"I'd wager that 'bird on bird' accounts for more deaths than 'cat on bird'."
Santaman
"I'll take that bet"
Nah - no such thing as meat-eating birds - sparrowhawk for example just refers to the size of its appetite...
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Cats killing billions?
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"I'd wager that 'bird on bird' accounts for more deaths than 'cat on bird'."
Santaman
"I'll take that bet"
Nah - no such thing as meat-eating birds - sparrowhawk for example just refers to the size of its appetite...
What chance is there of controlling the population when we can't even control our own government spending?
It's a certain fact that for every person who dislikes cats there is one who dislikes dogs and so on. Some people who rant about cats killing wildlife are quite happy to tolerate hunting of wildlife by humans. This sort of thing is emotive and seal culling where images of baby seals being clubbed are used by organisations to stop the practice are promoted yet deer or badger culls are seen as necessary.
I think everyone can take a stance on any of these issues for or against but to expect others to be converted to their own views is both naive and egotistical and I would have thought like football and religion a pretty pointless topic of discussion.
I think everyone can take a stance on any of these issues for or against but to expect others to be converted to their own views is both naive and egotistical and I would have thought like football and religion a pretty pointless topic of discussion.
I lost any faith in common sense when they banned my dogs from hunting what they are born to hunt! Now I see like breeds wearing pretty coats in all weathers, owned by park poseurs who rarely let them run; be warned cat owners, your moggys are next! They will have to be tethered at night and if the catch a bird you will be prosecuted and fined!
Boing...
So I reckon this'll put the cat amongst the pheasants.
Clicky here.
It covers some of the issues caused by releasing industrial quantities of pheasants into the wild every year. Some of the issues are...
Accidents on the roads caused by large, slow flying birds flying up*
Disease vector from pheasant feeders spreading avian flu and many imported birds
Flytipping huge quantities of dead pheasants.**
The Wild Animal/livestock tax and responsibility dodges that happen depending on which side of a pen fence theyre on.
The fact that releasing more bird biomass than all of the rest of genuinely wild birds in the uk strips the woodland of small lizards, amphibians and invertebrates, lessening food avalible for indigenous birds.
Wasted resources on feeding things only to chuck em away.
Oh and this one wasn't really mentioned too much and is more of a personal belief...
If you're killing a few animals for the pot, or even far more to help feed the nation then fine, however if you're going out to kill a hundred or so animals just for fun, its not sport., you just like killing things.
Its something you really should have grown out of by the time youre allowed to shoot a shotgun without adult supervision.
*One of my sisters was damn nearly knocked off the back of her boyfriends Suzuki GS Thou by a pheasant, many people each year arent so lucky.
**Anecdotally one of the local shoots near Penton just fires the bodies into landfill and another leaves em in an area to attract foxes to shoot. So not doing it for the pot are they
Have fun folks, now where did I leave my wooden spoon?
So I reckon this'll put the cat amongst the pheasants.
Clicky here.
It covers some of the issues caused by releasing industrial quantities of pheasants into the wild every year. Some of the issues are...
Accidents on the roads caused by large, slow flying birds flying up*
Disease vector from pheasant feeders spreading avian flu and many imported birds
Flytipping huge quantities of dead pheasants.**
The Wild Animal/livestock tax and responsibility dodges that happen depending on which side of a pen fence theyre on.
The fact that releasing more bird biomass than all of the rest of genuinely wild birds in the uk strips the woodland of small lizards, amphibians and invertebrates, lessening food avalible for indigenous birds.
Wasted resources on feeding things only to chuck em away.
Oh and this one wasn't really mentioned too much and is more of a personal belief...
If you're killing a few animals for the pot, or even far more to help feed the nation then fine, however if you're going out to kill a hundred or so animals just for fun, its not sport., you just like killing things.
Its something you really should have grown out of by the time youre allowed to shoot a shotgun without adult supervision.
*One of my sisters was damn nearly knocked off the back of her boyfriends Suzuki GS Thou by a pheasant, many people each year arent so lucky.
**Anecdotally one of the local shoots near Penton just fires the bodies into landfill and another leaves em in an area to attract foxes to shoot. So not doing it for the pot are they
Have fun folks, now where did I leave my wooden spoon?
I was recommended this video today as well.
Between this and a Hell on Earth magnet fishing video (channel I have never watched before) on the same day TeeDee went on to post his magnet fishing thread, I suspect there must be some algorithmal overlap with folks on this forum.
Down here some of the small scale pheasant shoots have closed, probably initially down to covid but also I expect down to a rise in food prices and other costs. Whilst it does mean less pheasants about I expect it means less wildlife as the cover crops are not planted, the hedges are cut back much harder, trees felled and even small copses are grubbed out. You don't see many lizards in a scalped silage field or a arable field ploughed to within an inch of its life.
