Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Writer Bruce Barcott, in The New York Times magazine, has a riveting story on the toll cats take on the environment.

Some experts:

In the scrubland canyons of Southern California, researchers have found that where coyote populations decline, the nonbird-eating carnivores are often replaced by domestic cats. Cat predation then leads to a decline in the abundance of native birds like the California quail, the greater roadrunner and the cactus wren.

… I traveled to Portland, Ore., to see the Wildlife Care Center, an emergency room operated by the city’s Audubon Society. Every year the center cares for 3,000 injured and diseased animals. In the process, center officials have compiled a rare and significant set of data. Since 1995, they have analyzed how all the wild animals admitted have been injured. The results are remarkable. Estimates for cat-injured animals, mostly birds, accounted for nearly one-quarter of all admittances. Other causes paled: car accidents (14 percent), window strikes (5 percent), dog-caused injuries (3 percent).

“The biggest complaint we get is cats,” Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Portland Audubon Society, told me. “The statistics are actually misleading. We only record an injury as cat-caused if the person saw the cat injure the bird. I’m kind of a stickler on that. A huge number of the injuries we record as ‘unknown’ are consistent with cat injuries, and the birds recorded as ‘orphaned’ are often that way because their mothers were caught by cats. . . . We often say that up to 40 percent of the injuries we see are cat related.”

On the morning I visited, a woman came in with an injured scrub jay. “One of my cats caught it,” the woman explained. Glancing at a “Cats Indoors!” brochure, she said somewhat sheepishly, “My cats are indoor-outdoor. I half expected a lecture from the people here, but I felt responsible for the bird, so I came anyway.”

Sallinger skipped the lecture and gave the bird to Karen Munday, an urban-wildlife specialist, who took it into an adjoining room and laid it out.

“This one’s got a wing abrasion and puncture wounds,” she said. That’s likely a fatal diagnosis. A cat’s teeth and gums contain enough bacteria to overwhelm a bird’s immune system. “What usually kills the bird isn’t the puncture; it’s the infection,” Munday explained. “A bird is more likely to survive a gunshot than a cat bite.”

The full story is here. I should disclose, I have pet cats, or they have me. And now I’m looking at them differently.