Love how this thread evolved from a stolen cat to the best goat meat. 
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One of the reasons I am addicted to this forum. You never know where any particular thread is going to end up.
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Well, here I must disagree. As a cat person who has only had indoor cats, I don’t approve of subsidized predators. Cats eat at home and then go about the neighborhood to kill whatever they catch. It’s what they do so you cannot blame them. You blame the owners. Birds, lizards, invertebrates, they all pay the price for our inattention. It’s not a good thing.
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I can assure you it is a good thing that my cat has killed plenty of mice and rats. She has killed one bird in three years.
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That you know of. They don’t always bring home their bounty.
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How would you know that if you only have indoor cats? Mine brings home all her bounty. She really doesn’t stray much out of my yard and likes to show off her hunting prowess.
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My goodness, indoor vs. outdoor cats discussion gets lively. People here are from all over the world with different circumstances. What is right for a New York City cat is probably not right for Miss Hiss living in a barn in the middle of no-where. (Yes one of my barn cats was Miss Hiss).
I thought the duvet vs. quilts discussion was impassioned!
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I’ve known plenty of cats. And while I cannot say 100% don’t bring home their bounty, you can’t say they do. You might read this to realize the impact cats running free have on birds and other animals: Cats and Birds | American Bird Conservancy I’m not a “birder” but I do like birds and birding is the reason most people come to our canyon and stay at our various cabins in the area. We are sensitive to what cats can do to wildlife. Free range cats are not appreciated here and thankfully most don’t survive the coyotes who also live here.
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Our Gold Rush era downtown has many buildings on pilings that were once over the harbor, but it’s been filled around them, and the whole area was a giant rat breeding ground. What finally killed them off were all the nesting bald eagles up on the hillside. After the rats were gone, the eagles started adding feral cats to the feral pigeons in their diet.
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Snakes did it here. The lovely neo-gothic church in our village, home to a clan of choir-gown-shredding churchmice, was taken over by milksnakes. Milksnakes are on the species-at-risk list, so no one was allowed to touch them, but once the mice were gone the snakes moved on.
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I loved having a good black snake hanging around the barn.
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So why is it okay for coyotes to kill cats, but not okay for cats to kill birds?
The natural world is filled with predators and prey. Many creatures are both. Only herbivores don’t kill other creatures. Do we think it’s terrible for lions to kill gazelles? For owls to kill rodents?
Why apply our human sensibilities to other creatures and decide that birds are worth protecting from predators but mice and rats aren’t?
I honestly don’t get it.
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It’s different when humans introduce a predator. I’m all for cats used as rodent pest control, but not in areas where bird populations are already dealing with reduced habitat and other human pressures. Birds are in important part of ecosystems, eating harmful insects and spreading seeds for wild plants in their droppings.
Feral house cat populations need to be strictly controlled, and the natural, not introduced, predators can help with that.
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