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of Audubon Societies, considers the wild house cat one of the 

 greatest causes of bird destruction known. He says that the 

 boy with the air gun is not in the same class with the cat. 



Dr. William T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoologi- 

 cal Park, and author of valuable works on the protection of wild 

 life, says: "In such thickly settled communities as our northern 

 States, from the Atlantic coast to the sandhills of Kansas and 

 Nebraska, the domestic cat is probably the greatest four-footed 

 scourge of bird life. Thousands of persons who never have seen 

 a hunting cat in action will doubt this statement, but proof of its 

 truthfulness is only too painfully abundant. . . . That cats de- 

 stroy annually in the United States several millions of very 

 valuable birds seems fairly beyond question. I believe that in 

 settled regions they are worse than weasels, foxes, skunks and 

 mink combined, because there are about one hundred times as 

 many of them, and those that hunt are not afraid to hunt in the 

 daytime. Of course, I am not saying that all cats hunt wild 

 game; but in the country I believe that fully one-half of them 

 do." 



Mr. T. Gilbert Pearson, secretary of the National Association 

 of Audubon Societies, and author of books and papers on birds, 

 makes the following statement: "There is no wild bird or animal 

 in the United States whose destructive inroads on our bird 

 population is in any sense comparable to the widespread devasta- 

 tion created by the domestic cat." 



Dr. George W. Field, chairman of the Massachusetts Com- 

 mission on Fisheries and Game, while fond of cats as pets, says 

 that he has reluctantly concluded that they destroy more game 

 and insectivorous birds than any other one factor at present 

 operating to diminish the bird population. 



Mr. Ernest Harold Baynes, author of "Wild Bird Guests," 

 etc., regards the cat as "far and away" the most destructive of 

 all the animals for whose present status as bird destroyers man 

 is more or less responsible. 



Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright, president of the Connecticut 

 Audubon Society, and author of many popular books on birds, 

 writes: "The evidence of men and women whose words are in- 

 contestable would verify my most radical statement, but one 

 fact is beyond dispute: if the people of the country insist upon 

 keeping cats in the same numbers as at present, all the splendid 

 work of Federal and State legislation, all the labors of game and 

 song bird protective associations, all the loving care of individ- 

 uals in watching and feeding, will not be able to save our native 

 birds in many localities." 



