Why you should keep your cat indoors

Is our beloved house cat among our most lethal, invasive species? Before getting into the latest research about this, let me say at the outset that I harbor no ill will towards cats. Indeed, I’m a dog owner (and lover), but there were cats at home when I was growing up, lovable strays that we adopted. With seven kids, my parents were always saying no to most of the critters each of us at one time or another would bring into the kitchen and plead about sorrowfully. But a couple of kitties passed muster, grew up with us, and were a delight.

Cats have quite a history. Long considered to have originated in ancient Egypt, researchers last June sequenced DNA from more than 200 ancient cats. Just published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, this research tells us, “Feline domestication occurred about 6,400 years ago in southwest Asia through southeast Europe.” The Egyptian cats came after that, and spread rapidly along the trade routes in the Mediterranean and across Asia and the Indian Ocean. Their dispersal went global thanks to their pest-control ability, and how well they served as companions. They have not only evolution behind their success as a species, but also, as this study puts it, “humans really liked them.”

So while our love for felines has endured all these thousands of years, we have to reconsider our habit of allowing them to wander outdoors. Scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, along with others from the Fish and Wildlife Service, combined the findings of a number of research projects and pilot studies and applied them nationally. As reported in the January 2013 issue of the journal “Nature Communications” and reported in the New York Times on Jan. 29 of that year, they concluded a shocking new truth: “cats are far deadlier than anyone realized.” This study is considered the first serious estimate of just how much wildlife America’s vast population of free roaming domestic cats manages to kill each year.

Whether it’s pet cats that spend part of the day outdoors, or the increasing number of strays and ferals, they “kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals annually.” These are native mammals, such as chipmunks, shrews and voles instead of introduced pests such as the Norway rat.

These kill rates are up to four times higher than previously thought. Just as alarming is that more birds and mammals die in the mouths of cats than from automobile strikes, colliding with buildings and windmills, and from pesticides and poisons. But as songbirds and mammals preyed upon by cats are in rapid decline, cats numbers grow the world over. Another tragedy in this story is the climbing millions of unwanted cats euthanized every year by animal shelters.

To allow cats outside lets their super-predator instincts run wild. The American Bird Conservancy attributes the extinction of more than 30 bird species directly to cat predation. But cat owners who irresponsibly demand that their felines deserve a bit of freedom are actually not very cat-friendly, as the “Kitty Cams” project at the University of Georgia reported. They placed cameras on the collars of indoor-outdoor pet cats to track their activities. While the cat participants freely devoured birds, frogs, field mice and the like, Kitty Cams showed how they contended with larger dogs, barely dodged cars and even drank antifreeze. Humane societies warn that letting cats outside shortens their lives.

What about feral cats, who are always outside? Animal shelter operators concur with what our local Petco staff tell us: Suffolk’s East End alone has literally hundreds of feral cat “colonies.” We have the increasingly popular trap/neuter/return (to the outdoors) program, widely believed to be more humane than euthanasia, with the goal that the colonies will eventually disappear. But conservationists, for their part, contend that trap and release encourages pet owners to abandon their cats to these feral colonies, confident that volunteers will keep them fed.

Dr. George Fenwick of the Bird Conservancy describes feral cat colonies as “subsidized predators,” and survive in far greater concentrations than do any wild carnivores that have to make their way in the world, for the same reason that underlies their success for all these past millennia: people love them. But even when fed, they hunt and kill in daunting numbers.

So how to solve this problem can only begin with a change in attitude. Dogs in our region pose not nearly the same problem owing to leash laws and an active animal control presence (though worldwide, wandering dogs in their own right are also a terrible scourge for wildlife). Letting pet cats outside is cruel to wildlife as well as to them. Adoption of healthy cats needs far greater emphasis. And here’s a seemingly excessive but necessary approach for feral colonies: volunteers who serve them should find a way to enclose them after neutering. But when we leave our beloved cats, domestic or outdoor cats, to wander at will, we contribute to a worsening problem for both them and the declining world of nature.