分类： 赛事资讯

“Switching Letters, Skipping Lines: Troubled and Dyslexic Minds”
By Hayden Miskinis, age 12, Epping Middle School, Epping, N.H.

I look down at my book. I slowly read the first line of jumpy letters that won’t stay still. It takes me a minute to find the next line, as my eyes jump around. This is a repeating process until I’m at the end of the page. This doesn’t just happen to me; it happens to 70-80 percent of dyslexic students in schools, and yet schools aren’t providing resources, teachers aren’t getting trained and people don’t even really understand dyslexia.

What is dyslexia? I didn’t know until 2015 when I was faced with the truth as to why I wasn’t progressing in school. I had been given interventions through a program called Title I which helps kids who don’t have access to books or reading in their homes, but it wasn’t working for me. I had plenty of books; I just couldn’t read them. What I needed were interventions that would work for me.

Many people think that dyslexia is just switching letters. In my case, and that of many other dyslexic people, switching letters is only a small part of the bigger issue. A recent study suggests that “The brains of dyslexics do form accurate neurological representations of language sounds” (Paul). This would explain why a dyslexic learner’s comprehension is so much higher than their reading ability. In other words, a dyslexic student could understand Harry Potter but not be able to read a simple word like “the.” In order for a dyslexic student to succeed, correct interventions should be applied early in school.

While it might be true that some schools acknowledge dyslexia, most schools don’t. In my case, it wasn’t until third grade that I started to get the right interventions. The delay made becoming a strong reader especially challenging. I don’t blame my teachers for this. Teachers don’t recognize dyslexia or use interventions because they aren’t prepared to. “One-on-one, individualized intervention is almost never an option in the public school system, but it is necessary for a dyslexic student” (Lunney). Students need to “attain functional reading and spelling as fast as possible. The longer that is delayed the farther behind they fall academically” (Lunney). I was fortunate that my school hired an Orton-Gillingham specialist who was trained in dyslexia. But, I’m one of the lucky ones. Most schools don’t have the funding to provide these necessary resources.

After years of intensive interventions including tutors and outside programs, I can finally pick up a book and read it like it’s nothing. This could be the future for many kids but not until teachers are trained properly and appropriate interventions are provided. In the meantime, we all need to remember, “Great minds don’t think alike.”

Works Cited

Emanuel, Gabrielle. “Dyslexia: The Learning Disability That Must Not Be Named.” NPR, 3 Dec. 2016.

Lunney, Marie. “Why Schools Don’t Do Dyslexia Intervention.” Lexercise, 25 Oct. 2016.

Paul, Annie. “Reading Experience May Change The Brains of Dyslexic Students.” The New York Times, 15 May 2014.

“Harnessing Boredom in the Age of Coronavirus”
By Elan Cohen, age 14, F.A. Day Middle School, Newton, Mass.

We all get bored frequently: waiting in line at Starbucks, riding the bus to school, sitting at home with nothing to do. It is inevitable, especially during this time of physical distancing, and it is not going away anytime soon. But if it happens so often, why do we tirelessly try to counteract it? Maybe, instead of avoiding the daydreaming and mind-wandering, we should be embracing it.

A study published in the journal “Science” showed what people would do when they were by themselves for six to 15 minutes and given two choices: do nothing or self-administer mild electric shocks. The findings were astonishing: two-thirds of the men and one-fourth of the women chose to shock themselves rather than be bored.

Do we crave external stimulation so intently that hurting ourselves is preferable to being alone with our own thoughts? Have we forgotten what it is like to be inside our own minds?

A few weeks into quarantine, I decided to take a walk around the woods near my house, with no destination or direction in mind. I saw a swan sitting on her nest, gently tending to some fragile twigs; an old beehive high up in a tree; another swan flying above the river like a bullet, wings just barely grazing the water; and a serene grove of trees on the waterfront with a circular stone path all around, the perfect spot for a picnic. I climbed up a tree and sat there for many minutes, simply observing the shimmering lake and the swaying trees. I never would have noticed these beautiful marvels of nature had it not been for my aimless wandering, and I never would have been able to appreciate my surroundings so fully had it not been for my mindful boredom. I learned that it is possible to be both bored and happy at the same time; the two emotions are not mutually exclusive.

