Kittens with nice mirrorring

Kittens with nice mirrorring (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Birds in Germany are dying by the millions and Peter Berthold of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, says that cats are to blame. By his calculation, cats kill approximately 50 million birds each year in Germany alone. The solution, he says, to this travesty, is a cat tax.

No, this isn't from The Onion. And it's not April Fool's Day.

This guy is totally serious.

Berthold, who holds a Ph.D. and a post-doctoral degree, believes that an "ecological compensation tax" would help control the amount of damage on bird populations. He's clearly passionate about the cause, having been an active member of the Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft, an organization dedicated to the protection of birds, since 1955.

He says, about cats, "[s]ometimes they kill a wonderful red-coloured bullfinch, or a wryneck, which could be the last in the district."

Berthold referred to a study published earlier this year in Nature Communications which found that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds (as well as 6.9–20.7 billion mammals) annually: that works out to 40 birds killed per cat every year. Many of those birds represented the end of their species: as many as 33 species of birds are thought to have been eradicated by cats. However, it's worth noting that stray cats, as opposed to pets, cause most of the damage.

You might assume that only Berthold is passionate about this cause - but the notion is actually spreading in the bird community. Markus Erlwein of the National League for Bird Protection in Bavaria (LBV), has also expressed support for the idea, claiming that the tax wouldn't be intended as a deterrent to keep cats but rather that the revenue generated from such a tax could be used to protect birds. Protection could extend to new tree plantings or the creation of new habitats where birds could form communities.

But not everyone is on board with the idea. Thomas Schröder, president of the German Animal Welfare Association (DTSB), worries that such a tax might lead to more stray animals. He said, about his concerns, "[c]onsidering the experience we have had with dog tax, we would fear that the introduction of a cat tax would mean many animals would suddenly be thrown out, or given to animal shelters as the owners would not want to, or be able to cover the extra costs." More "throwaway" cats, in addition to the health and economic issues that raises, might actually exacerbate the problem of bird deaths.

The existing dog tax in Germany, or Hundesteuer (literally "dog tax"), is like a license. It's called a tax, however, because the amount payable is dependent on where the owners live and the breed of the dog; dogs deemed as "dangerous" - like Dobermans and Rottweilers - are taxed at a higher rate (exemptions and exceptions apply). In some cities, like Berlin, a second dog is taxed at a much higher rate so as to discourage taxpayers from owning too many dogs.

The fact that a dog tax already exists - and has for hundreds of years in Germany - may make the idea of the cat tax a little easier to sell. However, while the cat tax idea has garnered a lot of attention, there's no indication that it has a great deal of support. Germany is one of the top ten cat-owning countries in the world (the United States is tops, besting even China) - and since cat owners tend to have more animals than dog owners on average, the numbers aren't on Berthold's side. That won't keep him from trying, however, from trying to preserve die "attraktivsten Lebewesen, die wir kennen" (the "most attractive creatures that we know").

