Their “job” is to destroy as much native wildlife as possible while conning people into thinking they are keeping the rat and mouse numbers in check.
It’s now time that I must disabuse people of a common misconception:
Keeping barn cats is not a “green” way of pest control.
I know that there is a large sector of the yuppie world that wants to return to agrarianism and do things the old fashioned way.
Maybe raise some heritage seeds or some heritage turkeys. Or maybe some pot.
Who knows!
These old-fashioned ways of agriculture are no more likely to save the world than wooden sailing ships are.
It’s just novelty and romance and with it the various delusions that the old ways were always better.
Most of these old-fashioned farm techniques are relatively harmless. Some are beneficial, but the problem is you can’t feed the world on this sort of agriculture. We’ve had to develop modern farming techniques because we have people to feed.
One of the worst romantic notions I’ve come across is this idea that keeping a colony of barn cats is the best way to control pest populations.
I haven’t even seen any data to show that cats are very good at keeping mouse and rat numbers down in agricultural enterprises.
It’s just something that is assumed.
We also assume that cats were purposefully domesticated for rodent control purposes, but no one has provided any evidence that this is true.
In fact, it seems much more likely that cats found protection in our early villages in the Levant and Fertile Crescent (not Egypt, as was once believed). They may have lived very near people for generation after generation in much the same way that raccoons, red foxes, and European badgers do now.
My guess is these animals were the first mesopredators to benefit from our first attempts to create horticultural societies, and over time, populations of cat grew to become adept exploiters of our world. The abundance of food in the form of expanding murid populations meant the cats could end their solitary existence, and now they could begin breeding in colonies that rather resemble lion prides– sans the cooperative hunting, of course.
Some people may have kept kept pet cats in much the same way people have kept pet skunks, raccoons, or foxes.
But it seems to me somewhat difficult to accept that cats were domesticated for the purpose of rodent control.
It seems to me that this is the first mesopredator to make it big off of our attempts to bend nature to our own liking.
The problem is that so many people think cats are necessary to keeping rodent populations under control that the yuppie farmer goes out and gets a score of barn cats under the assumption that this is the most ecologically friendly way of rodent control.
Of course, if anything, it’s probably one of the worst.
Cats might prey on mice and young rats, but they also prey on birds and amphibians and reptiles.
Commercial rodent baits are actually more ecologically friendly than cats. If you place rodent baits in granaries and barns, the chances of killing a non-target species are very low, although there is always a chance.
Further, the old way of rodent control on farms didn’t actually involve cats.
My mother’s family grew up on self-sufficient farm. It had several large grain stores that were often invaded by rats.
The boys had the duty of ridding the barn of rats. This was a duty they relished.
They would take the dogs into granaries and corncribs and let the dogs kill as many rats as they could catch.
Dogs have a strong tendency to surplus kill, so one can kill a lot of rats with just a few dogs.
In fact, this was the advice of a pheasant farmer nearly one hundred years ago:
Even if you do not keep a cat, you will be surprised at the number of these highly destructive creatures roaming the countryside in search of prey if you set out a few cat traps. An ordinary rabbit trap made a little larger than usual will do. The Greenwich, Connecticut, Bird Protective Society sells a most effective box trap for cats at $3.50. In its literature it suggests a fish head or raw meat as bait and advises placing the trap in shrubbery or having it otherwise partly concealed. The David T. Abercrombie Co., 311 Broadway, New York City, carries a box trap that automatically chloroforms the cat.
Keep no cat yourself. They do not destroy birds as a rule when anyone is looking and the hour following daybreak is their favorite time for hunting, so the oft-repeated statement, “but my cat doesn’t kill birds,” is seldom based on full knowledge of the animal’s movements. Cats have been proved by medical authorities to be carriers of the germs of scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis and many other frightful diseases. See “The Cat and Transmission of Disease,” by Dr. C. A. Osborne, Biological Department, Clark University, Worcester, Mass.
In common with practically all other vermin, cats are most destructive during the breeding season, when it is impossible or unwise to confine the young in covered pens.
The farmer recommended that one get an Airedale for rodent control purposes. The dog could easily be taught to leave stock alone, and it would effectively control vermin besides the rats.
If dogs are impractical, then ferrets should be considered.
Contrary to paranoia from certain game managers, there is no evidence of domestic ferrets going wild anywhere on the North American continent. They can be used in conjunction with dogs to kill rats out of granaries and corncribs.
