What affects us affects cats
I am sure that I’m going to give cat haters and ornithologists ammunition to criticise me and domestic cats. But I have an answer to that. My cat, Gabriel, is the only cat that I have shared my life with who has attacked and killed birds. My previous cats were not particularly interested in …
For years they have been at each other’s throats arguing about how many birds cats kill annually. Bird lovers say 4 billion birds are killed by cats each year in the USA, many of which are native species. Cat lovers like me say that the numbers are estimates based on local studies and extrapolated. …
It is said that Queen Elizabeth II is allergic to cats. It is also said that her staff at the Sandringham estate are killing accidentally or deliberately wandering outside domestic cats because they threaten young pheasants. Pheasants are shot on the estate for amusement. The Queen loves dogs and horses but apparently dislikes cats …
Here are two interesting instances when smart birds – in these cases crows and a woodpecker – took revenge on cats. The smart birds are part of the crow family (corvids) which includes . The woodpecker is part of the family Picidae. The picture above is a jackdaw taken by me in Richmond Park, …
A cat is overcome by the magnitude and magnificence of the quantity of prey before him. His prey selection sensors are overloaded so he takes a mad jump into the middle of the mass of pigeons and voilà…nada. He gets nothing but a flying leap into the unknown ending with a heavy landing and …
This is a high quality picture of my cat and the pigeon that he killed while I was out at the gym. He kills pigeons by suffocating them with a throat bite much like lions killing large prey. Usually domestic cats kill birds with a neck bite which breaks the spinal cord. The cat …
The South Essex Wildlife Hospital have presented, online, a grisly photograph of birds killed, it is implied, by domestic cats. The photograph is published on this page. What they say, and the photograph that they have published, has sparked off, yet again, that intractable and unsolvable debate about (a) how much wildlife (particularly birds) …
It is very difficult to assess if domestic cat predation of birds makes a difference to population sizes of the various species in the long term. I’ve said it before that some scientists are frankly biased and their studies are unreliable partly because they do small scale studies and then scale up the figures …
