3 ms·
Cats are everybody's problem. The scale of the carnage (there is no other word) is breathtaking. There is quite a bit of scientific literature available, howeve
by smackay 11y ago
Cats are everybody's problem. The scale of the carnage (there is no other word) is breathtaking. There is quite a bit of scientific literature available, however the popular press, though more sensationalist, gives a decent picture on how significant the problem is:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdoor-cats-kill-between-14-billion-and-37-billion-birds-a-year-study-says/2013/01/31/2504f744-6bbe-11e2-ada0-5ca5fa7ebe79_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdo...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/9-leading-causes-of-bird-deaths-in-canada-1.1873654 http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/9-leading-causes-of-bird-dea...
- ghostly_s 11y agoI won't claim to have the final answer on this issue, but the study you are citing has been subject to a brief statistical analysis which I think reveals it as highly suspect, at the least. http://www.alleycat.org/document.doc?id=633 http://www.alleycat.org/document.doc?id=633 http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-really-know-that-cats-kill-by-the-billions-not-so-fast http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-...
- smackay 11y agoSimilar research has been done in the UK (I believe by the Mammal Society, sorry cannot find a reference) and the estimated number of bird deaths per year was 300 million. This is a tough problem to quantify - typically the studies follow a number of cats closely and then extrapolate based on the estimated number of cats. Clearly this is close to an educated guess however the important part is that we are getting some idea of the scale of the problem. Given all the pressures on wildlife, this one is probably one of the more solvable problems.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]