18/12/2025
The Same Scientists Responsible for Studies Being Used to Advocate for Murdering Cats Have Admitted The Truth
Let me say this louder for the people in the back. Or the people who aren't listening. Or the people with outdated views based on cultural or rural notions or for the people without any modicum of education even remotely related to the complicated ecological affects of cats who continue to maintain and broadcast the opinion that killing outdoor cats will save birds and small mammals.
And let me say this, not with my own words, because I can simply be written off as a cat advocate. The studies that have been used to demonize cats as killers and eradicators of wildlife are erroneous and do not hold any water if you actually dive in and do research beyond reading headlines or jumping on bandwagons. Murdering domestic animals based on crap studies after we, as a society shirked our responsibilities, dumped them and then turned our back on them is bad enough but making them the scapegoat for the argument that they are killing too many animals is no worse than leading a lamb to slaughter and telling yourself you are doing so only because it surely would have grown up to gore a child to death with its horns.
In fact, the scientists who ran these studies and then allowed them to be magnified and then published/cited by people as reasons cats should be killed, are the very scientists backpedaling afterwards and admitting that their studies were crap and should not be published or used as an argument to murder cats.
Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, had this to say in response to the studies: "It's virtually impossible to determine how many cats live outside, or how many spend some portion of the day outside. Loss, Will, and Marra have thrown out a provocative number for cat predation totals, and their piece has been published in a highly credible publication, but they admit the study has many deficiencies. We don't quarrel with the conclusion that the impact is big, but the numbers are informed guesswork.
If even animal advocates admit "the impact is big," why do the specific numbers matter so much? Because when people start thinking of cats primarily as murderers, it then becomes the cats' lives that may be seriously endangered. Of concern are not only extremists like the man in New Zealand who recently suggested a ban on pet cats; cat advocate organization Alley Cat Allies says that the study is so "biased" that it amounts to an invitation to "ramp up the mass killings of outdoor cats."
Resource https://www.npr.org/.../do-we-really-know-that-cats-kill...
"It’s one thing to dislike cats, but for groups like the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), the National Audubon Society, and the National Fish and Wildlife Service (NFWS) to misrepresent studies, skew data, and take statistics out of context in order to push their anti-cat and anti-TNR agenda is irresponsible and unethical … especially since the cats are paying the ultimate price with their lives.
The “English Village” Study - DEBUNKED - Conducted by Peter Churcher and John Lawton
Churcher himself stated: “I don’t really go along with the idea of cats being a threat to wildlife. If the cats weren’t there, something else would be killing the sparrows or otherwise preventing them from breeding”
“Rarely are projections made with such limited data, except in junior high science projects.” (Elliott, 1994).
The “Wisconsin Study” - DEBUNKED - John Coleman and Stanley Temple
Temple himself stated, “The media has had a field day with this since we started. Those figures were from our proposal. They aren’t actual data; that was just our projection to show how bad it might be.”
In reference to the English Village Study: Biologist and Expert Feline Behaviorist, Roger Tabor states: “The mesmeric effect of big numbers seems to have stultified reason.” (Tabor, 1991)
Gary J. Patronek, VMD, Ph.D. of Tufts University said this about cat predation statistics in a letter to the editor of the Journal of Veterinary Medicine (1996):
"If the real objection to managed colonies is that it is unethical to put cats in a situation where they could potentially kill any wild creature, then the ethical issue should be debated on its own merits without burdening the discussion with highly speculative numerical estimates for either wildlife mortality or cat predation. Whittling down guesses or extrapolations from limited observations by a factor of 10 or even 100 does not make these estimates any more credible, and the fact that they are the best available data is not sufficient to justify their use when the consequences may be extermination for cats."
Dr. Julie Levy from the University of Florida’s Veterinary School and cofounder of Operation Catnip was quoted in Best Friends magazine (2003) as stating, “There are much more important pressures on bird populations [than cats]─primarily pollution and habitat destruction. And those are harder areas for bird groups to be effective in.” Levy concludes that the goal is to reduce the feral cat population saying, “we can do it in a humane way that respects the animals rather than in a 50-year-old vision of animal control, in which the only way you can help animals is by killing them”
Resource http://www.saveacat.org/debunking-the-myths-and...
In this article written by William S. Lynn, Research Scientist at Clark University and A***n Wallach, Lecturer at Centre for Compassionate Conservation, University of Technology Sydney and Francisco J. Santiago-Ávila, Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison:
In our most recent publication in the journal Conservation Biology, we examine an error of reasoning that props up the moral panic over cats.
Scientists do not simply collect data and analyze the results. They also establish a logical argument to explain what they observe. Thus, the reasoning behind a factual claim is equally important to the observations used to make that claim. And it is this reasoning about cats where claims about their threat to global biodiversity founder. In our analysis, we found it happens because many scientists take specific, local studies and overgeneralize those findings to the world at large.
Even when specific studies are good overall, projecting the combined "results" onto the world at large can cause unscientific overgeneralizations, particularly when ecological context is ignored. It is akin to pulling a quote out of context and then assuming you understand its meaning.
Resource https://www.ecowatch.com/cats-killing-wildlife-2646869888...
“…the presence of feral cats in a place indicates an ecological niche for approximately that number of cats” - Zaunbrecher, K.L., D.V.M., & Smith, R.E., D.V.M., M.P.H. (1993). “Neutering of feral cats as an alternative to eradication programs.” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 203(3), 449-452.
Each time cats are removed, the population will rebound to fill that niche.
Resource https://www.alleycat.org/reso.../research-the-vacuum-effect/
Compiled & written by Heidi Fernandes on 4/15/2021
Do your own research and please encourage advocates from all sides to do the same.
