Cats and Birds LTE from 1923

Cats are known to be the leading predator of birds in the U.S.A, killing somewhere between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds per year. It's a major problem.

And there's a sense that it's a new one. The Scott Loss paper cited about came out in 2013, and seems to have marked a turning point in the discourse. "Did you say billion?" A growing number of people talk about the problem, and potential solutions, and a growing number of people get upset and defensive about feral cats. 

But it's not true that our understanding of the impacts of feral cats on birds are new. We've known for a long time. A friend, Tim Flight, passed along this Letter to the Editor from 1923 -- 101 years ago -- about the cat predation problem and how the Maine Audubon Society apparently had a bill to do something about it. (I can't find anything more about the text of the bill, but am looking.) The letter was published in the Evening Express, a daily paper in Portland, Maine that printed between 1882 and 1991, and except for a few outdated turns-of-phrase could have been printed this week. Let's review some of the choice bits.

We have seen two robins in the City the past week, and sad to relate, a neighbor's cat killed one of them; and sadder still to know that there will be one less family of robins reared in our City this summer; for most birds are monogonamic and unmated do not breed.

OK good start here, relatable, if quite the run-on. (Plus is "monogonamic" a word?) 

Cats are not to blame for destroying birds, for it is their instinctive nature to do so. What blame there is attaches to the owners of the cats.

True! 

This leads to the purpose of this article--to answer the many interesting, curious, and sometimes impulsive articles that have appeared in our papers concerning the efforts of the Maine Audubon Society to regulate the cat.

All that is just the long way of saying "people are PISSED."

Section 1 of the bill provided that all owners of cats should have them registered and taxed. Section 2 provided for the collection of such tax. Section 3 provided for the humane disposition of unlicensed cats. Section 4 for the humane destruction of predatory cats, and Section 5 made it unlawful for people to willfully abandon cats when changing their residence, leaving them to a precarious existence often to perish from starvation or cold.

Wow. To be certain, no one at Maine Audubon has any recollection of this effort. Every conservationist recognizes the impact of cats, but no policy like this would seriously be proposed today in the U.S., and it's frankly too bad that the inclusion of the more extreme measures (destruction) would poison the possibility of some of the more logical ones (registering cats in the same way that dogs are). Bold, and unhelpful.

Those who oppose this bill have unwarrantedly concluded that we are unfriendly to the cats and want them all destroyed. We ... challenge anyone to cite either in this bill or in our writings, and statement that justifies any such assumptions.

I'd say it was that stuff about "humane destruction" you just talked about.

The point has been made that cats do not want to wear collars. We don't want to put license plates on our cars. Adam and Eve didn't want to wear clothes.

OK. Interesting argument. It does illustrate how ideas become normalized, like, you don't read a lot of LTEs complaining about license plates any more. Adam and Eve are still pissed, though, chafing against their undergarments.

 We have stated our belief that there are 200,00 cats in our State. ... New York city disposes of as many stray cats as that annually. 

There's some math here that's pretty back-of-the-napkin, but is still valid in terms of how today, in 2024, we don't really know how many cats we have in Maine. Various unscientific-sounding resources say that Maine ranks second in rate of cat ownership, with nearly 48% of households owning a cat. We've got 1.4 million people here (not exactly sure how many households that is), so, I dunno, there's some math. And wait, NYC kills that many every year? Damn. 

How many insectivorous and game birds do these cats destroy yearly? The smallest possible estimate, taking into account the nestlings that are lost, would be five birds to a cat, and that would mean 1,000,000.

We're still doing this kind of math, but it's backed up by a lot more science. The 2013 Scott Loss and Pete Marra study is one of the biggest ones, but its conclusions have been verified time and time again, around the globe. Also a quick note here is how important "eating insects" was to conservationists in the early 1900s. "Protect birds because they eat insects that eat your crops" was how a lot of things were justified, including the establishment of Maine's state bird in 1926.

Unless you too, make an equal effort with us for a more humane and rational treatment of the cat, we shall challenge your assumption that you are a better friend to pussy that we are.

Ending on a high note! What a finish! I'm ready for action!