Must We choose between Cats and Birds?
“From an animal-welfare perspective, confining cats and shooting the cat, in the Galveston example, is wrong,” says J. Baird Callicott, a philosophy professor at the University of North Texas. Callicott, a past president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, taught one of the nation’s first environmental ethics courses in 1971. He went on to say, however, that “from an environmental-ethics perspective it’s right, because a whole species is at stake. Personally, I think environmental ethics should trump animal-welfare ethics. But just as personally, animal-welfare ethicists think the opposite.”
Out of curiosity, I boiled down the Jim Stevenson case and sent it to a few environmental-ethics professors. Most agreed with Callicott: Shoot the cat.
Kill the Cat That Kills the Bird?
If you have an interest in cats, birds, the environment, the endangered species act, and/or ethical debates this is a very good article. It has amusingly stated factoids (James Cook was the Johnny Appleseeds of tabbys), and not so fun facts (Cats are considered so destructive to the environment that the World Conservation Union now lists the domestic cat as one of the world’s worst invasive species.). I'd especially encourage you to read it, if you live with cats and let them outside, regardless of the urban/rural environment you live in.
As a lover of both, I am an unabashed proponent of keeping domestic cats indoors, and controlling feral cat colonies (although I don't advocate shooting them). Ultimately, I agree with Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Portland Audubon Society:
“Habitat loss is the No. 1 problem [for birds], no doubt,” he said, “but that’s all the more reason to deal with these secondary problems. We don’t have the luxury of saying, Well, there’s all this habitat out there, and the birds will recover. There’s not, and they won’t.”
Would be interested in hearing what other people think.