Cats and Birds information on net.

I grew up with cats who moved between indoors and outdoors at will. We lost some to cars, some got sick, others just disappeared. Cat litter made full-time indoor feline living an option. We keep ours inside all the time, neutered and vaccinated in case they get out (Salvador made a run for it during our last earthquake).

The always-indoors option has forced cat keepers to confront a dispute as hot (among cat lovers) as gun control. One side sees free-roaming cats as individual sentient beings, misunderstood and unfairly maligned, deserving respect and care. Another side sees wretched, disease-prone killing machines, endangering human health and cutting a swath through wildlife populations.

The dispute is big. Most cat counters estimate about 60 million "pet" cats in the US. One third (20 million) stay indoors; the rest are indoor/outdoor commuters. Another 60 million are strays (abandoned or lost) or feral (descendants of strays). That would make one Felis domesticus for every two Homo sapiens in the country.

"Cats, whether owned, stray, or feral, should not roam free!" says The American Bird Conservancy. Its Cats Indoors! program (see access) estimates that free-roaming domestic cats kill hundreds of millions of birds each year.

On the other paw, Alley Cat Allies (ACA; see access) counters that such numbers are extrapolations from very limited data. ACA claims that feral cats mostly scavenge and hunt rodents; that the real enemies of wild bird populations are habitat fragmentation and pesticide use.

Indoors-only advocates argue that cats can catch (and sometimes transmit to humans) rabies, distemper, toxoplasmosis, and a host of other diseases. Roaming cats can clearly become neighborhood nuisances, hunting at the next-door bird feeder, digging up and doing it in gardens, and singing love songs into the night.

Recommending indoor living may be reasonable for pet cats, but what to do about the 60 million homeless? Organizations agree that their numbers should be reduced, and, when possible, they should be trapped, neutered, vaccinated, and placed in good homes. The fur flies over otherwise healthy cats deemed too "feral" to be placed. Two options polarize the cat-concerned: (1) trap, neuter, and release cats into `managed colonies'; or (2) eliminate colonies in a humane manner (a euphemism for another euphemism, euthanization).

# posted by Medical Information : 3:23 AM