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300 to 400 million! Think about it: that’s around one million per day, a billion every three years. Are there enough small birds in Canada to sustain this slaughter? I think that, at that rate, we would have run out of birds some years ago. I recently read an article in the Guardian, called “Meaty meals and play stop cats killing wildlife,” about a scientific study done in the United Kingdom, the premise being to understand why some well-fed (but not all) housecats hunt. Their estimate was that cats kill around 100 million animals annually in the U.K., of which 25 per cent are birds. Canada’s human population is about 55 per cent that of the U.K., so assuming that the cat and kill ratios are about the same, that would be about 14 million birds killed in Canada.