1. I never let my cat go hungry, so it won’t hunt. Well fed cats are just as likely to hunt and kill wildlife as hungry house cats. Research has shown that cats will kill impulsively, eating only about half of the animals they destroy, on average. 2. Cats need to be outside to be happy. Cats develop habits based on their experience. If you keep your cat indoors, it can become quite accustom to staying there. If you have been letting your cat wander outside, it will need some help making the transition to becoming an indoor cat. You can find some helpful tips on making that transition by reading the articles listed on the Links page. 3. Cats need to be outside to be healthy. Just the opposite is true on average. See the next page for details. 4. Cats don’t really kill enough wildlife to justify making them stay indoors. Cats rank second behind habitat destruction as the reason for declining bird populations and kill millions of animals daily. 5. I had my cat declawed so it can’t kill wildlife. Even cats without claws are very capable of stalking and killing wildlife, including birds, which they bat out of the air. 6. I put a bell on my cat so it can’t sneak up on wildlife. Bells do little if any good. For one thing, birds and other animals don’t associate little bells with deadly danger--until it is too late. For another, cats are very stealthy, and can quietly sneak up on their prey, even when wearing a bell, leaving wildlife with no time to escape once the bell rings during the cats’ final pounce. 7. I live in the city, not in a wildlife area, so my can’t can’t kill wildlife. A surprising amount of wildlife lives in, or travels through, cities. Birds are especially vulnerable to significant losses due to urban cats left outside. 8. I taught my cat not to hunt. Cats are natural hunters. They cannot be taught to lose their instincts. If your cat seems to have been trained to stop hunting, it is more likely that it has simply learned not to hunt or bring home “trophies” in front of you. 9. Well, if cats are natural hunters, its only natural to let them hunt. Cats were native to Northern Africa when they were bred as pets almost two thousand years ago. They are not native to the Americas, Europe or Australia where they are reported to be having significant negative impacts on native wildlife species. Also, cats do not face the same population controls (such as starvation) that native predators do, so they tend to be much more concentrated in a given area. Instead of fitting into native ecosystems, cats deplete the food chain to the peril native predators, such as hawks and foxes. 10. Even if I keep my cat inside, there will still be other cats left outside. That’s probably true, but it is not a reason to contribute to the problem. Besides, you can do something about those other cats in your neighborhood. See the previous page for suggestions. |
