Neighbours, cats and birds.

[Birdmurderer]

NC for this but regular.

We've lived in out house for a year, on a "hello" basis with next door. She's got a voice you can hear 3 streets away and her eldest daughter seems to have inherited it. A few issues but generally ok neighbours.

We have 3 cats - one who is old and never leaves the decking area of our garden, one who seems to have another family a few doors down (other side to neighbour in question), and one who likes to peep through their chain link fence at them but is too much of a mamas boy to leave our garden. (we've had a lot of time during lockdown to confirm our theories about where they go during the day). They made it clear from day one they don't like cats and will talk loudly about how awful our cats are when they know we're within earshot .

DP just went outside to get his bike and the woman is sobbing in the garden. Spots DP and starts shouting at him because apparently one of ours cats has eaten a bird that she was looking after (she has a feeding table in her garden).

DP apologised - for what I'm not sure - and sort of left it there and went off about his day. I was still in bed when all this happened.

He's gone out now and I can hear her sobbing and shouting in the garden about this bird.

There are 2 big cats the other side of her, one of which is horrible and has put my little cat in the vets twice. I think that's the culprit over my fat old one who sleeps 23 hours a day, the deserter, and the little one who can't catch his own tail.

AIBU to think she's massively overreacted? I have quite bad social anxiety and I am not good with confrontation so I'm hiding indoors now.

Cars un neutered can cause issues, cats need to be free.
Birds eat insets, cats hunt the way it is, as do roaming foxes, cats kill rats and mice

Some cat owners are crazy

Blame drivers for running over their pet
Blame dog owners for killing their cat
Blame people for having anti freeze in their own garage which the cat goes into

NEVER blames themselves for refusing to contain their pet which ultimately causes the above scenarios.

Clearly don't love their cats that much. Whatever happened to prevention is better than cure?

Of course now there'll be comments about cats being untrainable and "roaming free"

If someone can train bumblebees and butterflies to move from one area to another than it's sure as hell possible to teach cats. People are too lazy though.

"bollox, keep your pets inside during the night or build them a cat run or secure your garden so that they can't get out."

Why in the night? It will be vermin they go for at night, not birds.

Anyway, how does she know it was a cat? Unless she saw it. We saw a sparrow hawk kill a bird in our garden the other day. As it's getting quieter because of lockdown, all the animals are getting more daring.

I can’t stand cats. Our neighbour has one and I shoo it out/away as soon as I see it. We feed the birds in our garden and I’d be gutted if I saw a cat kill one (although wouldn’t mention it to the neighbours!)

People are getting massively confused between animals that are wild and kill, and domestic pets that kill.
It’s not about the individual animals instincts. It is about whether they belong in the ecosystem or not.
Foxes do. Cats don’t. It’s that simple.
In a natural ecosystem, the real circle of life, an animal that is old or injured and cannot hunt will die. And if there isn’t enough food they will die allowing prey to bounce back.
Cats are fed, so however low the prey population is there will still be loads of cats out there preying on them.
Cats are one of the introduced animals responsible for declining populations of wildlife in many parts of the world.

Cat owners need to acknowledge that and try to mitigate it.
It is not a natural part of the circle of life in this country because cats would not live in the wild here.

Cats and foxes do not kill things for 'kicks' nor do they kill things for 'shits and giggles'.

How intelligent do you think these animals are?

They kill because they are driven by instinct.

Cats will hunt over and over before they manage to get a kill. If you
have no idea when you might eat again you need to kill whenever you get the chance, which is why a fox will kill a whole coop of chickens rather than just the one it might need for food at the time.

Someone on my fb page during a discussion about people feeding foxes, claimed that because foxes often scavenge out of dustbins nowadays they had completely lost their ability to hunt. Stupid woman. As if a few generations of getting easy food is going to overcome an animals hard wired natural instinct.

These animals kill because they're driven to survive. Not because they like to 'play' with their food, or for the fun of it.

Oh and the idea that cats are playing with a mouse or rat is nonsense.

Those patting and jumping movements are to protect the cat from being bitten by the other animal. A bite from a rat or mouse could prove fatal for a cat so in order to protect itself it leaps and parries in order to avoid the other animals teeth.

