Don’t Blame Cats

I operate a retirement center for one persnickety resident, my cat. We named him Pandemonium as a kitten because he was tons of both fun and trouble. Long, strong and large enough to weigh upwards of 17 ponds before he slimmed down to a fighting weight of 11, Pandy has become a wise 15-year-old cat who has arthritis and kidney trouble. It’s he who graces my blog because, damn, I love him.

A digression, Pandy refuses to acknowledge his name in short or long form but does respond to the generic “kitty-cat” quite well. By quite well, I mean he will acknowledge that someone is calling him and, if he thinks it’s in his best interest (either food or getting some behind the ears rubbing) he will even come on over and say hello. I think I’ve called him Pandemonium twice in the last decade, both times when annoyed at him, like a displeased father calling a child by their full name, including middle.

A lifelong indoor/outdoor cat and inveterate mouser, Pandy now relies on pain meds to get through the day with just a serious limp. He still loves sleeping under my flowers, or going on walkabouts on our half acre property, as well as the lands immediately adjoining ours. And, since cats want to be cats till they die, limp and all he’s still chasing after prey. Quite spectacularly, he still gets about one kill a week, mice, rabbits, voles and other small prey.

These days I try to monitor his movements, but there is really no protecting an independent minded cat when they’re outside. Not without costly surveillance technology. I thought of a collar cam but besides the cost, Pandy’s never worn a collar. If you’re tisking about his lack of a collar, don’t. I’ve asked Pandy if he wants one and the answer is a definitive “No.”

Pandy’s such a good mouse that he’s kept our old farmhouse, with its myriad small inlets perfect for rodent invasions, fairly free of rodents since he arrived here full of love and mischief in equal measure.

One type of kill is exceedingly rare, perhaps twice in fifteen years my cat has killed a bird. And I fed the birds for about ten years too. Pandy would stay in the bushes near the feeder, but still had little success hunting them. I’ve asked others living with cat hunters and they report similar results. This makes sense. With the advent of farming and larges scale stored food, rodents became more of a problem which attracted that segment of the hunting population that already lived on rodents, cats. Cats are literally built for killing mice and other small mammals. Humans are nothing if not adaptable, so we adapted to cats. Over the course of their time with us, cats unlike dogs, never really became domesticated. There’s evidence for this in cat DNA compared to wild sources and dog DNA compared to wolves. There’s much more divergence between domesticated dogs and wolves than between cats and their baseline stock in old Eygpt and the Fertile Crescent. Interestingly the biggest divergence is in their coats. We like cute killers with a tabby coat.

For something like half their tangled relationship with people, which only goes back about 10,000 years compared to dogs 40,000, cats kept to themselves. They stayed in the shadows and ate the rodents who were also busy becoming part of our messy story.

And now we get to my pet peeve (forgive the pun). There’s shitty science out there claiming that cats kill an enormous number of birds. I’ve had cats for about 45 years and not one has killed birds with any regularity. Pseudo-science articles using highly questionable data sources (like the remembrances of pet owners in one study in New Zealand) have come up what every cat owner has suspected is wildly exaggerated data about cat bird kills. I’ve had bird lovers tell me I’m akin to a mass murderer for disregarding my four-legged avian menace. When I ask them if they’ve ever seen evidence of cats successfully killing large amounts of birds, I’ve never heard people say yes.

This is not to say a cat wouldn’t want to kill a little bird. I’ve already admitted their cute little barely domesticated killers. Birds probably taste like chicken, which Pandy loves. Perhaps a small percentage of cats achieve a high success rate killing birds. The majority of kitties just aren’t built for success at that endeavor. But the idea that scientific journals could deny the evidence in front of their face and publish articles proclaiming outdoor house cats are participating in avian ethnic cleansing seems absurd. Consider this, where outdoor cats exist in their millions, suburbia, is where birds are doing spectacularly well. The argument goes that cats are outrageous killers who without human intervention, i.e. imprisoning all cats inside, will decimate cute little bird populations. But in the Suburban landscape, the biggest test scenario for this theory, the place where cats and birds exist together in large numbers, birds are doing extremely well. When real world facts contradict a flawed analysis, in order for the facts to be ignored someone’s been sipping the cool aid laced with stubbornness.

This blog post https://outthefrontdoor.com/2015/09/17/bird-conservationists-whats-wrong-with-this-picture/ does a nice job pointing out the holes in the cat killer idea and has links to other pro-cat information. But all you really need is to look at a cat. They may try to kill birds, but birds have one significant advantage. Cats can only fall when they try to fly.