If one can control a ferret in a confined space, one will not have any problem with it going wild. They’ve not been proven to survive on their own anywhere on this continent anyway. They are simply too tame, and they are very poor at competing with native mustelids.
But cats don’t have that same record.
Barn cats that are allowed to breed often give birth to kittens in the woods, where they readily grow up as ferals.
And even neutered barn cats are going to take an astronomical number of other wildlife.
So if every farm had them, it would make the ecological travesties that are the feral and free-roaming cat that much worse.
Some may not appreciate it, but there are ways of controlling vermin on agricultural enterprises that don’t involve releasing an invasive superpredator into the ecosystem.
If you really want to control rats and mice, poison is a much better option.
Using dogs or ferrets or even encouraging native predators to live near you are even better choices.
Cats belong indoors.
This is not a bromide.
If you actually cared about the ecology of your area, you would understand why barn cats are just such a bad choice.
But the truth is most people don’t care that much about the ecology.
They’d rather play farmer and keep some kitties in the barn.
Does the North American Bobcat out compete feral cats when their ranges overlap?
Bobcats will kill domestic cats if they find them, but they can never exist at the same densities. In my area, they eat entirely different prey species. The bobcats eat a lot of deer and rabbits, while cats eat all the tiny things.
The worst is when city people so kindly drop off their unwanted cats on farms, where they are usually quite equally as unwanted as they spread disease through their feces (sheep and toxoplasmosis is the best example that comes to mind).
We have lots of bobcats in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We see both them, and their prints, regularly. Unfortunately, neither they, nor the foxes, owls, and hawks, keep the pocket gopher below plague proportions. Gophers are chronic plague and the farmer / gardener’s nightmare. Not all that easy to poison or trap, either. Some combination of cougars, bobcats, great horned owls and foxes does, however, keep feral cats (and raccoon) numbers low. (Quail and doves remain abundant, though). I’m looking at about $50k worth of grapes getting ripe and starting to attract birds. I lost about $4k of grapes to bird damage last year, and wouldn’t mind having an animal around that scared them off. Cats would be worthless for the job . . . and, thanks to native predators, they tend to disappear if you don’t keep them in at night.
I wish we had more snakes. They seem like the best alternative for keeping smallish burrowing animals under control.
What about raptors? Can you encourage them to live there?
No need to. We have two pairs of red shouldered hawks that nest nearby and a few resident owls . . . plus visiting red tails, kestrel. Problem with raptors is that they don’t like to land between the vine rows, so they’re pretty useless for gophers.
You need some sharp-shinned or Cooper’s hawks. They specialize in hunting in the trees and brush.
I have kept neutered cats here and they did help with vermin a bit….
BUT
When I first came here, there were 2 farms below me at the riverside. And on one of them there were 20 cats. Wall to wall cats in the farmyard. Willie the farmer told me they were to keep down the rats.
And rats there were. I was having a rat problem too. I trapped a lot of them. I was sure they were coming up from the farm.
Then Willie fell out with his 2 sons, who were telling him how to run the farm. In a fury, he sold the farm, so that neither would get it.
A new farmer moved in. The cats left. And lo and behold – no more rats! The secret was not cats, but better farm management, particularly in grain and feed storage.
I now have neither cats nor a rat problem.
Elizabeth
megrim43, you’re not the only one to have witnessed this effect.
Toxoplasmosis:
http://scitizen.com/neuroscience/parasite-hijacks-the-mind-of-its-host_a-23-509.html
Cats attract rodents to your home with their whole slew of diseases. If you want rodents in your home keep cats outside of it to attract diseased rodents to your area.
I experienced this phenomenon (as have many others). Interestingly, after having shot every last cat that had infested my land (hundreds of them), a mouse problem that I started having about the time all the cats started showing up, completely disappeared after all the cats were gone. Apparently the cats were attracting them to the area around my home. I’ve not seen even ONE mouse inside my home since I got rid of all the cats in the area. Coincidence? I don’t think so. The T. gondii cat-parasite info that is available now explains why it was happening.
Also interesting, once the cat/rodent predator/prey relationship has balanced itself out you end up with nothing but both — cats and rodents and no other wildlife. What an awful end result to the suggestion of using cats as rodent control.
