http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/opinion/sunday/the-evil-of-the-outdoor-cat.html?_r=0"We were about to become early adopters in the trend that is beginning to make outdoor cats as socially unacceptable as smoking cigarettes in the office, or leaving dog droppings on the sidewalk.
What?s driving this trend is a growing sense of alarm about the dramatic decline in wildlife, and especially bird, populations, combined with a new awareness that cats bear a significant share of the blame.
The National Audubon Society tracks 20 common North American bird species ? Eastern meadowlarks, field sparrows and the like ? that are now in decline. Their numbers have dropped by 68 percent on average since 1967, because of a variety of factors. In Britain, likewise, farmland bird populations have plummeted just since 1995, with turtle doves, for instance, down by 85 percent, cuckoos by 50 percent, and lapwings by 41 percent.
If these were stock market numbers, people would be leaping from buildings. But the peculiar thing about what biologists have called ?the second Silent Spring? is that people tend not to hear it."