> In many places, domestic and feral cats are indeed the sources of
> "uncontrolled predation."
As a former pedigree cat breeder asd show, I must defend the keeping
of domestic pet cats. Feral and semi-feral cats are another matter and
they don't have a pleasant life and have a huge mortality rate.
One of the Cat Fancy's slogans s "every kitten a wanted kitten." We
cat fanciers look after our cats and often keep them indoors with the
breeding cats. We most certainly don't put them out at night.
I still have five "favourites and failures" who go outside in acres of
woodland if they want to but "under supervision". When they were
younger, they brought in occasional captures but in almost all cases
these were either already dead or "nature's failures". With a long
gone favourite cat, she would bring me live and dead specimens with an
appropriate call.
Unneutered cats running wild can be a menace, but with few exceptions,
even these do little more than clearing up nature's failures. Any
species having, say, 5 young a year will have an average survival rate
of 2 out of 7 or only 28%.
It's called the survival of the fittest, and releasing pheasant poults
into that environment without some losses is not feasable, buzzards or
no buzzards. Almost all of the other pheasants are going to die by
gunfire anyway, and there is a lot of that in this valley - and it is
another noise source in my recordings but that is a different thread,
:-).
David
David Brinicombe
North Devon, UK
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum - Ambrose Bierce
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