Cats tend to kill small garden birds though, which are very common. Wind turbines take out eagles. I don't think a domestic cat could kill an Eagle. Although one of my cats thinks he could, and might be tempted to have a go.

Since you didn’t name the species, it’s hard to say whether they’re common or not, or verify that their populations remain stable while an ever increasing number of cats are given an unrestricted license to kill anything that moves if it happens to be small enough.

Relevant: “Cat owners failed to perceive the magnitude of their cats' impacts on wildlife and were not influenced by ecological information“

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.1553

so statistically speaking, yes - because many domestic cats live near small gardens.

But there are lots of ground-nesting birds that have been decimated by cats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduced_mammals_on_seabird_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife

I found the cognitive dissonance comment interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife#Cat_...

They do not just kill "common" birds, they have led to the extinction of several bird species. Keep your cats indoors.

> Keep your cats indoors

Are cats not naturally supposed to be outside?

There’s nothing natural about a domesticated species being spread around the world and allowed to roam free while simultaneously receiving care and protection from humans.

Cats can live happy lives inside, they just need a bit of attention.

Ours get a couple of hours supervised outside time whilst on long leads. They can and do carry out hunting behaviours, but being on a tether and being supervised allows us to dramatically reduce their impact on wildlife to almost nothing.

Considering what they do attempt to catch whilst we are standing their, I'd imagine they would take a dramatic toll if we just let them roam free.

And only implied in your comment: they should not be alone. Not an excuse to go full catlady as 2 are plenty.

They are (in nearly every country) a foreign invasive species, so “naturally” they shouldn’t be there at all.

Aren't all animals?

I guess the ones meant to live in caves or underground would do fine indoors?

Not in North America!

Apex predators are surprisingly important, far out of proportion to their numbers.

Efforts to protect them have similarly outsized effect.

It's not just that small garden birds are very common, in general they've co-evolved with predators similar to cats and have adapted to deal with that (for example by nesting at height, having large broods, etc). There's some exceptions, mostly when cats get introduced to islands with few similar natural predators, but as a general rule it's probably not the most pressing problem. Large birds like eagles reproduce slowly and don't have the instincts to avoid wind turbines which in theory makes wind farms a serious threat to those species.

Raptors are more likely to take the houscat than the other way around.

Mammals such as rats and mice... which can carry many diseases including hantavirus, leptospirosis, lymphocytic choriomeningitis (LCMV), Tularemia and Salmonella...

It sounds like the implication here is that it's acceptable to use an invasive species to deal with pest problems. There are alternatives to dealing with pests that don't involve decimating bird populations.

In many many places domestic cats aren’t much of an invasive species. In north and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa there are similar cat species of similar size that take up a similar niche which were recently extinct (at least locally) many of which are closely enough related to housecats that they can interbreed.

One of the reasons to worry about domestic cats in some areas of the British isles is not to protect birds and the like, but to protect the closely related extant cat species that is getting its genetics replaced too much with housecat genetics. This wild cat used to have very broad ranges which disappeared.

Islands with no cat species don’t have this consideration of course.

Bird populations in places that should have and used to have catlike predators are and should be fine for the most part. Predators tend to help the population dynamics and health of prey species. Some people are just really uncomfortable with predation.

I don't know the specific numbers, and I've only just seen one or two studies (would appreciate an alternative numbers) - but if a three 3 billion bird reduction is almost a third of the total population in birds in North America since 1970s, and cats are killing at least 1.3 billion per year... I guess that's "fine for the most part"?

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaw1313

The predation of cats is also unnaturally controlled as they are domesticated; people view them as pets primarily and thus prevent them from being killed (their predators are also heavily controlled - wolves, coyotes, etc). I don't see how you could compare that niche to previously extinct, naturally local species.

> I don't know the specific numbers, and I've only just seen one or two studies

You might as well cut you comment at this point.

One or two studies is more than the “zero” amount of data that’s been provided by anyone else at this point. I look forward to you sharing more specific numbers that counter the numbers I’ve provided.

The other way around: the domestication of the cat helped deal with pest problems.

Here's a question: suppose next year we mandate all cats are indoors unless they work on farms, and all cats allowed outdoors are sterilized. What happens to the small bird and mammal populations ten years later?

It’s even more the other way around, the native cat species basically domesticated itself finding hanging around humans for our density of vermin to prey on to be more advantageous than living in the wild. We didn’t go stealing cute kitties from the wild because they looked nice, we started taking care of the vermin eaters that migrated into our cities, especially the ones that had adapted themselves to be cuter and nicer to us.

We are not separate from the evolutionary process and several species have effectively domesticated us in order to survive better. Our civilization has created new habitats and we don’t need to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

You want to help your local bird populations? Plant oak trees.

Why oak, and/or what region does this advice apply to?

Advice applies to anywhere which has native oak species.

Oak trees serve as host to a particularly large number of species, many of them feed on the tree and serve as food for others year round along with acorns as food and species that feed on acorns as food. Oaks are keystone species as they have a particularly large positive impact on the local ecosystem.

Lots of birds eat mostly insects and only sometimes seeds, oak trees provide year round supplies of insects for birds to eat, in a wider variety and number than most other trees.