Their pleas were given weight by Jennifer Dyer’s claim in the Times that her 2-year-old black and white moggy has brought her no fewer than 5 rats during 2012. She had also brought 2 bats, a grey squirrel and 122 small rodents (mice, bank voles and shrews). Creatures such as this do quite a lot of damage in my garden, as well as scaring the living daylights out of me. But what Mrs Dyer doesn’t mention is that cats have a liking for birds as well as mammals, and the chances are that her moggy caught as many small birds as she did mammals. Not such a good idea, unless you do what the Victorians used to, which is to tether them in the kitchen garden as a deterrent.
There are 8 million cats in Britain and if each of them had an equivalent haul to Mrs Dyer’s moggy, that would result in an overall kill of 1,040,000,000 (yes, more than a billion). I’ve no doubt at all that they kill an equivalent number of birds. Someone had better tell the RSPCA. Postscript: That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think I was amused to see this headline in the New York Times today, provoked by a report from the Smithsonian institute that cats in America kill 2.4 billion birds and 12.1 billion mammals every year. Perhaps my estimate of a billion in the UK is on the low side after all. See here for a link to the report.
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