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Letter: Keep cats away from birds

It’s been a long time since I’ve sent a letter in to the editor, but I feel so strongly on the issue of free-range cats I just had to chime in.

I’ve loved cats my whole life. For most of my adult life, the cats I’ve had have been indoor/outdoor cats.

About five years ago, after our last cat died of some strange disease, I decided that enough was enough, and in the future, all my cats would be indoor cats. I made this decision for several reasons: I lost a cat to a predator, another one to a car and a couple to diseases they had picked up outdoors.



The main reason, though, is I also love watching the varied colors of birds we get, and with my cats out hunting them, they never came around. Now that our two newest buddies are indoor-only (except for field trips to the yard on a long leash), we are once again surrounded by song and the flashes of color around our bird feeders. Plans are in the works to build our boys a “catio” so they can be closer to the outdoors, but roaming free isn’t something they’ll ever do.

I’m all for towns changing their cat laws so the bird population can recoup and so the neighbors won’t have to deal with the noise and mess free-range cats leave behind. Why should cats be treated any differently than dogs? (Which I also own, so I’m not “anti-dog.”) Hopefully, making people be more responsible for their cats will cut down on the feral population as well. Maybe killing birds is in their DNA, but the out-of-control cat population is definitely contributing to the declination of our songbird population, and I hope nobody wants to see that.



Audrey Thornton

Silt


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