Are concerns of cat predation and effects on birds/wildlife valid?
Jeff Elliott wrote an extensive article for The Sonoma County Independent, “The Accused,” March 3-16, 1994, where he investigated findings frequently used to implicate cats in the decrease of wildlife populations. Here is an excerpt from the article listing the studies and his findings of their accuracy. “But what do those studies actually say? And how good is the science in them? Here’s some background on the two most frequently mentioned studies, cited in Cats and Wildlife: A Factsheet from the National Audubon Society. “Britain’s 5 million cats kill about 20 million birds per year.” “Studying the hunting trophies brought home by 78 cats in a single English village, Peter Churcher and John Lawton found birds were 35 percent of the kill-by far the highest estimate in any such study. In a 1989 condensation for Natural History magazine, they multiplied their results by the estimated number of cats in the entire nation. Rarely are projections made with such limited data, except in junior