Contrary to the media-manipulated messages we get from modern society, it is healthy to let our minds wander every once in a while. Our brains are host to vast stockpiles of deep thoughts, honest emotions, nostalgic memories and wildly creative ideas just waiting to be exploited. When we use boredom as a tool to tune in to our deepest internal selves, we unlock all those hidden elements, becoming more connected with ourselves and the world around us.

So next time you find yourself at home with nothing to do (which will happen a lot over the next couple months), remember that it is OK to be bored. Try being content with following the crazy stream of thoughts inside your own head because you never know what you might find.

Works Cited

Paul, Pamela. “Let Children Get Bored Again.” The New York Times, 2 Feb. 2019.

Razzetti, Gustavo. “Why Boredom Is So Powerful in Your Life.” Liberationist, Accessed 30 March 2020.

Webb, Jonathan. “Do people choose pain over boredom?” BBC News, 4 July 2014.

Wilson, Timothy D., et al. “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind.” Science. 4 July 2014.

“How Pragmatism Is Poisoning the Democratic Will of America’s Youth”
By Edward Xu, age 16, Shanghai American School, Puxi Campus, Shanghai, China

What the 2020 election cycle has taught me is that the most hopeless candidate is whichever one excites me. Throughout the year, I progressed from falling in love with Andrew Yang’s human-centered capitalism, to begrudgingly rallying behind Elizabeth Warren’s battle with billionaires, and finally being forced to support Bernie Sanders as the only remaining candidate whose conception of human rights aligned with mine.

And now, like so many other teenagers, I am deeply disappointed — or at least vaguely resentful — with the nomination of Joe Biden. Love or hate Biden, it is impossible not to mourn the unfortunate defeat of some of the most novel policy proposals in American history by the textbook definition of establishment. While the passionate communities of “Yang Gangers” and “Bernie or Bust” voters were able to keep their candidates on a lifeline, the unoffensive and palatable nature of Biden invoked a much more powerful force opposing the optimism of radical reformists: Pragmatism.

Increasingly, members of the Democratic Party have surrendered their ideology for the singular goal of unseating President Trump in 2020. A report from The New York Times showed that after the first six Democratic primary debates, “party strategy” received more airtime than climate change — and almost as much time as women’s rights and education combined. This sacrifice exists far beyond screen coverage, as a YouGov survey of Democratic primary voters found that 65 percent of respondents believed that a candidate’s electability was more important than their stances on major issues.

When did we learn to consider democracy as a means to an end? When did politics become about idle stewardship and keeping someone else out of office? When were the human aspirations of change swallowed by our fear of failure?

While administrations come and pass, the soul of a generation persists for decades. As my peers and I evolve from teenagers to activists, any inaction will be seen as a free pass for complacency. If we refuse to abstain out of principle, our threats have no leverage. If we refuse to stray from the party line, our demands receive no reaction. If we refuse to dream bigger, our successes will always be mild.

Two things need to happen to restore courage and imagination to America’s political youth. First, reform in the voting system itself. America needs to abandon “first past the post” and transition to sensible alternatives, such as the single transferable vote, which dispel considerations of popularity while voting. Second, Gen Z-ers need to recognize the collective power they hold over the fate of our country. With a voting bloc 72 million strong, there is no need to hide behind the party sanctioned poster boy.

One day it will finally register, that the future is ours to decide.

Works Cited

Barbaro, Michael. “Who’s Actually Electable in 2020?” The New York Times, 5 Nov. 2019.

Burden, Barry. “Democrats Aren’t Voting Only on ‘Electability.’ They’re Just as Interested in Candidates’ Stances on the Issues.” The Washington Post, 4 March 2020.

Seitz-Wald, Alex. “‘Electability’ Is the Most Important, Least Understood Word in the 2020 Race.” NBCNews.com, 23 June 2019.

The New York Times. “The Issues That Got the Most Time at the Debates So Far.” The New York Times, 20 Nov. 2019.

“How Animal Crossing Will Save Gen Z”
By Ananya Udaygiri, age 15, Shadow Creek High School, Pearland, Tex.

