PART I: Cats as predators; we're meat eaters, too

Last night's prey

When I look at the field mouse tunnels on our lawn, I feel no grief! They tunnel under the snow, as this Red Fox video shows. Our shed has deermice (left) in what was a box that houses the electrical plug. I think the first owner ran an extension cord from the house to light the backyard shed. The next owner must have cut it off. The box remains as a nice little mouse den. Daisy told me there are mice in there! When I open the shed door to get some bird seed, they run and hide.

I often find mice eating the bird seed. Sometimes, they will hop into the garbage cans, in which I store the bird seed, and when I next go back to the cans they will have sat there overnight, happily devouring the seed.

Oliver caught red squirrels our first year here, but they've had babies, and came back with compensatory reproduction. Thankfully! I felt so guilty. The mice are plentiful, as well, and form the basis of our cats' outdoor activities. As a meat-eater, I cannot judge. They'll bring garter snakes to me, poor things just harvesting the frogs from the goldfish pond, which I release in the far-off meadow. I liken them to our wolf and coyotes, they prey on the weak,  slow to run, not-so-swift (chipmunks really are dumb as bricks - why built a home outside our back door) and keep the gene pool strong. The wild canines, as well as our domestic felines, eat more mice, voles, moles than we know. Bless their hearts.

Daisy, trying to catch the chickadees.
They're far too quick for her, sitting tweeting, and teasing her!

Birds are clever and visit various food sources throughout the day. Deer, not so much, and tend to exploit an area, then move on. Ours is their winter yard, where they congregate feeling safe in our meadow, unlike Bambi and his momma.

There are 'research studies' out there, proclaiming how many critters cats kill. The media has grabbed these stories and run with this poor science. Now, as with the deer that we feed, if you regularly feed the birds, you'll support the species. So long as you continue to feed them. If you live in a rural area, have access to a large acreage (1200 acres of land nearby), and feed them quality food, I'm happy to continue our feeding program begun by the previous owners.
They expect it, their meagre mouthful each day.

Caught it in the seeds!

This cat study [KittyCam] was a lesson in sloppy science on the part of National Geographic (media seeking readers), for a project seeking funding, with these conclusions. Perhaps Tree Hugger embraces the 'call to action' popular in the media, but the numbers of cats studied was too small, environmental conditions will vary from area to area, rural/urban, country-to-country, and there are too many variables to make it a valid study, susceptible to inflated numbers. Any extrapolation of the results from that small a collection of data to world-wide statistics, is criminal. You can conclude and extrapolate for Georgia, for a temperate climate, cannot compare to this climate.

Field mouse - they've been nipping my goldfish
pond liner.

Reputable studies need more than a study population of 60 cats, with 30% capturing prey. That said, only a minority of these cats hunted at all all the time. The prey recorded included Carolina Anoles (abundant lizards), voles (abundant) then unspecified invertebrates (probably abundant), and last of all birds. One cat refused cat food, which further changes predictive value of cats. As with all predators, they are most likely killing the sick, injured, and most commonly found birds, when they do get a bird. One has to put it in perspective. My field is filled with mice, judging by the mouse tunnels, yet they aren't caught all that often.

"You can be pretty sure they're not bringing down endangered American Eagles; and we don't have endangered birds in our forest." wrote one commenter. 

A GOOD scientist can not extrapolate that cats are killing 500 million birds a year from THIS study; "cats are likely killing more than 4 billion animals per year, including at least 500 million birds."

deer mouse

The American Bird Conservancy extrapolates this data from Athens, Georgia, to a 'slaughter of 4 Billion birds', yet it doesn't apply everywhere, especially to non-feral cats, like ours. Nor can you extrapolate to cats who live in cold regions, where they are indoors, out of the snow and cold, or barn cats.

And, yes, Kellie, we can point fingers at one another, but ultimately, naturalists must be realists. As with the 'End Poverty Now' campaigns, we aren't going to eliminate cat ownership. It is a fruitless endeavour, especially in rural Canada, to keep all barn cats and feral cats indoors! There is a purpose to their captures.

KittyCam Technology Reveals How Much Wildlife Is Killed by Outdoor Cats

The results of the study showed that of the 60 cats wearing the cameras, 30% captured and killed prey with an average of one kill for every 17 hours spent outside, or 2.1 kills per week. You can watch several select videos of cats' activity, like fighting off an opossum, making a new cat friend, and birdwatching.
We used Kitty Cams to investigate the activities of urban free-roaming cats in Athens, Georgia from Nov. 2010 -Oct. 2011

I had such a time with rude, abusive posts, wishing a zoonostic cat disease on me and my grandchildren, that I had to delete them. As with other invasive species, we must learn to live with cats. From a discussion, she went into rants. Very rude and disrespectful youngster.

She got me banned from a Facebook sight, as I wanted people to discuss this topic reasonably. It didn't happen. It skewed into cats as invasive species.