Trail to Earth Day #5: It’s Cool for Cats to be Indoors

The Trail to Earth Day, a series of simple tips to help the environment (with music at the end!) will run through the 50th Earth Day, April 22. We’d be happy to send you one a day via text. Sign up here.

April 5, 2020 — Don’t let the cat out of the house. Outdoor cats kill an estimated 1.3 – 4 billion birds in North America every year (they also kill 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually).

It’s a huge, emotionally-charged problem but there’s something you can do: keep your cat indoors and, if you acquire a new cat, train it as an indoor pet.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, three scientists wrote: “Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals. Scientifically sound conservation and policy intervention is needed to reduce this impact.”

“Anthropogenic mortality” = death caused by humans.

Today’s song documents, using the most serious, peer-reviewed methodology, just how persistent cats can be. And there’s a bonus song below as well.