Niall Hatch

I think greater care is needed in places like remote headlands or areas where we have upland or especially offshore islands where we have other types of bird nesting.

But for, you know, in general, where you have sort of suburban gardens and so on, keeping the cats in at that time will make a

Well, I think so.

I mean, the fact that people talk about it being nature that this happens, but cats aren't subject to natural selection the way that our native wildlife is.

They're sustained by people and they don't have predators in most cases that are controlling the numbers either.

So I think it really comes down to the owners of those cats.

I know there's also a separate issue with feral cats, cats that are living in the wild,

And that's a much harder situation to control.

I know you have like, like trap neutral release programs and so on, which can make it a humane reduction in that.

But at least, you know, talking to cat owners who listen to the program today, that bit of compromise, that bit of help for our nature could really help.

You know, we don't know how many cats there are in Ireland.

I've seen estimates of anywhere between half a million and a million.

So we're talking a significant number.

That's clear.

Yeah.

We know from our partner organization in the UK, an organization called the RSPB, they've done some pretty, pretty good research on this.

And they know that in, um,

In Britain, they reckon that around 400 million birds are killed by cats every year.

So if you extrapolate that to Ireland, obviously we have a lower human population here, which is obviously a lower population of pet cats, we still would be talking about tens of millions of birds killed by cats here in Ireland.

That's not counting things like the shrews and the frogs and the other creatures that Jim was talking about.