Generation Z was born in the aftermath of 9/11, molded by the economic recession of 2008, and polished off by the coronavirus, the worst pandemic in a century. And that doesn’t even include the mounting crisis of climate change. Or the growing nationalism. Or the gun violence epidemic. Gen Z’s childhood is rooted in issues that would be unrecognizable only a decade prior. We are no strangers to a fight. So what drew us to a Japanese video game about living in a village with anthropomorphic animal neighbors? Like moths to a flame, or perhaps more appropriately, like children to their first love, Animal Crossing has captured the young teenage heart.

Animal Crossing is a video game made by Nintendo in the early 2000s. The game’s iterations and evolutions have mirrored our developments throughout grade school, and now, when the curtains of our childhood begin to close, Animal Crossing’s masterpiece has taken the stage. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the latest version of the game, is now a staple of Generation Z’s culture. The characters in the game connected with my generation at a level never seen before. Yet in Animal Crossing, the characters live virtually unrecognizable lives.

The basic premise of Animal Crossing is small-town living. Your character, a human villager, performs basic, everyday functions. You fish. You catch bugs. You grow a tree. Common themes are relaxation and simplicity. Even the soundtrack is purposely designed as a calm lullaby, which harks back to simpler times today’s teens have only dreamed of. It’s a stark contrast to the chaos of our lives. In a New York Times article focusing on Animal Crossing in the age of coronavirus, the author described how Animal Crossing was a “miniature escape” for those isolated by the pandemic. He labeled it as a “balm” for the “rushing tonnage of real-world news.” While that is certainly true, for Generation Z it encompasses all that and more. The characters in the game don’t have to worry about school shootings, arbitrary college admissions or the rapidly deteriorating environment. They simply… live. For a generation that has been denied safety, a voice, and now, as the final blow, the coming-of-age traditions of prom and graduation, Animal Crossing represents a Gen Z vision for better times.

There are those who seek to diminish my generation’s concerns. They cite the suffering of others and admonish us for our presumptuousness. But sadness is never relative to others. Our generation’s troubles are valid and growing. Buzzfeed News so aptly describes it as a “generation free fall.” So pick up your video game console. Load in Animal Crossing. Play the game. For Generation Z, Animal Crossing is hope, and it will save us all.

Works Cited

Brodeur, Michael Andor. “The Animal Crossing Soundtrack Is an Unlikely Lullaby for a Nervous World.” The Washington Post, 21 April 2020.

Brooks, Ryan. “The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Put Gen Z And Young Millennials’ Lives On Hold.” Buzzfeed News, 20 April 2020.

Buchanan, Kyle. “Animal Crossing Is the Perfect Way to Spend Quarantine.” The New York Times, 31 March 2020.

“This Land Was Made for You and Me”
By Nicole Tian, age 15, The Harker School, San Jose, Calif.

“Welcome home!” the United States customs agent smiles at me, handing me my deep blue passport embossed with a golden eagle. America is my home, where I can celebrate Lunar New Year and drive up to San Francisco five months later to cheer with strangers, united under fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Picture an American on Independence Day. Picture a Chinese. Now, picture a girl, a product of these two cultures, smiling so wide her cheeks hurt as the night rumbles awake. The dark hides her face and skin tone. Her silhouette against the sky outlines the features of a patriot.

Now, the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus has transformed part of my identity into a slur. My own president designated the pandemic as the “Chinese Virus,” a moniker that implicates a whole culture and its descendants, inviting fear and offering up Asian-Americans as easy targets.

Inflammatory language leads to violent actions. Reports of bigotry against Asian-Americans recently spiked. Clearly, this violence is misguided. The viruses are blind to ethnicity. Not every Chinese American has Covid-19, and not everyone who has tested positive is of Chinese descent.

To confront the coronavirus and alienation, the Chinese-American community has gone to great lengths to mobilize in slowing the virus’s spread. However, my community’s good will is misunderstood by some as a plea to be accepted as American, a submissive gesture from the “model minority” to please the system that is constructed against us. Indeed, prominent members like former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang have called upon Chinese-Americans to increase their efforts at patriotism to escape stigma. According to his argument, Asian-Americans must volunteer vigorously, wave the flag more enthusiastically and spin their tale into one of die-hard patriotism to prove their rights for being in this country.

Novelist Toni Morrison pointed out the truth of this strained effort to prove one’s Americanness, commenting “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” Yang reinforces the idea that hyphenation means not fully American, not fully loyal, and connotes a degree of separation from being American.

