Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Aye, caramba

Return of the Killer Cats.

Spring time, little baby birds, and cats killing millions of the baby birds for fun.

Yawn.

That's not the yawn caused by general lack of energy in the spring but a yawn about a study that goes and quantifies the huge numbers of birds killed by cats every year.

Sounds unfair to the study?

No, the unfair part is that a German author takes a study that says "on wildlife of the United States" and does a numbers game on the situation in Germany.

Oops, that comes out to cats killing off an estimated 50% of the birdies here, so the author puts in a couple of "sounds really too high" and "cats in urban settings only" and adds a few good words about the baby bird season in general.

What a sweet bummer.

Sweet because it is so easy to demolish.

The article states unequivocally that cats will hunt and kill birds even if they are well fed and not hungry.

That is just so wrong.

Free-ranging cats in the United States have a very different life from their counterparts in Germany. Been there, seen it, seen and done spay and neuter, and blah, blah, blah.

Just because some cats are mindless killers like some human counterparts...hey, keep your human locked up inside so he or she cannot go and kill, perfect.

We won't go all pseudo darwinian on you as some comments to that article do, but if you care to collect data, here are some:

2 cats in the yard for 4 years.
Number of birds killed: 0
Number of mice and rats killed: hundreds



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