It might look cute to see a kitten jump about after a feathery toy but those movement are not play they are deadly serious and could mean the difference between life and death for the cat when it starts to hunt in earnest.

Why in the night? It will be vermin they go for at night, not birds.

Many birds (and also rabbits) are mainly crepuscular feeders so around dawn and dusk. Keeping a cat in overnight is mainly to stop it (a) getting into fights and (b) to stop its dawn predations.

Obviously cats, like all animals, are amoral, so their actions in 'unnatural' environments are the responsibility of humans,

@pigsDOfly I have witnessed cats playing with prey. Once, I saw a cat catch a mouse, bite it, and let it go When the mouse started escaping the cat pounced in it again. Again the cat let it go a little and pounced again. It’s different from batting them around. You can see this a lot if you’ve spent time on farms, as I did as a child.

My grandmother had a beautiful cat on the farm who was an outstanding hunter. Once, a weasel broke into the chicken coop. The day after, the cat dropped a dead weasel at the doorstep.

Cats do play with their prey. I have had cats all my life. They enjoy the fun of the chase. It’s horrible to watch. They aren’t doing it for survival and they don’t eat their kills. The number of live mice I’ve had brought into the house and then abandoned because the car has got bored are too numerous to mention. You can’t blame the car, but you can put a collar with bell on . Keeping them in overnight helps, but keeping any cat indoors all the time is just cruel.

Cat not car obviously!!

@RunningAwaywiththeCircus, yes, she received a lot of praise and love from my grandmother. She was always a great cat. In fact, all the farm cats were great, and tolerant of us as children. The dogs were great too.

@RunningAwaywiththeCircus your comment on the Australian cane toad leads me to post this recent interesting article about cats in Australia with a view that they have (along with feral cats) caused issues with some species of birds.
www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/15/keep-pet-cats-indoors-say-researchers-who-found-they-kill-230m-native-australian-animals-each-year

@SweetMarmalade, then there’s this story-

www.google.ca/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/tibbles-the-cat-and-stephens-island-wren-2014-12%3famp

Runningaway - but evolution takes thousands of years.

Our own Scottish wildcat is endangered in part due to hybridisation with domestic cats.
Having worked in Mauritius with some critically endangered bird species, cats are one of the introduced animals causing problems.
A consrvation forum I attended on Australian wildlife included a discussion about the impact of pet cats. Yes, cane toads are a bigger problem but cats take their toll too. Go to any Australian zoo and look at the work done by the education teams to try and show people how to manage their cats so as not to affect wildlife.

When you say more spoils for others, what others do you mean? Wild animals? Things that either eat fledglings or starve? In which case, aren’t cats competitors with an unfair advantage in that they get fed anyway, and who are therefore artificially holding down the numbers of wild predators?

Since cats were kept for their ability to keep down mice and rodents over centuries, their worth was measured by how well they did this. So if we’re now shrieking in horror at the very thing they were valued for, it is a bit unfair. The best hunters probably survived longer as they were fed and cared for. So it’s in their DNA

Having worked in Mauritius with some critically endangered bird species, cats are one of the introduced animals causing problems

Another being rats, perhaps?

Yup. And some unexpected contenders.
Goats, who browse in a completely different way to native herbivores and so change the nature of the plants, which impacts on food availability. Macaques, which are not native and predate nests.

"It is not a natural part of the circle of life in this country because cats would not live in the wild here."
Never heard of the wild cats of Scotland?! Try keeping one of them as a pet. They live in the wild. So do feral cats.

Were you getting at the idea that the cats could kill the rats? Because that tends not to happen. Given a choice between killing rats which fight back, and native bird and reptile species which have not evolved alongside cats, and therefore are not equipped to fight back, guess which one cats go for?

Tabby, read my next post a bit further down. I am well aware wild cats are native to this country. Domestic cats are threatening the existence of the Scottish Wild cat through interbreeding. Domestic moggies and the native wild cat are not the same thing. Domestic mogs are still not subject to the same pressures as a wild population. Which is the point I was trying to make.