The peril of social division is not just about our president and politicians’ literacy and decency, but of ours. As citizens of this country, we, born here or naturalized, are obligated to join the collective effort to stop the virus. It is also our responsibility to call out another form of pathogens in our systems and structures. The use of “Chinese Virus” is rooted in ethnocentrism and racism, which not only undermines our civility but also comes at a cost to human lives.

You and I are both Americans, featured differently, but committed equally to the well-being of our country.

Picture Americans, you and me.

Works Cited

Tavernise, Sabrina, and Richard A. Oppel, Jr. “Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Their Safety.” The New York Times, 23 March 2020.

Toni Morrison Quotes. Goodreads, 2020.

Yang, Andrew. “We Asian Americans are not the virus, but we can be part of the cure.” The Washington Post, 1 April 2020.

“The Class of 2021 Could Change College Admissions Forever”
By Erin Tan, age 16, Middlesex County Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Technologies, Edison, N.J.

Junior year of high school is notorious for being the most stressful, acne-inducing year of a teenager’s life. With college applications fast approaching, students scramble to bump up their course rigor and boost their grade point averages. On top of that, they have to find time to prepare, and pay, for the SAT, ACT, subject tests and Advanced Placement exams.

By mid-March, I was starting to feel the heat: It seemed like I had two tests every day and four projects a week. If this kept up for three more months I would implode from stress. Then a global pandemic shut schools down indefinitely.

The high school class of 2021 just lucked out hard. In the busiest part of our hardest year of high school, we get to have school from home and abridged open note A.P. exams. Because of all these changes, our college admissions are going to be much more complex. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Ahead of the fall of 2021 college application period, many universities across the nation have announced modifications to their application requirements, specifically for standardized testing. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, will not consider SAT subject tests. Dozens of other colleges and universities have dropped the SAT and ACT altogether, with some schools even amending their admissions requirements beyond fall of 2021. If this precedent catches on, the landscape of college admissions, as well as the overall high school experience, will change drastically.

Colleges claim to value a student’s character in the admissions process. “It’s not enough just to be smart at top schools,” says Angela Dunnham, former assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College. “Students must also show that they’ll be good classmates and community builders.” If this were truly the case, then an applicant’s essay and extracurriculars would hold equal or more weight than a test score or G.P.A. After all, there’s nothing about a multiple choice test that showcases a student’s creativity or versatility.

Placing less emphasis on standardized testing will remove an added stressor that students face during high school. Students have accustomed themselves to the reality that if they are poor test takers, they will automatically disqualify themselves from admission at most top-tier colleges. Additionally, the high costs of taking and preparing for these tests have made standardized testing a catalyst for socioeconomic privilege.

By valuing more personal aspects of an application, colleges will be able to assemble a diverse roster of students that don’t fit one cookie-cutter model. High school students will worry less and become the sociable, humanitarian people that any college would be proud to admit. The fall 2021 college freshman class will prove what admissions guidelines truly produce the most well-rounded group of students, and colleges better pay attention.

Works Cited

Butterly, Joel. “7 Admissions Officers Share the Things They Never Tell Applicants.” Business Insider, 7 Feb. 2018.

Cole, Jonathan R. “Why Elite-College Admissions Need an Overhaul.” The Atlantic, 14 Feb. 2016.

Hoover, Eric. “What Colleges Want in an Applicant (Everything).” The New York Times, 1 Nov. 2017.

My long-distance friend and I often text pictures of books back and forth, accompanied by “Have you read this?” He also sends photos of crowded bookshelves, crammed with pale booklets. They’re his dad’s, who owns roughly ten thousand books.

When I displayed my more modest personal bookshelf, featuring shiny-foiled fantasy and colorful young adult novels, he bemoaned, “My dad won’t let me read anything un-classic. He thinks it’s a waste of time.”

I was immediately indignant over his dad’s attitude. How could you own so many books, yet deride almost every genre? But how would I, a high schooler, have more valid tastes than a scholar and elevated press editor?

Most of the books in my house are bright and sparkly, characterizing my reader origins: Rainbow Magic, Candy Apple, Dork Diaries, Popularity Papers. Motifs include magical creatures, “distracting” font choices, unrealistic high school drama, crushes, mean girls. Also present is a subsection of young adult, with the same elements. I devoured these wastes of time.