I have a purely anecdotal theory about cats and fleas. I used to have a cat and a dog at the same time, and year after year, had a flea problem. After I figured out that I am allergic to cats and rehomed my last cat, I stopped having a flea problem. The only time I have ever had to treat for fleas since was when my neighbor was feeding a local feral who used to come in to my backyard as well (I kept encouraging her to trap the cat, which she wouldn’t do–cat disappeared finally, probably hit by a car).
There are cat fleas and dog fleas, but apparently the fleas that most often cause an infestation are cat fleas. My theory is that the fleas were coming in on the dog, but STAYING on the cat (when I had a cat) and that the feral cat was bringing fleas into my back yard.
I prefer not to use anything for flea preventive if I don’t have to (just personal preference) but since two of my Shelties develop flea-bite dermatitis if they get bitten (the other two–another Sheltie and an Italian Greyhound–don’t seem bothered by fleas) I have to use something at the first sign of fleas. We’ve been good so far this year.
Cats DO apparently go after rodents — http://socpvs.org/journals/index.php/wbp/article/viewArticle/10.2461-wbp.2010.6.3 (The diet of feral cats (Felis silvestris catus) in the Mediterranean island of Majorca (Spain) was studied from July 2008 to June 2009 by the analysis of the scats of 75 feral cats captured in baited traps in 14 different areas. A total of 138 preys were identified in the analyzed scats. Mammals were the main group preyed on and constituted 93% both in frequency and biomass. Among them, mice were the most frequent prey consumed (55% Mus sp., 18% Apodemus sylvaticus) but represented only 20% of biomass. Rat was present in 29% of scats and was the main component in terms of biomass (57%). — I found another study done in NZ. I could not find any study in the US. However, if you happen to have livestock, etc and don’t want to use poisons (which can get the wrong animal), cats do seem useful for those who don’t happen to have little boys and terriers to employ. The cats do it without being “set to do it”. The terriers aren’t as good at climbing as the cats and so may not get into lofts, top of haystacks, etc.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like feral cats. I believe that even barn cats can do a lot of collateral damage. I for sure do not like the way many with barn cats don’t vaccinate or treat for anything (it being a barn cat doesn’t mean you can’t “tame” and treat it). But if they happen to eat small rattlers or scorpions, etc, I doubt most farmers would complain. That they also eat the songbirds, gopher snakes, etc, is probably seen as “part of the price”. I think Barn cats do have a function — but that this is not a carte blanche for just letting them run wild.
No one said put the poison in the feed. You put the poison in another area, where livestock can’t get to it.
I think barn cats are about the most irresponsible animals out there.
I think every cat ought to be inside or shot.
Nuclear weapons will also take care of your rodent problem.
That’s what cats are. They are the animal equivalent of neutron bombs.
Just to play devils advocate… because I have seen it many times… you said that poison baits were a good alternative and rarely are eaten by the unintended target… in the vet hospital I work at alone we see about a dozen dogs that have eaten a warfarin containing poison set out for vermin. Sometimes they make it, sometimes they don’t – there are a lot of variables.The production companies make the poison so it tastes yummy (to animals anyway), otherwise how would you get even the rats to eat it. What is to stop any wild animal from eating this? Also, if a scavenger eats a dead rat it finds in the woods then he has just been poisoned as well. Poisons are a dangerous thing to get into.
I agree people should not let cats roam outside for the safety of wildlife and the cats themselves. It makes me so angry when I have to see a cat on an emergency basis because it has been ht by a car, because it is almost completely preventable (barring accidental escape). You can imagine the horrors.
We live out in the desert middle of nowhere and would have a huge rodent problem without poison. We use bromadiolone bait blocks that go into these plastic boxes that can only be opened with a key. The boxes go into places the dogs can’t get to. Even during the first die off after we started using poison, we rarely found a dead or dying rodent out in the open where the dogs could get to it.
Interestingly, we’ve had far fewer rattlesnakes this year but LOTS of other kinds of snakes, like bulls and Texas rats. We do have kangaroo rats that stay outside where they belong, maybe the shift in snakes indicates a prey preference.
What I’m suggesting is hiding the bait in an area where a dog can’t find it or dig it out. I know what you’re talking about.
But these things are even less of a problem than the things that cats can do to wildlife. It’s really that severe.
You are right about sometimes hitting non-target species.
Not to spoil the book for you, but in Rat Island, one of the Aleutian Islands that was baited with poison against rats killed a whole bunch of things, including some bald eagles. It didn’t wipe all those things out like it did with the rats.
