I read an article today about how cats in the United States kill billions of critters a year. Billions. Per year. In the US alone. For reference, this is a billion: 1000000000. Multiply that by 20ish, and you’re looking at how many mice, squirrels, birds, bats, and other small fluffy or feathery lives are extinguished per year, in America, in the jaws of vicious kitty cats.

Some thoughts:

1) Holy crap, we have a lot of critters out there if cats are murdering billions a year and the population of birds and squirrels still seems to be thriving (as far as I can tell, anyway).

2) I guess the loss of that many birds and small mammals is probably bad for the environmental balance, and the whole catch-neuter-release idea for stray cats isn’t necessarily the best plan, although the alternative breaks my heart.

3) I wonder how much higher that number would be if my Horton was an outside cat.

4) Maybe that explains the giant monster squirrels in Mom’s backyard. Evolutionary pressure.

No, really! Think about it! Obviously, the cats are preferentially picking off the smaller and weaker creatures, leaving the giant-critter-genes disproportionately represented in the population! This explains why the crows in my yard are getting so fat they waddle and the squirrels are big and strong enough to haul beefsteak tomatoes off my garden vine and eat them on the deck.

I’m in Montreal this week, and Mom likes to have her morning coffee and cigarette on the back porch even in the cold of a Canadian winter (our blood is thick up here, folks). On my second day here, I heard her yelp and race back in, slamming the door behind her. “He’s back, ‘stie! Jennifer! Come see this sucker!” She pointed out the window towards the biggest squirrel I had ever seen.

“He hates me,” Mom told me, still wrapped in her fur coat and wanting her smoke. “He’s an aggressive son of a bitch! He’s the one who ate through my garbage cans and dug up my flowerpots! I put mothballs like my friend told me, but he just dug them out and threw them on the neighbor’s balcony! When I’m inside at the table, he comes to the windowsill, looks me in the eye, and poops there on purpose right in front of me, the little shit!”

Good daughter that I am, I put on my purple down coat with the fluff-lined hood and stood on the balcony with my mother, brandishing a plastic shovel to defend her from giant attack squirrels. This guy came towards us once or twice, but the whoosh of the shovel scared him back to the neighbor’s hanging flowerpot. I got a picture of him:

And this was one of the smaller guys.

While I was out there, I had a good look around. We were surrounded. There were dozens of squirrels hanging out in the trees behind Mom’s place in Montreal, and every single one was bigger than the ones I usually deal with back in Maryland. The Canadian squirrels look exactly the same in terms of color and features, so I’m sure they’re the same species, but they must weigh at least 3 pounds each.

Weight-loss-inspiration photo these guys surely have taped to the bathroom mirrors in their nests.

I’m not kidding. Thick branches dip dangerously under their weight. The downstairs neighbor is contributing to their weight problem by throwing crackers and stale bread out for them on a regular basis. If you’re quiet, you can hear them crunching from the balcony. It’s surreal, hearing dozens of crackers being crunched by hundreds of tiny teeth.  I tried hard to get a picture of the really fat one, but he stayed too far away. He doesn’t fit through the holes in the chain-link fence, poor little guy, so he had to climb the fence to get at his carbs.



A photo of Fatty from 2008. He’s still using it in his SquirrelMatch.com profile.

I’ll be back out there tomorrow for more balcony defense. Wish me luck. They may bring reinforcements. Does anyone have an outside cat I can borrow?