Possible/

Is it possible that the "model based on a new cat murder algorithm" is based on the algorithms used by MPIA to identify losses due to piracy, and feral cats actually kill only 3 birds & 5 mice between them every year?

brilliant web comic on this (theoatmeal.com)

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill

a visual presentation on similar figures

This just in: carnivorous predators kill prey. News at 11.

Go, cats!

I would support fellow mammalians v feathered dinosaurs descendants any day!

Cat food?

If seafood is sea creatures that people eat, then what is cat food?

Feral cats

My neighborhood has a solution: coyotes. Keep your pet inside or lose it.

Cats for rodent control what a joke!

City dweller fantasy much?

On my farm I kept/keep cats for rodent control. Useless things said screw the mice and rats they take work and immediately ate all the frogs, lizards, rabbits and then I started seeing larger native wildlife show up dismembered including birds. All the while my house walls and roof got infested with succeeding population and mice and rats (the later would move in and eat the former) leaving me exposed to both disease and house fire (countless rats pulled from roof cavities bitten into the electric cabling of the house).

Then I got Jack Russels, they were picked on as pups by the pups but when they grew up from the more agressive cats who would swipe out or otherwise attack a pup. But they eventually got their own back. Most of the cats ended up killed or chased away.

There is no more active and enthusiastic mouser or ratter than a Jack Russel, I was amazed at how enthusiastically they hunted the vermin and my house infestations have become a rarity. The side benefit is they are also aggressively protective of the property against foxes while the farm cats would just hang back and be lazy and let the animals on the farm get kille by foxes.

And to the people who think animals are so much more holier than thou above humans on a moral scale and only kill for food, you are again misguided city people far removed from reality and plugged into you tellies as the only input into what's going on in the outside world.

I've seen foxes eat baby lambs as they are being born and during lambing season they eat the brains and leave the rest of the animal to rot while going on to the next baby lamb. You lot need to wake up and stop your fairy tale life beliefs in what is happening out here in the real world.

They ARE interesting animals!

My cat (custody from my ex-) was a wonderful "lap-cat" for almost 18 years. Yes, he did his share of dispatching both birds and mice (just a few), but overall a nice animal.

As for cats in general, one theory is that the great plague ravaged Europe because cats were "unwelcome". They previously did a job of cleaning up vermin, and had a partial immunity to the Plague. Maybe that is their great purpose.

I do understand that cats have domesticated us humans quite well when we keep them as pets.

What percentage of the bird/mammal population are they killing?

As compared to the replacement rate? I doubt they are doing any damage that matters except to crazy PETA types who like to think that no animal would "murder" another in the wild and it is somehow the fault of us nasty humans importing animals into areas where they didn't occur naturally.

The common house cat may not be native to the US, but bobcats and panthers sure as hell are, and there used to be a few orders of magnitude more of them around all over the US than exist today (for some reason ranchers don't like having their livestock killed so they shoot them) If you figure one cat is as good as another in hunting prowess, is a few million panthers and bobcats killing much larger mammals better than 50 million house cats killing small mammals? The big cats kill fewer animals because there are fewer of them, but they may win in pounds of animals killed. What if saber toothed tigers, also native to North America until 10,000 years ago or so, were still around? A few of them could supposedly kill a mammoth. That seems worse on the murder scale than a robin or squirrel, but maybe that's just me.

I wonder how many sparrows and rabbits equals one mammoth in their feline murder equations?

In fact...

Nearly all animals removed from their native to somewhere they have not evolved have the potential to become an ecological blight. Humans have been spreading animals to places they should not have gone for millenia. Personally, I think if you want to keep a vicious killer like a cat as a pet you ought to need a license to do so with conditions that include not allowing it to roam freely. Feral cats and free-roaming pets cut bloody swathes through the vulnerable, unique, and endangered native animals of my country, Australia. I would like to see government appointed professional cullers whose job it is to shoot unattended cats on sight.

You're saying it's pussies or pussies?

Oh the irony

Here we have Cat lovers that think it's animal cruelty to cull the mass murdering domestic cat. When in fact it's the cat owners that are the sick cruel perverts that think nothing of the billions of lives lost to these furry monsters, nor do they think about where the meat they feed them comes from.

Putting cats into bags and drowning them is pretty sick ... but then how sick is ripping a poor defenceless bird apart. Just because it's your pet doesn't mean that you should be allowed to ignore the suffering of others animals.

My personal bug bear is the fact that these so-called owners allow their cats to spread their toxic faeces all over the neighbourhood, so that children can be contaminated by potentially lethal Toxoplasmosis ... and of course the law perversely stops neighbours from killing the vermin when they trespass onto their land!

It's about time that the law was changed so that the cat owner has a responsibility to ensure that their monster isn't allowed outside of their property.

Cat owners are not animal lovers.