What I’m saying is that cats actually produce so much collateral damage when they are released that even limited poisoning isn’t that bad by comparison.
Can they make a poison that only appeals to target species?
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Well even while playing devil’s advocate I still agree with you – and anyone who has studied ecology should as well. I just wish all people were smart enough to always place poisons where they can not be accessed by children or pets.
Thanks for addressing this issue. This has been one of my hugest gripes with these delusional urban cat-lovers.
Feral and stray cats that are dumped on farmers and ranchers never stay where they have been dumped. And even if they do return to their roost in the morning, all the rest of the day and night they are out roaming far and wide annihilating anything that moves. So they are summarily shot to death as soon as they stray onto someone else’s land. This is precisely why I had to shoot and bury hundreds of them. From cat-lovers telling everyone to dump their unwanted cats into “barn cat” programs. Now all shot dead and buried here. Nice plan of theirs, eh? They’re all just SO smart.
If I can’t change their ignorant mindset that is causing this, I’ll just have to shoot and bury hundreds of them in the future. Something that nobody should be forced to do just because they are too spineless and heartless to euthanize their own unwanted cats. Just last week I had to shoot 5 more. There weren’t any on my land for over 2 years, then one of the idiots in the area must have thought it was safe to adopt more cats from someone again because they hadn’t heard gunshots for so long. They quickly learned that guns were going off again and “surprisingly” none of their cats ever returned home — again. My land is now 100% cat-free again, as it is supposed to be. But how long will that last until they think it’s safe to adopt more cats from some idiot who doesn’t want theirs?
While on the topic, I’d like to mention the benefits of having Gray Fox in your area. They’re one of THE MOST BENEFICIAL native species of all. Not having evolved with European poultry, they seldom if ever put farmers’ poultry on their diet. (Though the numb-nutz farmers in my area shoot anything that moves. They even shoot the smallish Barred-Owls for fear an owl will take their chickens.) Gray Fox are also the only fox species to climb trees so they’ll even keep squirrel populations in check for you (as well as all excess rodents).
Sometimes mistaken for European introduced Red Fox, which DO love poultry — an easy way to remember to I.D. them from a distance or under poor lighting is:
Black Tail-Tip = Gray Fox, HIGHLY Beneficial.
White Tail-Tip = Red Fox, invasive species, destroys poultry, feel free to trap or hunt it if that’s your thing.
While the Reds are considered an introduced/invasive species, they are nowhere near as harmful to the ecosystem as cats are. Where I live both species of fox seem to get along rather well. I guess their diets don’t overlap enough to be a huge problem to the native Grays. Now that my land has been recovering from the cat-infestation that I eradicated over two years ago, I was fortunate enough to have a family of Gray Fox make a den near my home last year. It’s enjoyable to see them prancing around outside in the late afternoons or at night, showing their kits what is what. And it’s nice to know that if they remove any rodents, they’re not doing so by attracting even more of them. (see my post above, concerning cats’ Toxoplasma gondii parasite and how it hijacks the brains of rodents to make them attracted to cats)
I love gray foxes. They also keep red foxes away. They are the only small canid that tends to dominate them.
There is some debate as to whether red foxes are native or not. They definitely are in the West (except for most of California) and Canada, but the ones in the Eastern US have been thought to have been derived from English foxes.
I believed that for a long time, too, until I saw a study on mitochondrial DNA of red foxes in North America. It found that there were no Eurasian haplotypes in Southern and Eastern red foxes. They are actually derived from the Eastern Canadian population.
The researchers think that when the Eastern US became agricultural, this allowed Canadian red foxes to wander down here and become established. Red foxes actually were not seen in most of the South until the nineteenth century.
Now, some caveats. Mitochondrial DNA just looks at maternal inheritance. It’s possible that they are actually hybrids between native and introduced red foxes.
However, they wouldn’t have been able to colonize the East if the forests hadn’t been destroyed. I think the reason why red foxes, which are found in forests in Europe, don’t live in forests in the Eastern US is that red foxes don’t like to be in areas where there are gray foxes. Gray foxes love the deep forest, where they can climb trees.
It’s only now that I’ve seen anything in the literature on red vs. gray foxes, but my father’s family were fox trappers and shooters from way back. They would use electronic calls to toll in foxes to the gun, but they never would use gray calls. Gray calls would bring in only grays. Reds, which were much more valuable, would run away.
