Cat-killed Birds
The ‘State of Indian Birds 2023’ exercise recently concluded that birds in India are faring poorly.
Among many factors, the report acknowledged a silent bird-killer lurking in India’s urban areas: cats.
In the U.S. alone, free-ranging domestic cats have been estimated to kill billions of birds every year.
One study found that cats may be the “single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality” for birds and mammals in the U.S.
The study also found that Worldwide, free-ranging domestic cats have caused or contributed to dozens of extinctions of bird species recorded in the IUCN Red List.
Study conducted in India:
A study on the hunting habits of free-ranging domestic cats on urban birds in Dehradun, a city that has 590 of the 1,359 species of birds recorded in the country.
The study found in a survey that pet cats hunted birds the most, followed by reptiles, insects, rodents, and amphibians.
Cats can climb, so they can reach habitats such as the nests of canopy-dwellers.
Cat saliva is also more likely to contain bacteria (Pasteurella multocida) that are lethal to birds.
So if the direct impact of an attack doesn’t kill them, the bacteria will.
Cats also maintain a ‘landscape of fear’.
This means that when cats are known to be in a particular area, the bird would avoid foraging or nesting there.
They end up investing time and energy to be extra vigilant and to find alternative areas.
This affects them individually and on a population level.
Trap-Neuter-Return Policy
Domestic cats (Felis catus) weren’t always this widespread.
Palaeogenetic studies have found that wildcats (Felis sylvestris) were probably first domesticated in West Asia some 10,000 years ago.
They spread via sailing ships much later.
Today, they are one of the world’s 100 worst invasive alien species.
The proper way to deal with the cat problem has spiralled into a vicious debate in the west.
Animal welfare groups usually advocate the ‘trap-neuter-return’ (TNR) policy, whereby stray cats or dogs are trapped, sterilised, and returned in the hope that this will reduce their populations.
This is considered a humane approach because it could improve the quality of a cat’s life as well.
The trouble is that cats are not easy to trap. And unless most of them are sterilised at once, the population will not decrease in a sustained way.
This is why TNR programmes around the world have had limited success.
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