I feel that it is necessary to follow-up on Rick Sinnott's comment "Feral cats have no place in Alaska" (Daily News, May 24). Inside the home, the domestic cat is a wonderful pet that responds to affection and returns affection to its owners. But the practice of maintaining colonies of feral cats, or letting cat pets free-range, is highly destructive to native birds and small mammals.
Allowing feral cats and cat pets to roam is no different than releasing northern pike into interior lakes, reintroducing rats to Hawadax Island, or allowing escaped pythons to persist in the Florida Everglades. Like pike, rats and pythons, cats are a novel predator which native wildlife has little ability to evade.
Science has shown that when cats are removed from urban and suburban areas that bird and small mammals benefit. Letting domestic cats, either feral or pets, free-range is a practice that kills and in doing so, further degrades our environment.
— George Durner
Anchorage