But some cat lovers are also bird lovers. Some cat owners aren’t aware of the problem some are, but feel that the companionship they receive from their pet outweighs their small contribution to a broader issue. And our having them around in such numbers means trouble for birds. But their instincts haven’t caught up to our evolving needs-cats are still highly effective stealth hunters. But there’s little need for working cats anymore these days, most people just think of them as gentle companions and Internet memes. Humans originally used domesticated cats as efficient predators, protecting stores of food from vermin. That’s a lot of cats, and many spend their days doing what they’ve done since the first cats were domesticated more than 9,000 years ago: hunting small animals. An estimated 30-80 million more live as strays. In the U.S., there are about 84 million pet cats, and around 46 million of them are allowed to roam outside. But here’s something else that stretches across borders: People love cats. Researchers in the United Kingdom estimated that 55 million birds fall prey to domestic cats there each year in Australia, threats to endangered species led government officials to announce plans for euthanizing 2 million feral cats.Ĭat predation of wildlife, in other words, is a worldwide issue. A 2011 study found that domestic cats have directly contributed to extinctions of 22 bird species on islands around the world, and threatened dozens more. While habitat loss and climate change pose long-term dangers to birds in this country, recent research shows that outdoor cats currently kill more of them than any other threat caused by humans. land-bird population, which the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center estimates is around 10-20 billion.

That’s most likely a sizable chunk out of the U.S. Here’s an alarming but little-known figure-stray cats and pet cats allowed outdoors kill 3.6 million birds every day on average in the United States, for a total of at least 1.3 billion birds per year.

Pet bird bell