The Toll of Outdoor Cats

The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental organization Resilient Palisades to deliver a weekly “green tip” to readers. This week’s tip was written by Sheda Morshed.

Some of nature’s vital services rely on birds: They minimize harmful insects, control rodent populations, pollinate our plants, and disperse (and sometimes fertilize) wildflower and tree seeds.

And even though birds have persisted on our planet for millions of years, humans are the direct cause of their steep and alarming decline, as reported by The Cornell Lab. Since 1970, we have lost three billion breeding adult birds in North America alone, with devastating losses in all habitats.

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services declared 23 wildlife and plant species extinct; 13 were birds, including the ivory-billed woodpecker and Bachman’s warbler.

The number one threat to the disappearance of birds is habitat loss. The number two threat: outdoor cats, both feral and family cats. Annually, outdoor cats kill an estimated 2.6 billion birds, according to The Cornell Lab.

The decline of birds has significant impacts on humans, including plant extinctions, the loss of agricultural pest control and the spread of disease, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America shared. But luckily, this is one big issue that we can tackle directly.

And we are now in the bird fall migration season—where birds fly from their summer grounds to their wintering grounds, using our backyards as their final destination or as a resting stop on their long migration. So this is an especially critical season to keep cats indoors. Here are some tips on how to responsibly make your cat happy:

• Build or buy an outdoor enclosure instead.
• Walk your cat on a leash.
• Use the internet for DIY or store-bought mind exercise games.
• Make sure your cat is spayed or neutered to reduce their roaming desire.

If bird extinction is not a strong enough argument for your doe-eyed cat who’s scratching to go outside, maybe “PetMD 5 Threats to Outdoor Cats” will inspire your tough love, including ingested toxins, attacks by coyotes and other predators, dogs, and of course, vehicles.

If the fate of birds isn’t convincing enough, then consider our native wildlife: Outdoor cats also injure or kill other beneficial local wildlife, including our Lyme-disease-preventing-western fence lizard and tick-killing skunks and opossums.

Our individual actions do add up. Unless we act as a collective whole in our daily lives, natural systems that help and support us will continue to break down.