No actually he's counter acting the damage done to the environment by his consumerist lifestyle

Ah, but like so much in canada the legislation is largely irrelevent unless people choose to actually enforce it, so in practice cats come and go unless some neighbour takes it upon themselves to be the cat police I suspect.


Regarding cats as indoor creatures, Im afraid I am on dbds side. If you have to declaw a cat to make it more suited to indoor life, then its simply not a species genetically predisposed to indoor life. Its not sentimentality, millions of years of evolution have hardwired cats brains to want to roam a territory and exhibit certain behaviours. Most (but not all) cats once they have seen outside will want to keep going back, so really you have to decide with a kitten that its never going to go out. I would say if you are going to do that then why not just get an obviously indoor animal instead.

I can certainly see the neighbours in a city subdivision being unimpressed with next doors cat using the flower beds as a litter box, and thats the real reason behind the outside cat rules, nothing to do with birds. Fortunatley we have enough space that thats not much of a factor (especially as other neighbours have cats who police there own territory), and ours seem to mostly prefer to use the boxes provided anyway...

Two sides to every story I guess, I dont see this is a right or wrong issue..of our three cats one could care less about being outside, one will escape at every oportunity, and one likes to go out now and again. And all are safely inside at night when the larger creatures prowl outside, and seldom stir in the winter. No shortage of song birds in my yard.

Does such a creature REALLY exist

NO animal (well not one that occurs without intergenus breeding) is truly an indoor animal.

Mice, Hampsters, Chinchillas etc etc. Those nasty little yappy lap dogs too.

Im guessing there must be a few animals / reptiles/ birds that have been bred to be sedate indoor pets... It seems that at least some cats are happy enough living indoors, but how you know that when you choose a kitten I have no idea, and I'll bet most would choose to have at least the option of going out.

Your other arguments made sense: this one's just silly. That's the anthropomorphising I was talking about! Cats aren't imprisoned.

Butch - you have no idea about my lifestyle - try arguing to the point for once, and not ad hominem.

Irony TG, Irony (or have you been away from blighty too long to appreciate it)

Read my previous post - I have no iron in my blood right now, maybe it affects my humour/irony quotient.

I did read the article. This struck me as less than rigorous application of scientific method:

"In the absence of good numbers, for now it is probably safe to presume that there are as many feral and stray cats as there are owned cats. So lets say 81 million again."

Note that 81 million was an unsubtantiated number for pet cats. Now we have double an unknown quantity.

At this point, the author abandons all effort at producing figures that can be substantiated:

"According to a study in Michigan by Lepczyk et al, outdoor pet cats across an urban to rural gradient killed an average of .683 birds each week during the breeding season.

IF you can extrapolate that across the full year, that would be an average of 35.5 birds killed by each cat/each year. IF you can use that figure for all outdoor cats, you get a calculation of 4.1 billion birds killed each year."

Why do we think the cat kill rate in one part of Michigan at one time of the year can be extrapolated to apply to cats in Death Valley at other times of the year? The author doesn't even seem to think so, hence the capitalisation of "IF". Why do we think the kill rate is a uniform 35.5 birds when the other study cited came up with 15?

He's just musing and then he's not subtracting any number for innocent kittens savaged by birds of prey. Nor is he giving credit for improvements to the bird breeding stock due to cats eating the weaker birds.

It seems to me that if he were a crusader for voles, mice, rats, chipmunks and other small ground creatures then he might have a point. Decimation of rare bird species? Nah, not on this evidence.

But if you keep something trapped indoors then isn't it imprisoned?? I don't see describing them in that way as attaching human characteristics to the animals.

Sorry, you had me at

Of course the new kitten will be indoors until she's no longer snack size for an osprey.

I dont think the osprey is much if a threat is it? Not unless its a fish flavoured kitten?

I spent a wonderfull hour or so up on the weir near my place watching the osprey hover and plunge into the river. The poor bigger was getting mobbed by the smaller birds every time it headed for a tree for a rest. Those song birds are a feisty bunch!

lost your irony button too iaink?

They do fly over land looking for food, but prefer fish. We see them over the garden. I doubt they would want a kitten when they can have perch. Sometimes the osprey get evicted from their nests by smaller birds.

Nah, just wanted to mention watching the osprey do their thing. One of the pleasures of living here. Almost as mesmerising as the hummingbirds I got a pair of binoculars from the kids for my birthday

trapped or safe? "Trapped" applies a negative value to the act of keeping the cat in.

Does a domestic cat have "right" to be outside?

Now a wild cat - a lynx or bobcat etc, absolutely they have a "right" to be in the wild, in that it is natural for them to be in nature. It is not natural for a domestic cat to be outdoors in Canada - it's not it's natural stomping ground, it has been introduced, and plays no part in the natural balance! They are fed, treated by the vet, have no nutrition need to hunt, and only do so for pleasure, and they kill innocent, nay naive little chicks and chickadees - feathered waifs, who have struggled to migrate, only to be met by this:

.