If you have a cat you have to stop it scaring and eating birds

[lasagnelle]

Get a bell collar or something. Give the wildlife a chance. Can you train cats to leave birds alone?

What do spiders do?

Cats can be trained quite easily. It’s down to the owners to do this.

i have lots of responsible cat owner friends. And sadly, some neighbour owners who just don’t care.

They kill birds and baby squirrels in our neighbourhood and it’s heartbreaking. they also poo in our garden and dig up our fruit and vegetable patches.

I don’t buy “this is what they do” because I have a large hunting dog - and we don’t give him free roam to hunt. There would be uproar if we did.

I’ve also been approached by 2 neighbours saying I need to keep my dog INSIDE when their cats are out, because both cats stupidly try to gain entry to our house.

I'm sorry, if you have a cat who hunts you cannot train it to not hunt. Ffs

You can stop it sure, by keeping it in, but no, you cannot train a cat to not hunt. If you think you have then you've not had a hunter.

What's your diet? Do you drive? Pollution caused by producing the clothes you wear, go abroad for holidays?

It's not even close.

I'm leaving this here.

We need cats far more than a lot of people realise.

Apparently after a quick Google, spiders keep us from famine! If there weren’t enough of them then our crops would get consumed by insects because the spiders weren’t eating them

Our cat is no match for our local seagulls.

I mean, cats gonna cat. I have saved most of the birds my cats have brought in, including a pheasant 😱. But sadly not all of them. Luckily the murdering is slowing down a bit now they’re getting older. What I don’t understand is people who have both cats and bird feeders. Luring birds to where cats live is not a very bright idea.

I'm not sure why you're blaming cats!

Use of insecticides and building over the countryside is killing birds. Even if cats didn't kill any, bird numbers would be limited by loss of habitat and food sources.

See @lasagnelle we need them to hunt to keep the eco system in balance

At least they're not shitting all over public areas, beaches, parks, not in every cafe, shop, pub etc, or savaging and killing people.

I keep mine shut indoors at night which is when they're most likely to hunt and bring you back a present to wake up to, and also when they'd be more likely to get hit by a car and killed themselves. But I believe having a completely indoor cat and even a catio is cruel.

What? If I had a cat it would be worse for the environment than what I already do. I do not drive or go abroad for holiday as I'm poor.

Gosh! Wow

It's really not. My cats don't have any interest in going out. They're all rescues so I guess they've been there and got the T shirt! If a drip of water gets accidentally dropped on them, they flee like they've been scalded!

My cat kills nothing.
She scares the vet quite a lot though

In that case, nobody would ever feed birds, because cats get everywhere! It is though perfectly possible to have both. I think the benefits to the birds of being fed outweighs the risk of a casualty!

Have you ever trained a cat??!

Your large hunting dog could cause a lot more damage than Fluffy down the street!

My old cat was so big the birds used to hear him a mile off, especially when he jumped down. Hours of entertainment watching him try. He bought a few mice back when he was younger, lost interest thought.

My neighbour lost some koi carp from their pond and tried to blame the local cats. However it’s not that unusual to see a bird of prey in our gardens and there was a crane once. There are always predators.

The people who bought our last house decimated our lovely garden! Philistines!

The problem op is that pet owners claim to be animal lovers. But the truth is they only love their own animal(s) and don’t give a stuff about wildlife if biodiversity. They just continue to introduce more and more non-indigenous animals and justify it to themselves as being “animal lovers”.

Well they can fuck off out my house then as I am not growing any food indoors. Bastard things. Rodents and reptiles are cute but spiders are evil fuckers

We are cat lovers but also members of RSPB so find it really distressing when our two young cats catch birds.
(Our previous puss couldn't have cared less about them).
Collars fall off so we now restrict the mogs to only a couple of short spells outside per day. Luckily they don't wander far and they bring themselves home on a regular basis so it's possible to do that.
They spend the rest of the day running around the house, playing with toys and each other, eating and kipping.
They are never let out once it starts to get dark.
But we couldn't take this measure if they were roamers, which a lot of cats are

I guess you did? These links might not be quite to the standard of scientific expertise you demanded, but it’s probably more significant than this -

“My cat catching perfectly healthy birds by stealth, speed … not catching crippled weak birds.”

What is your expertise on the relative health and likelihood of survival re: wildlife? Are you qualified to assert that whatever your own cat has caught is perfectly healthy?

As I said before, look it up 🤷‍♀️
https://pangovet.com/statistics/how-many-birds-do-cats-kill-statistics-uk

https://www.birdspot.co.uk/garden-birds-and-cats/cats-and-the-decline-of-garden-birds#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Mammal%20Society,which%2055%20million%20are%20birds.

Two threats can co-exist, but cats really are a drop in the ocean compared to habitat loss.

There won't be any birds for cats to kill if humans don't sort out the more pressing issue.

That being said, I do have a bell on my cat's collar even though he's mostly a homebod nowadays.