NJAS Opinion: May, 2003

By Eric Stiles, Vice President for Conservation & Stewardship

The most popular pet in America now poses one of the greatest challenges for wildlife lovers.  Cats, wonderful companions for humans, are killers without conscience when they roam the outdoors.  In the lowest estimate, 40 million domestic cats spend part of every day outside hunting.  The problem is that cats are more successful hunters than many of their owners would believe.  Another conservative estimate suggests that over one billion birds, small mammals and amphibians are captured and killed in the U.S. by our friendly feline predators every year.

Unlike wild predators, domestic cats have no problem completely eliminating the species they hunt.  While native predator populations fluctuate to match the populations of their food source, well-fed cats hunt bird species to extinction.  Domestic cats have been traced to the extinction of eight bird species on New Zealand and the eradication of 40 more species on select islands.  Extensive studies in England and the U.S. show dense populations of domestic and feral cats literally devastating regional wildlife.

Cats are now the most common household pet in the U.S.  Unfortunately, care of domestic cats often remains in the same primitive state it has been since European settlers imported cats to reduce rodent populations.  Today, letting cats outdoors is cruel to the cats, dangerous for their owners, and a serious threat to wildlife.  Millions of cats are run over by cars every year.  They are trapped, poisoned, hounded, and abused.  Free-running cats breed with the over 60 million feral cats in the U.S., producing more litters of sickly, short-lived (averaging five years) ferals.

Meanwhile, outdoor cats transmit a variety of dangerous diseases to their owners, including cat-scratch disease, rabies, lyme disease, toxoplasmosis, roundworms, hookworms, and plague-yes, plague, in California.  A much longer list of diseases attacks outdoor cats without being transmissible to humans.  These facts seem to make an overwhelming case for keeping cats indoors, and yet only one third of U.S. cat owners do. 

Cats raised indoors are comfortable staying that way, and outdoor cats can be trained to enjoy indoor life.  A long list of organizations recommends keeping domestic cats indoors.  This includes the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Bird Conservancy, the Humane Society of the United States, the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, the National Audubon Society, and the New Jersey Audubon Society.  All of these organizations are well regarded and widely respected.  All of them are founded on a respect for nature, for cats as well as wildlife.  Cat owners should pay attention.

Some of the most irresponsible cat owners abandon their cats or their cats' kittens- the awful consequence of inexcusably low levels of spaying and neutering-at feral cat colonies.  Some humane groups support the maintenance of feral colonies as a means to neuter/spay wild cats while keeping them from starving to death.  Unfortunately, not enough people maintain the cat colonies to effectively neuter their occupants.  Instead, the growth of feral colonies is well recorded, and cruel owners use the existence of cat colonies as an excuse to abandon still more unwanted cats.  The areas surrounding colonies in Florida show bird populations at half the normal levels.

The New Jersey Audubon Society supports keeping all cats indoors and the humane removal and domestication of feral cats wherever possible.  A combination of cats indoors, proper spaying and neutering of domestic cats, and humane removal should limit the impact of cat predation on wildlife and reduce the swelling U.S. feral cat population.  Habitat loss causes the most devastating drops in New Jersey bird populations, but predation is the second largest killer.  Keeping domestic cats indoors is a wise and easy step to reduce the suffering of cats and to save hundreds of millions of birds every year.

Please visit our Cats Indoors! web feature and help participate in this important conservation campaign.