Cats Indoors! Claim:
“Fascinating personalities and behaviors have made domestic cats the most popular pet in America. But within every cat are the genes of an efficient, prolific, and non-native predator.”

The Truth:
European settlers brought cats over with them to control rat populations. Cats have been living in North America since the 1600’s. Ironically, “ non-native” is a designation that most of us share with felines under this strict definition.

Cats Indoors! Claim:
“Scientists estimate that free-roaming cats kill hundreds of millions of birds, and probably more than a billion other small wildlife, in the U. S. each year….How many birds and other wildlife do domestic cats kill in the U.S. each year? No one knows, although reasonable extrapolations from scientific data can be made.”

The Truth:
The “reasonable extrapolations from scientific data” are really guesses based on information presented by Coleman and Temple in a University of Wisconsin study that took place in rural Wisconsin in the winter.

Cats Indoors! Claim:
“Researchers at the University of Wisconsin coupled their four-year cat predation study with data from other studies, and predicted a range of values for the number of birds killed each year in the state. By estimating the number of free-ranging cats in rural areas, the number of kills per cat, and the proportion of birds killed, the researchers calculated that rural free-roaming cats kill at least 7.8 million and perhaps as many as 217 million birds a year in Wisconsin. They estimated that in some parts of the state, free-roaming cat densities reach 114 cats per square mile, outnumbering all similar-sized native predators.” (Coleman, J.S. and S.A. Temple. 1995 How many birds do cats kill? Wildlife Control Technology: 44.)

The Truth:
The often cited University of Wisconsin study was never published in any scientific journal. In a 1994 interview J. S. Coleman admitted “Those figures were from our own proposal. They aren’t actual data; that was just our projection to show how bad it might be.”

Cats Indoors! Claim:
“Because some island bird populations evolved in the absence of mammalian predators, they have no defense mechanisms against them. When an efficient predator such as the domestic cat is introduced or abandoned on an island, elimination of entire bird populations can result.”

The Truth:
"Rats have been involved with extinction of birds throughout the world," according to Andy Engilis,an ornithologist who has worked with the California Cosumnes River Preserve since 1989. (Source: Sacramento Bee: Where have all the songbirds gone? 7/1/01)

Feral cats continue to be blamed solely for the extinction of bird species, including Stephen’s Island wren in New Zealand, a country that has few native animals. This event occurred in the 1830’s, which is significant because it is a vaguely cited example of “evidence” that “cats have killed off entire species of birds.” The fact that this bird “was probably the smallest flightless bird ever to have existed,” is never mentioned by Cats Indoors!, nor is the bird’s habit of “scuttling around like a mouse”. More importantly, it took more than 30 years for islanders to totally eradicate the feral cats on the island.

According to Dr. Julie Levy, associate professor at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine who specializes in feline infectious diseases and feral cat control: “Eradication of feral cats has only been accomplished on small uninhabited islands in which a combination of poisoning, shooting, trapping, and a deliberate release of infectious diseases was used over decades at a cost of millions of dollars.”