But today, I whittle away at classics, fully appreciative of their cultural significance and artistry. My recent leisure reads include Austen, Beckett, Hugo and Neruda. Next to heist fantasy “Six of Crows,” social media teen romance “Tweet Cute,” and graphic novel “Pumpkinheads,” of course. Such “frivolous” genre reads can be meaningful in their own right, offering breaks from the density of both classics and real life. Most importantly, they’re fuel for the reading habit that’s significantly linked to success and well-being.

This habit is created, as described by editor Pamela Paul, by experiencing reading not as “spinach,” but as “chocolate cake”— not necessarily full of nutrients, but deliciously addictive. (Perhaps the spinach becomes chocolate cake: Homer’s “Odyssey” after reading “Goddess Girls,” “Pygmalion” after “Princess Diaries,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” after “Her Evil Twin.”)

Parents may be underwhelmed by their kid diving into “Captain Underpants" or their teenager’s obsession with “Twilight.” Readers themselves may feel guilty in sticking around in young adult, chick-lit or romance sections. But as Lev Grossman writes of genre fiction, “What is it, exactly, that those pleasures are guilty of?” You’re still getting the boost in vocabulary, an expanded worldview and access to originality and imagination. In whatever amount it may be present in.

I certainly feel the need to steer others toward capital-G Great books that are well-written and inventive. Yet my younger sister will ignore my recommendation of “Anne of Green Gables” for a month while flying through a book about magical cats in a day. At such a time, I recall the privilege of pulling “Dork Diaries” from the shelf, sitting down with it for several hours, relishing the sparkly illustrations and overdramatic plotlines in a decidedly un-literary way.

Works Cited

Bruni, Frank. “The Gift of Reading.” The New York Times. 25 Nov. 2015.

Grossman, Lev. “Literary Revolution in the Supermarket: Genre Fiction is Disruptive Technology.” Time. 23 May 2012.

Pinsker, Joe. “Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers.” The Atlantic. 10 Sept. 2019.

Laboring over Spotify unable to find the Rachmaninoff piano concerto played by a favorite soloist, attending a Mahler’s symphony surrounded by empty seats … such is the reality that we classical music enthusiasts face.

Since the start of this century, the popularity of all traditional classical music platforms has been plummeting. The percentage of adults attending classical music performances declined from 11.6 percent to 8.6 percent between 2002 and 2017, whereas participation in all other genres rose by as high as 15.7 percent. In the year 2012 alone, classical album sales decreased by 21 percent. The ingenuity of Beethoven is becoming increasingly impotent against the ferocious attraction of pop music.

In this age of the internet, one can easily avoid the blame of such tragedy by claiming that classical pieces moved online. However, it is precisely metadata — the algorithm based on the album, song and artist that popular music streaming platforms use — that has been impeding their digital growth. How can Spotify accurately place into its categories the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel? As a result, classical music presently constitutes less than one percent of all streaming services, lagging behind its 2.5 percent of American album sales.

Ultimately, society’s abandonment of classical music stems from modern cultural changes. Since the mid-20th century, Western society has developed a countercultural attitude that readily questions established authority, the classical canons included. Encountering a myriad new adrenaline-charged music styles, people eschew the slow-paced, less immediately accessible classical music. Plagued by modern populism, those in search of easy numbness dub classical music “elitist,” using it as a convenient excuse to turn away from the elusive genre.

In rejecting classical music, we neglect its unique and timeless emotional depth. It is an abstract representation of the composers’ meditations on the world, expressing complexities when words are inadequate. Cambridge composer John Borstlap asserts that classical music offers an “alternative to the modern world” instead of the “reflection” or escape from reality that people seek in pop lyrics about sex or drugs. From Brahms’s melancholic tunes, to Schumann’s rhythmic introversions, to Tchaikovsky’s impressive harmonies, classical pieces preserve our inner peace to balance out the external bombardment of indigestible information from society. Such is the perennial virtue of classical music.

Despite the current waning of classical music, its future remains hopeful as long as we embrace its fruits and pass on its legacy. Go to a local concert. Pick up an instrument. Advocate for classical music education in schools, starting from childhood. Download apps like Idagio and Primephonic — streaming platforms devoted to classical music, search for a serenade, and feel how your soul soars with every chord.

Works Cited

Borstlap, John. “The Relevance of Classical Music.” The Imaginative Conservative, 29 April 2017.

