"We like to recommend people be considerate of the bird," says Garber. For this reason, Garber recommends that pets under 15 pounds, living in areas with large bird populations should be supervised at all times during outdoor activities. The New Mexico town has a population of Cooper’s hawks, which can be fiercely protective of their nests, not just attacking pets, but anything that threatens its territory, including humans. Gail Garber is the executive director of Hawks Aloft, an Albuquerque nonprofit focused on conservation of indigenous wild birds and their habitats. They encourage people to keep their yard "free of debris or plant material that predators can hide in."
Texas A&M’s Veterinary Medicine program encourages, pet owners living closer to rural areas to look for nesting areas, and to stay away. Oftentimes the answer is as simple as knowing if your yard is also viewed by a hawk or owl as its own home. Be mindful of your own backyardīirds do attack pets - great horned owls in particular have a reputation for attacking domesticated cats - but there are a number of ways to avoid these confrontations. Great horned owls, northern goshawks, and red-tailed hawks are three of the most common birds-of-prey to lash at small dogs and cats, typically those under 20 pounds. In the United States a number of hawks and owls are large enough to attack a pet, though most are unlikely or simply unable to carry a dog or cat into the sky with a cartoonish flourish. The rise of the hungry hawk in popular culture is likely attributable to its panic-inducing concision: a few words capture an otherwise difficult-to-summarize fear that a surrogate of nature will swoop into our controlled suburban spaces and turn our domesticated housemates into feral snacks. And yet, from years of stories of malicious birds, people were primed to mistake grim fantasy for reality. An eagle, smaller than most large hawks and owls, cannot lift a 30-pound toddler. The video is fake, obviously, but more so it’s premise is ludicrous and should be clearly impossible.
In 2012, a group of Canadian students tricked a number of local news channels when they uploaded a video of an eagle swooping into a park, grabbing a baby, and arcing upwards into the air, before releasing the infant back to earth. A hawk won’t carry your child into the clouds The shift has changed our perception so thoroughly that many people are willing to believe the animals are capable of physics-defying attacks. It’s as if the further the story traveled, the less true it became.īut as is the case with most news, people rarely remember the corrections, and so large hawks and owls have unjustly earned a bad reputation for abducting pets from numerous misreports and rumors. Which is to say they may not have been nabbed at all.
It’s also false.Īccording to a follow-up by the Bangor Daily News, Greenville residents only lost three pets during the reign of the great horned owl, and two of those pets - a pair of vanished house cats - were nabbed without eyewitnesses. The Orlando Sentinel made room for an item on the owl hundreds of miles away: "Wildlife officials said the owl, which hunts small prey, may have discovered an easy food supply in Greenville's cat population and eventually lost its fear of being around humans." The image is morbidly funny. Despite the incident’s comparably minor scope - a few pets abducted by a wild animal in a small town - the story became something of a national sensation. For example, let’s return to the insatiable great horned owl of Greenville, Maine.
The trouble with avian spook-stories is they’re often exaggerated, speculated, or outright fabricated for maximum drama. There are a few things people with small pets - under 20 pounds - can do to take a little extra precaution. But large hawks and owls are predators, and they do, sometimes, attack pets. No, there isn’t a secret war between birds and pets. The National Park System is turning 100, and The Verge is celebrating with Wilderness Week : a look at the natural world, its freaky critters, and its future.Īre we really to believe in a legitimate avian menace skulking above our backyards? Have said backyards become the battleground in the war of domesticity? Should we as pet owners be paralyzed in fear?
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