I'm not against shooting cats if they're on your property and have no visible collar or are known to be feral, and it is safe to do so (take a shot - no nearby neighbors), but honestly, I'd rather have more cats and less birds - that is, if the cats can catch starlings and grackles. The cats can eat the starlings, which in turn fattens up the cats so that they make a nice meal for my dogs - that works.
Having said that, there sure seems to be some logic deficiency in the "arguments" of the animal lover:
Not so, says Frohman of the Maryland-based Alley Cat group. Man is a far worse predator, she said, with skyscrapers and other man-made structures killing countless migrating wild birds in collisions each year.
I'm sorry, but if a bird is not smart enough to avoid hitting a building and dying as a result, rather than going around it, then methinks its genes *need* to be culled from the pool. And, what would she have us do, knock down all existing skyscrapers to help the songbirds?
The true solution to the country’s millions of feral city and country cats, she said, is to trap them, have them spayed or neutered and then released back into the wild.
Wow. Ok, who's going to pay for that / actually get it done? If YOU'RE not, then allowing hunters to do what it is that they do is a solution - in fact, the only solution yet presented that could actually occur. And I find it interesting that she admits that there even is a problem in need of a solution, given that hers is not economically viable.
Killing them, she said, only causes colonies of existing cats to expand in size to take up the territory of those that have been eliminated.
Well, yes and no. While it's true that any hardy wild/feral species will rebound from a culling exercise eventually, in the short-term, and even perpetually, allowing hunting/culling can and will in fact reduce the numbers, as it is a matter of time - they are hunted faster than they can procreate, in all likelihood, up to a point of diminishing returns - they get harder and harder to see and hunt, allowing an equilibrium to be established at lower numbers than present. Bottom line, she's incorrect.