Your cat is destroying the environment

Anyone who has watched her cat hunker down on its haunches, lock eyes on a moving target — a twitching toe or finger, a laser-pointer dot, a songbird — and pounce, knows that she is cohabitating with a predator. But while we might have felt the consequences of our pets' teeth and claws, cats owners are often in denial about the damage their beloved feline friends are wrecking on the environment:

In 2013, Marra and a team of researchers found that in a single year, free-ranging cats killed "up to 4 billion birds, 22 billion small mammals, 822 million reptiles, and 299 million amphibians" in the U.S. alone. A 2011 review of 120 islands found that cats caused "the decline or extinction of 123 species of songbirds, parrots, seabirds, and penguins; 25 species of iguanas, lizards, turtles, and snakes; and 27 species of small mammals, including a lemur and a bat."

Particularly problematic are stray cats, which, while an invasive species, are defended ardently by animal rescue and welfare groups. On the other hand, environmentalists must act to protect fragile species — and that can require the extermination of stray colonies.

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This much is for sure, though: "Pet cats should no more be allowed to roam around at will than should pet dogs, horses, pythons, or pot-bellied pigs. The notion that cats have a particularly deep-seated 'need' for freedom is also a cop-out, an abdication of an owner's responsibility to, hey, play with your cat once in a while, rather than expect the sparrows to do it for you." Read the full report at The New York Review of Books.