In the old days, they would keep a few red foxes in a pen for the purposes of urine collection. You use the urine to mark the bait on a leghold set. They were always running out of it, so my grandpa kept a few “piss foxes” for that purposes. One day he got the idea to put a gray fox in that pen, and the gray went nuts in the cage. It was in the process of killing one of the reds when he pulled it off.
Grays don’t tolerate reds in their territories. That may be why they never were able to colonize the Eastern US outside of the boreal and mixed forests.
People find it hard to believe that grays have this effect on reds. It’s only now being mentioned in the literature. Reds kill all the other little foxes whenever they encounter them.
Wow! Interesting stuff! Thanks for sharing all that. I too wouldn’t believe that Grays would have some predator effect on Reds. They’re so much smaller. I often confuse them for “another damn huge cat” on my infrared critter-cam wildlife monitor at night. So I have to go to the window to check. But I can usually tell in the monitor if I get to see how long their tail is. (WAY too long for a cat’s.)
(During my wildlife restoration project I had 2 adults and a kit (might be the clan that set up a den nearby) stop by every evening. Like little puppy-dogs. They’d sit on their haunches waiting for me to fill a plate for ‘em. Their little kit looking on in curiosity. VERY wary of any human-contraptions. They’d always first quickly tap the food-plate then jump away. Making sure it wasn’t a trap. Or in the case they do find a real trap to spring it to make sure the bait was safe to take. Smart critters.)
Interesting too about Reds’ possible origins. Might be why they coexist so well in this area. (Maybe “coexist well” is a bad term for it … I see ‘em both so I suspect neither does harm to either’s survival.) Mixed biomes here too. From hardwoods to coniferous to grasslands. They all can find what they like best.
In any case — GO GRAYS! :-) And I’ll be more respectful of any Reds I see. I like ‘em both, but Grays get the edge for climbing trees. :-) Sigh … now I’ll have to update my prepared “Good Animals For Rodent Control” texts. :-)
And there’s a reason they were named “Barn Owls”. You don’t hear cat-lovers promoting that, now do you. Sigh … (again)
The reds here are about the same size as the grays. However, I’m sure the larger subspecies of red can handle grays pretty easily. I saw a taxidermy of a red fox in Germany that was the size of a small beagle!
Interesting, showing my ignorance, I didn’t even know there were so many sub-species of Reds. Cool page you created on them. Thanks again! Now wondering if much of the predation by cats in my dense woods (heavy underbrush) starved out the Grays more than Reds, (cats being more prone to Gray habitat than Red habitat it would seem), which might have caused some stunted growth in the very few I’ve met personally. Will be interesting, if over the years, I see larger and larger Greys now that all cats are gone.
(This dense underbrush and heavily wooded habitat also lended itself to my having had to invent many unique methods to find and hunt down every last cat. MP3 Player Cat-Call (downloaded cat sounds off of cat-lover sites), strays and ferals run from unknown human sounds (“Here kitty kitty” does NOT work); learned the predator calls of my Gray Squirrels (most effective of all, they not only let me know one was around, but if 2 or more squirrels pointed their noses into the underbrush below, I could triangulate exactly where the cats was hiding) or by following the squirrels’ warning-calls through the woods could find where the cat was headed to; etc. etc. I could probably write a book now on how to hunt domestic cats. :-) This page http://www.americanhunter.org/blogs/arkansas-will-trap-feral-cats has a post-length-limit condensed overview of the methods I used which were very successful — in case someone needs the info.)
Oh, and Retrieverman, a little anecdote you might like to know about the origin and use of domesticating cats …. they were kept as the clean-up crew in castles and whatnot during the middle-ages. They didn’t wash dishes or pick up the left-over bones and scraps of food. After a banquet in the main hall they’d release the cats (and/or dogs) into a hall to clean up the mess while everyone retired to sleep off their mead and other strong drinks. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I heard it long ago on some PBS special. Gives a whole new light to the word “dishwasher”, no? :-)
My dad’s family always did that (put the plates and pots down for the family pet to lick clean after the food was gone) But they would always wash them with soap and hot water when the pets were done.
I also read/heard a story somewhere of a family that was confronted with the “Fish and house guests smell after three days” problem. After dinner one day the mother quietly told all the family to put their plates on the floor to get licked-clean by their pets. Then she gathered up all the plates and silverware and put them back up in the cupboards and drawers. The surprised visitors asked about this practice, getting the reply, “Oh, no, we do this often.” :-)