I blame online communities for this.

Cat ladies are insane and organized now. In my city, there’s a group distributing shelters and placing them in various outdoor areas to keep feral cats alive over the winter.

They are as nutty as the pigeon feeders, except the cats kill everything in sight.

We have a group like this, which feeds a couple dozen feral cats on "Kitty Cat Lane." Of course there is science behind the insanity -- toxoplasmosis infections from the cats they love.

Our local Nextdoor exploded when some particularly nutty cat vigilante started stealing cats and spaying them.

I think as society sprawls out and folks have fewer kids, this stuff gets escalated.

These comments are disturbingly out of touch.

'Neuter and Release' programs are common, supported and sanctioned by animal shelters, usually local vets provide their services for free, and the point is to provide basic medical for the animals while at the same time trying to control excess populations.

Calling them 'Nutty cat lady vigilantes' would be like calling people 100 years ago providing shelter for abused women 'Marriage Wreckers'.

This particular group of self-described activists were running a squeegee guy scam with cats.

They were stealing pets and shaking down the owners for cash.

Enough with the petty, denigrating attacks people helping mostly harmless animals, which is a generally good thing. These rescuers/helpers run 'neuter and release' programs and are keen on having population control, not increasing the number of rogue cats.

Mostly harmless to you... What a strange thing to call what is effectively an apex suburban predator that is known to kill for fun with no intention of eating.

They are animals like any other, and this notion of 'apex suburban predator' is nonsense.

What's nonsense about it? These aren't raccoons digging through people's trash and scavenging, they hunt wildlife for food and are protected from everything that would hunt them in return, even getting food and water and potentially shelter in the worst months.

No way. Cats eviscerate bird population.

Feral cats should be euthanized from a distance. Ask any infectious disease doc about cat bites. And think twice about feral kittens being all innocent, their teeth are like hypodermic needles, and can inject shit into joints. You can lose life and limb from kitty cat bites. These are not cool animals.

Our door cats have existed for millennia. Pesticides have not. I don’t think outdoor cats are the problem. Pesticides have killed most of the bug biomass in the last several decades and now birds are being affected.

I cannot understand why DDT is forbidden, but 10000x more powerful insecticides are not forbidden. WTF? Birds are dropping from the sky in Spring, because they have nothing to eat, because bugs are gone while seeds are not ready yet.

Also, air pollution makes them weak. Birds are much more sensitive to air pollution and CO2 level, because they breathe at much higher rate while they have much lower mass than land animals.

Its a solid point. I'm not sure what the average ownership of cats are, but I would imagine every 3rd or 4th person in my friendship network to own one. I would imagine at least over 100 million cats in north America to which most owners probably let them outside to hunt wild life.

Bob cats, mountain lions, etc used to have the entire US as their range. I suspect the bird population boomed after we got rid of the cats (100-150 years ago). Now that we have house cats they’re dropping again.

Boom-bust cycles for animals are common. I try to reflect what the natural order was 10,000 years ago and reflect. 20,000 years ago, there was an ice sheet over North America - ie no birds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet

Unless you're talking about the lynx (which mainly eats hares), the historic ranges of American cats barely overlap with LGM ice cover. It's not very relevant to this discussion.

Would that even be beneficial? If the problem is that there are fewer insects and therefore the birds have less food, then cats suppressing the bird population might have a positive impact on insects, which the birds eat. That might be good for birds too in the long run.

Predators are part of a feedback loop. That the predators in question are housecats makes it a somewhat unnatural feedback loop, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad.

Housecats are part of the food chain as well; they can be killed by cayotes and raccoons, and hawks might sometimes go after a small cat.

Not sure what it is like in the US, but in the UK, the RSPB doesn't seem to think cats are a major cause of bird population decline https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-...

That seems very silly. The concept of an indoor or outdoor cat didn't even exist until one hundred years ago.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=outdoor+cat%2C...

>including the cat

But my cat likes going outside. He likes catching birds.

I like birds, i like them alive. I would like your car to not go outside and catch birds.