of mortality, this might have a serious impact on bird populations.

Yet this doesn't stop people like Andrew Brown writing their pig-ignorant rants about predation by cats. So here's a little more information. Firstly there have been significant declines in some bird species with farmland species the worst affected. However when we look at the main garden species - blackbirds, blues tits, great tits, wrens, robins and chaffinches - there hasn't been any decline in the period from 1970 to 2012. Indeed some species such as the long tailed tit (yes, the bird Andrew Brown is so agitated about) have seen what DEFRA describe as 'weak increase'. Put simply the birds that cats are most likely to predate aren't the species in decline.

There are about 7.9 million domestic cats in the UK (according to the Pet Food Manufacturers Association who I guess make a study of these things) which means that the average mog catches about seven birds a year. Just taking one species, the blackbird. There are about 5 million breeding pairs in the UK and, in a typical year, a pair of blackbirds with raise two or three broods - four if there's a mild autumn - with each brood comprising 3-5 chicks. That's around 60 million blackbird chicks every year. Repeat this calculation for blue tits, dunnocks, wrens, robins and that lovely long-tailed tit and we have literally hundreds of millions of chicks born every year.

Declines in bird populations are not down to cats. Mostly the declines are down to changes in habitat, modern farming practice and competition from other birds. Andrew Brown may, in his ever so urban and squeamish way, not like to see those little chicks munched up by next door's tom cat but it's a long step to get to blaming that cat for bird population declines that either aren't happening or else are down to fertilisers, hedge-removal and marshland drainage.

Cats have been part of human living for a very long time:

All domestic cats, the authors declared, descended from a Middle Eastern wildcat, Felis sylvestris, which literally means "cat of the woods." Cats were first domesticated in the Near East, and some of the study authors speculate that the process began up to 12,000 years ago.

And during that time those cats have done a sterling job of everyday pest control while also providing the playfulness and cuteness that makes them such an Internet sensation. It seems however that some people have a problem with cats. But instead of using their newspaper column to tell fibs about these wonderful creatures, such people should just come clean and say "I don't like cats". We understand this position (weird though it seems to us mog fans) and it's so much most honourable than trying to argue cat owners are bad people who don't care about wildlife.
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