Earth Day Focus - Cats Are Not the Problem!

Earth Day is about protecting our living planet. The first step in doing that is identifying the greatest threats to the environment. Where wildlife and biodiversity are concerned, habitat loss due to human expansion is the clear frontrunner, as per World Wildlife Foundation’s Living Planet Report 2022 (along with many other credible sources). The report listed exploitation of organisms as the second biggest problem, followed by climate change, then pollution, and then invasive non-native species.
​
Yet based on messaging by bird-specific conservation groups such as the American Bird Conservancy, and novelist Jonathan Franzen’s widely-read opinion piece in The New Yorker, one would think that cat predation is set to destroy ecosystems around the world. Apart from the fact that cats’ status as non-native or invasive is highly debatable since they have been living in many parts of the world where they didn’t originate for centuries now, there are much bigger dangers facing biodiversity. Encroachment of cities and farmland on wildlife habitats, chemical and plastic pollutants being dumped into the atmosphere and waters, and the inhumane trade of exotic animals for human gain are all problems that need to be addressed. 

Cats who roam outdoors undeniably hunt and kill some animals, and they do not discriminate between plentiful and endangered species. However, the effect cats have on the overall population of prey animals is still unknown. The few studies that have been conducted on cat predation are from islands with closed ecosystems, where local animals have not evolved with predators. Because cat predation on continents is very different from island environments, it is inaccurate and inappro­priate to extrapolate data from these particular studies to predict predation on continents. In fact, some studies have even shown that cats protect endangered bird populations by preying on rodents who themselves eat the eggs and chicks of ground nesting birds. 
 
Even so, many organizations continue to vilify cats; it is easier to fundraise at the expense of cats than to challenge the big, powerful industries and popular luxuries that do the real damage to our planet. This is tragic because it causes culling and other forms of persecution of cats, and doubly tragic because it diverts needed energy from solving the true problems. 

The path to saving lives should not be the destruction of lives. We need to focus on mitigating the harmful impacts of one species alone, and that is us!

---