In the UK, cat ownership has steadily risen over the past century. At present, a quarter of all UK homes have one or more cats. But there is something that few cat owners are prepared to discuss: cats are, it is undeniable, an ecological disaster.
In Britain, a study carried out in the mid-1990s estimated that domestic cats, whose numbers were at around 9 million, killed 88 million birds and 164 million small mammals annually. (This same study found that among all activities investigated as reasons for the killing of wild animals, hunting and shooting were responsible for just 6.006% of deaths, whereas cats accounted for 82%.) A later study, carried out in 2022, revealed that domestic cats annually killed between 160-270 million wild animals, around a quarter of which were birds.
An interesting analysis of the two studies above can be found in the work Rural Wrongs by Charlie Pye-Smith. Since Pye-Smith published that work, the Scottish Animal Welfare Committee published a report entitled Responsible ownership and care of domestic cats in Scotland; the research therein noted that the “number of wild prey killed [by cats] could reach at least 700 million vertebrates per year in the UK.”
It might be noted, too, that the domestic cat has now by hybridisation wiped out the only indigenous wild cat of these isles, the Scottish Wild Cat, of which it is believed only around 35 individuals remain in the wild. Domestic cats are thus a very serious problem from a conservationist perspective, especially given the UK’s rapidly declining population of songbirds and wild mammals. Moreover, it shouldn’t be ignored that cats kill in such a famously slow and torturous way that they are frequently selected as model animals for studies of acute aggression in predators.
As is revealed by the above examples of research into the adverse effects of cats, as time passes, the feline problem is escalating and intensifying. It is no exaggeration to say that the domestic cat is an ecological calamity of great magnitude. Yet, no one has called for the banning or even regulating of cat ownership—despite the extraordinary devastation cats cause to wildlife and the cruelty they deploy whilst doing it.
Every year, a great fuss is made internationally about those people living around the Mediterranean who kill migrating songbirds for food. This is a pastime especially treasured by Italians, many of whom even travel to North Africa and Eastern Europe to shoot songbirds with shotguns or ensnare them in all manner of gruesome traps. It is estimated that around 20 million migrating songbirds are killed each year in this way. Most people who hunt or shoot agree that this activity of killing vast numbers of songbirds is unsporting and morally problematic from the perspective of ecological ethics. But the reaction to the annual killing of songbirds around the Mediterranean is clearly disproportionate when considered in the light of the 90 million plus songbirds that domestic cats kill every year in the UK alone.
And yet, when it comes to the very serious ecological problem of the domestic cat, we hear nothing but crickets from animal welfare or environmentalist charities. The reason for this silence is obviously that such charities will only target environmental or animal welfare issues in accordance with prevailing fashion. Whatever the gravely deleterious effects of cats, such charities will say nothing that will alienate their cat-owning donors and supporters. And so, such organisations attack hunting and shooting because it is fashionable to do so, even though ethical hunting is a massive driver of conservation the world over; in the UK, organisations like the British Association for Shooting & Conservation and the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust do incredible work in wildlife protection and habitat preservation.
At present, in the UK, much of our countryside has been turned over to unscrupulous agricultural organisations that cover our fields in fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides. Our rivers not only suffer the consequences of the runoff of such toxins from the fields, but are now filled with raw sewage as well, with only 14% of England’s rivers meeting the standards of ‘good ecological status’ under the Water Framework Directive for England and Wales. The amount of raw sewage spilling into England’s rivers and seas doubled in 2023, with 3.6 million hours of spills compared with 1.75 million hours the year before. The contamination of our rivers is increasing with every passing year, and consequently, the brown trout and rainbow trout are fast vanishing. Moreover, at present, much of the countryside is covered in scattered rubbish and piles of fly-tipped garbage, a growing problem which Britain has largely imported with the arrival of populations from countries with a well-established habit of throwing trash all over the landscape.
The countryside struggles under these pressures from chemicals and toxins, and meanwhile, the town centres are left undeveloped and neglected while woodlands are felled and fields torn up to make room for new housing developments. 50% of our woodland and forest has disappeared just in the last eighty years. Besides some protected pockets of countryside, the once internationally admired landscape of the United Kingdom is fast becoming a desolate wasteland. Many of these problems have been highlighted by hunting, shooting, and fishing communities and trusts, and much of the pioneering work to undo the damage has also been advanced by them. And yet hunting, shooting, and fishing continue to be demonised in the modern world.
All the while, the cat-owning ‘environmentalist’ has no clue about the astonishing ecological damage he is doing. When it comes to our failures in stewardship and wildlife management, it is time to have a far more honest public conversation.
