I’ve been told to get a cat to take care of the gophers so many times, but cats just love to kill everything.
I can’t imagine seeing the quail babies hunted. My dogs used to kill one or two every year, it took an effort to train them.
Now I get so many birds in the orchard garden. Love the countless lizards, geckos, and the cute kangaroo rats. Don’t mind sharing with a few pack rats and squirrels. They all deserve to live.
Most likely the drought caused the extreme decline in rodents, rabbits and so many critters in 2021 — even at my place where they have essentially unlimited food and water. Usually they got much of my harvest before I could to it. Last year was unreal, I got so many peaches and I even got to harvest the grapes, almost until it froze.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
… We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. 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. …
The study goes into great detail and I hope that eventually, cat owners won’t let them prey on wildlife anymore.
We used to have a cat when I was a little kid and she didn’t get any food aside from some milk every day. She was our cat, but lived outdoors, no litter box in the house. And she often brought live mice, my mom was so scared of them. Never saw her catch anything but mice. Wonder why.
