Outdoor Cats Are No Longer Cute — and Here’s Why
Yes, even Mister Fluffy
It’s no secret that outdoor cats are a huge (and still growing) problem, both in America and the rest of the world. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, conservative estimates show that outdoor cats kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds and between 6.3 and 22.3 billion mammals each year — and that’s just in the U.S. alone. And if a bird is to be caught by a cat and escape, it’s fairly likely it will die anyway — mammalian saliva is toxic to birds. Many people point out that it couldn’t be THAT bad — their cat wears a collar, comes in at night, and is fed daily. How much of a toll could one cat take on the environment?
First off: If your cat isn’t spayed or neutered, it no longer counts as just one cat. The ASPCA estimates that 100-400 cats may result from one unspayed female cat. Males are a different issue entirely. Cats are not monogamous creatures, and your unneutered male will happily impregnate everyone he can (and if those cats are owned, not ferals, the kittens will become someone else’s problem). And if your male cat is to breed with ferals, he will be part of bringing life to kittens that will grow up entirely in the wild — both taking an ecological toll, and suffering through hot days and cold nights without water, lack of food, predators, and so on. Millions of cats are put to…
