Official News page 5

REAL LIFE NEWS: A WORLD WITHOUT CATS

by Hazed

Lots of people are cat lovers. Lots of people are indifferent to feline charms. And then there are those that hate cats, who are always trotting out statistics about how many songbirds are killed each year by the little furry predators.

Anyone who knows me will be aware that I fall firmly into the cat lover’s camp, so I was intrigued to read an article which speculates what would happen if all the cats in the world suddenly died. Apart from all their owners being bereft, I didn’t think it would make a huge amount of difference. After all, cats don’t do very much: they spend a lot of their time asleep, and the rest of the time acting cute in order to coax their owners into feeding them.

But the thought experiment shows how wrong I was. Cats - both strays are pets - are expert predators of small animals, and without them, we’d soon be overrun by mice and rats.

And that wouldn’t just be a problem for food stores, it would trigger a cascade of other ecological effects. For example, if rat numbers go up, bird numbers can go down because the rats eat the eggs.

It’s all fascinating stuff, and should be the perfect counter next time someone moans about poor little sparrows being slaughtered by evil cats. Go and read the full article for more details.

Source: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/cats-world-suddenly-died-145802016.html

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