A Michael Broad Blog
If American feral cats only ate starlings the world would be put to rights. It would solve the ‘non-native’, ‘invasive species’ problem of North America at a stroke. To all the purists of American wildlife the thought of non-native species killing and consuming each other is bliss. But it does highlight the poor argument …
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 …
Moffett Field is a few miles south of the Googleplex; Google’s office complex. Some of the Google employees like to look after the cats in the grounds of the complex. They feed and generally take care of them. This practice sits nicely with the general attitude of Google. There’s quite a freewheeling open attitude …
Libby Watson writing on splinternews.com coins a term which I like: birdheads. It’s a derivation of ‘petrolheads’ (car lovers) and it is very apt. It applies to ornithologists and people such as Jonathan Franzen, an American novelist and essayist, who prefers birds to cats. He thinks they are more important. And he believes that …
Perhaps it is time for cat owners/lovers to do something which pleases people who like birds; to stop the war of words and try to ameliorate the situation and the situation is that cat owners are criticised for letting their outdoor cats prey on birds. For bird lovers the situation looks worse than it …
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 …
The full title of the book published by Princeton University Press is: Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer. The authors are Dr Peter P Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and Chris Santella, a freelance writer who was probably employed to make sure the grammar was okay because poor …
This is a comment from Pippa Mealings who lives in Australia. It is a very fair-minded and sensible comment based on fact not supposition which all of the misguided estimates by the authorities are when they describe how domestic and feral cats decimate native wildlife in Australia. “In mentioning Australia, the following fact should be …
