The last cat I owned was basically an indoor cat who got some supervised time outside. Of course, you couldn’t bring the groceries in from the car without him escaping. And more than once, he managed to kill a bird in the short time it took me to put the groceries on the counter and go back outside to retrieve him. He was like the ultimate predator. When I was a child, we had a cat that killed everything and then brought it home as a present. He was an outdoor cat and he just disappeared one day. It really upset me when I realized that God wasn’t going to answer my prayers and return my cat. Things were never the same between God and me after that. But I was about seven years old, so…

In any case, I’m not surprised to learn that cats kill a lot of stuff, but the estimates are kind of stunning.

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

The article goes on to to scold people who let their cats go outside. I think people should know that their cat will encounter many dangers and probably not live as long if you let them roam around outside. But the fact that they will kill birds and shrews and mice is not a reason to confine your cat. If you choose to keep your cat indoors for its whole life, it should be because you want your cat to have a long life, not because you want to preserve the shrew population in your neighborhood.

For feral cats, it makes sense to have a policy to deal with impact.

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