Cat Infestation

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1034285289400492436,00.html?mod=home_page_one_us

Fights between cat people (who often feed birds) and bird people (who often have cats) have sputtered for decades. But as the cat population has exploded -- to well more than 100 million by most estimates -- the conflict is rearranging the landscape of environmental politics.

How serious the problem is and what should be done about it are questions that have split veterinarians and wildlife biologists, divided animal-protection groups into rival camps, and united such strange bedfellows as bird-watchers and bird-shooters.

In one revealing battle, the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1998 funded a signature drive in California for a state ballot initiative to ban leg-hold and other traps as cruel, and promoting it with gruesome TV ads.

As soon as it passed, the National Audubon Society sued in federal court in San Francisco to block enforcement of the ban, claiming that the law didn't apply to federal lands and that trapping feral cats, foxes and other predators is an important tool in saving endangered and migratory birds. The National Trappers Association joined the suit.

In his ruling in favor of Audubon, Federal District Judge Charles Legge wrote: "Most such litigation pits environmentalists against industry or government. Here we have an unusual alignment of birds versus mammals. That is, two competing groups of environmentalists are in court to protect their respective wildlife constituents against one another."

...A century ago, most cats lived in towns and cities separated from wildlife habitat by huge belts of cleared farmland. Farmers kept cats as mousers. The cats also preyed on other animals and birds around the farm. But their overall rural numbers were small.

Today, many farms are gone. The eastern third of the U.S. is home to the largest natural reforestation success story on the planet. Between splotches of big cities, trees, bushes and meadows have reclaimed abandoned farmland across hundreds of millions of acres, recreating a lush habitat for wildlife. At the same time, suburban sprawl has pushed relentlessly deeper into that habitat. That's where the majority of Americans -- and their cats -- now live.

To let cats roam freely in this prey-rich environment is criminal, bird people say. They say cats aren't native; they're an introduced species, like kudzu vine.

"Like West Nile virus," says Linda Winter, who runs the five-year-old "Cats Indoors!" campaign for the American Bird Conservancy, a bird-protection group in Washington. Keeping cats from roaming freely outdoors saves cats from passing cars, disease and predators, and saves wildlife from cats, she says.

While the Humane Society supports the initiative, Washington-based Alley Cat Allies, a vociferous defender of stray cats, denounces "Cats Indoors" as "a new environmental witch hunt."

...Today, the number of pet cats in the U.S. is somewhere around 73 million, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association. That number doesn't include feral cats -- strays that live on handouts, garbage and hunting. "Feral cat numbers are pure guesses," says Martha Armstrong, vice president for companion animals at the Humane Society. "There could be 30 million ferals, or 150 million."

If the high figure is anywhere close to the actual number, the total U.S. cat population exceeds the combined populations of cattle (99 million), pigs (61 million) and sheep (eight million). By contrast, the estimated U.S. population of white-tail deer, another controversial species, is 33 million.

...The Humane Society says that one fertile female and her offspring can produce 420,000 cats in seven years. As strays, they lead short, brutal lives. Sterilization rates for pet cats jumped dramatically, to 80% in 1990 from 10% in 1970, says Peter Marsh, a Concord, N.H., lawyer who founded Solutions to Overpopulation of Pets to promote neutering and reduce euthanasia in shelters. But feral reproduction more than makes up for nonbreeding pets.

To underscore the damage these cats do, bird lovers often cite Stanley Temple, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin. His study team reported in the late 1980s that densities of free-range cats in some parts of rural Wisconsin outnumbered all midsize native predators -- foxes, raccoons, skunks and the like -- combined. The report said a "good guess" was that these cats killed from eight million to 217 million birds annually. It added that "most reasonable estimates indicate" that 39 million birds are killed by cats in the state. Citing other studies, the report went on:

"Nationwide, rural cats probably kill over a billion small mammals and hundreds of millions of birds each year. Urban and suburban cats add to this toll. Some of these kills are house mice, rats and other species considered pests, but many are native songbirds and mammals whose populations are already stressed by other factors, such as habitat destruction and pesticide pollution." It added: "World-wide, cats may have been involved in the extinction of more bird species than any other cause, except habitat destruction."

I side with the bird crowd. Cats are worthless.

 

Iranian clerics apparently fall into the pro-cat crowd:

http://www.iranmania.com/news/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=12504&NewsKind=CurrentAffairs