But back to cats, the feral cat that has chosen to live in our garden does indeed kill quite a bit of wildlife, as expected. Regular feeding does seem to reduce it's carnage and I do wonder if some of the birds it has munched would have died anyway as we get large flocks of things like goldfinches on our fields and the odd one does appear deformed and thus easy prey.
Funnily enough, even with quite a few phesants about the place we're overrun with lizards. I can count several dozen on a warm day, probably down to looking after their habitat rather than hacking back everything in our garden and then blaming the lack of wildlife on someone else.
But back to cats, the feral cat that has chosen to live in our garden does indeed kill quite a bit of wildlife, as expected. Regular feeding does seem to reduce it's carnage and I do wonder if some of the birds it has munched would have died anyway as we get large flocks of things like goldfinches on our fields and the odd one does appear deformed and thus easy prey.
Funnily enough, even with quite a few phesants about the place we're overrun with lizards. I can count several dozen on a warm day, probably down to looking after their habitat rather than hacking back everything in our garden and then blaming the lack of wildlife on someone else.
It's a complex subject to be sure. We have 12.5 million cats but, according to recent published figures, the actual wildlife kill rates are lower than people expect as many domestic cats don't have much access to wildlife anyway. However, it's still not insignificant. The problem is, we have no natural predators for cats
I know the number of pheasant released annoys people (it does me) but, unless we can come up with another way of paying for country estates to be maintained, I don't think we can expect any change.
I have just spent the day on one such estate (doing a fungus survey of all things) and the quality of habitats, from parkland (woodland pasture), to scrub, woodland, and freshwater, was fantastic - the pheasant shooting pays for that.
I know the number of pheasant released annoys people (it does me) but, unless we can come up with another way of paying for country estates to be maintained, I don't think we can expect any change.
I have just spent the day on one such estate (doing a fungus survey of all things) and the quality of habitats, from parkland (woodland pasture), to scrub, woodland, and freshwater, was fantastic - the pheasant shooting pays for that.
Would make for one hell of a Christmas Day alternative to the three bird roast.I woke this morning to six pheasant, two sheep, and two cats in my wildlife garden. Personally, I'd shoot all of them
Not a fan of cats, pheasants/grouse/partridge, or the people who shoot them for sport, but none of the issues surrounding them are anything other than human made issues. As always, WE are the problem!
Quite right. There are just too many of us -- by about an order of magnitude -- for one small planet.
Donkey's years ago I briefly worked in the Astronomy Department at Imperial College, London. I shared a flat in Wood Green, about ten miles north of Imperial, with a bunch of other computer programmer types.
The landlord was a Turk. It seemed that the road that this flat was on was a kind of demarcation line between the Turkish and Greek communities, because if we didn't like what was on the telly we could turn the sofa round and watch the knife fights that seemed to take place nightly on the rooftops of the next street north of us.
But I digress. One day the landlord was there collecting the rent, and the current girlfriend of one of my flatmates complained to him that there were rodents in the flat.
The Turk laughed out loud. "You are feeding them!", he said.
I just nodded. She was, but try as I might I couldn't get her to stop putting food out for the many stray cats.
After three months I'd had enough and I left London. Since then I've done the odd contract there, but nothing would ever make me consider living there again.
Still, you're never more than fifty yards from a rat. Or is it fifty feet?
In London? More like six feet. Same in Paris and New York and probably any big, densely packed city.
Our local feral cat isn't interested in the birds. The spadgers feed within a foot of her and she's not interested. The crows usually wait for their turn after she finishes the cat food.... usually. There's a pecking order in who eats the leftovers. First the cat, the the resident pair of crows, then the crows offspring, then the resident pair of magpies. Rats don't get a look in. It's a low intensity livestock area not arable, there's birds and bugs everywhere. There's a few escaped/naturalised pheasants around too.
Too easy in many areas to blame cats (or magpies, that other target of human hate) for taking birds when the real culprit is the way humans manage urban and many rural arable areas to be basically lifeless. Lose the bugs and the hedges and the birds go. Cut down the trees for a driveway, make the back garden an "outside room" with few plants and tidied to within an inch of its life and you have created a food desert for birds. (Except for magpies which can basically eat anything and are highly intelligent problem solvers). Don't blame the cats for bringing in the starving weak birds that haven't died of starvation or been caught by the sparrowhawk yet. And some intense arable areas are just as bad with few hedges and high use of chemicals which kill everything bar the crop.
GC
Too easy in many areas to blame cats (or magpies, that other target of human hate) for taking birds when the real culprit is the way humans manage urban and many rural arable areas to be basically lifeless. Lose the bugs and the hedges and the birds go. Cut down the trees for a driveway, make the back garden an "outside room" with few plants and tidied to within an inch of its life and you have created a food desert for birds. (Except for magpies which can basically eat anything and are highly intelligent problem solvers). Don't blame the cats for bringing in the starving weak birds that haven't died of starvation or been caught by the sparrowhawk yet. And some intense arable areas are just as bad with few hedges and high use of chemicals which kill everything bar the crop.
GC
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