Sisario, Ben. “In Streaming Age, Classical Music Gets Lost in the Metadata.” The New York Times, 23 June 2019.

“U.S. Trends in Arts Attendance and Literary Reading: 2002-2017.” National Endowment for the Arts, Sept. 2018.

A few weeks ago, my friend arrived at our lunch table in tears. She’d come from physical education class, where a group of white classmates called her “coronavirus” for her Chinese heritage. It hurt my friend, who hadn’t heard from her relatives in Wuhan. That incident wasn’t isolated — other Asian-American students were targeted for their ethnicity at our middle and high schools. Throughout February and March, similar scenes played out at schools across the country, with Asian-American students insulted and harassed by other students.

One might think that this behavior reflects the numerous anxieties Americans face due to the coronavirus pandemic, including economic insecurity. But my community is affluent and well-educated, my neighborhood dotted with lawn signs saying “Hate Has No Home Here.”

Instead, the coronavirus-fueled bias against Asian-Americans is symptomatic of a wider phenomenon: American society has always regarded Asian-Americans as “non-American.”

Many Americans, of all stripes, are unfamiliar with the breadth of cultures and backgrounds that “Asian-American-ness” comprises. Without that awareness, it’s easy to paint a generic picture of Asian-Americans with broad, stereotypical brush strokes: industrious, high-achieving, passive and foreign. A local university thinks we lack “personality.” This unfamiliarity leads to a subconscious categorization of Asian-Americans as being “other,” a one-size-fits-all group too different to be fully “American.”

Nearly every Asian kid (myself included) experiences this categorization through the question, “Where are you really from?” It doesn’t matter that I was born in Boston, or that my dad cried tears of joy when his hometown team won the World Series “after 108 years of futility.” It’s usually an innocuous question phrased poorly, and I’ll happily talk about my background, but it assumes that Asians can’t quite be considered “American.” That assumption quietly breeds suspicion, and suspicion breeds fear.

We’ve seen this fear of the unfamiliar, combined with external “proof” that Asians “threaten the American way of life,” give rise to active discrimination, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to Japanese internment during World War II, to the verbal and physical attacks of today. This is only possible because Asian-Americans were always viewed with suspicion. For sure, the Communist Party of China has been untrustworthy, but it doesn’t justify linking my Chinese-American friends to the coronavirus. President Trump’s “Chinese Virus” label holds power against Asian-Americans because they’re seen as outsiders — it taps into the fear and anxiety that Americans feel, and the need to displace that fear.

Yet, the coronavirus, and the heightened bias associated with it, gives Asian-Americans a unique opportunity to hold a national dialogue about being “forever foreigners” — to go beyond cultural stereotypes and share our individual experiences. By approaching one another as human beings, not faceless “others,” we might someday view each other as Americans first.

Works Cited

Bittle, Andrea. “I Am Asian American.” Teaching Tolerance, 2013.

Hong, Cathy Park. “The Slur I Never Expected to Hear in 2020.” The New York Times Magazine, 12 April 2020.

Oung, Katherine. “Coronavirus Racism Infected My High School.” The New York Times, 14 March 2020.

Pan, Deanna. “Fears of Coronavirus Fuel Anti-Chinese Racism.” The Boston Globe, 30 Jan. 2020.

Yang, Andrew. “Andrew Yang: We Asian Americans Are Not the Virus, but We Can Be Part of the Cure.” Washington Post, 1 April 2020.

“Tom and Jerry” is television gold. Its basic premise of “cat-chases-mouse” glued generations of kids to the screen. Yet, unlike Tom, house cats are ruthless predators that almost always catch their prey. New research shows that house cats are unsustainably clawing their way through bird populations across the United States. In fact, more birds die by cats than by collisions with buildings, cars and other anthropogenic activities combined.

Since when did Tom actually catch Jerry and Tweety? Since always. We just never noticed. Cats bring home “up to 11 dead birds, rodents or lizards a month,” according to Professor Roland Kays in the NPR article “Why House Cats Are God’s Perfect Little Killing Machines.” On its own, this cat fact isn’t too surprising. But when we consider almost four in 10 households own a cat, feline predation has an outsized impact. Due to their constrained roaming grounds (usually near their house), cats have four-to-10 times the effect of a wild predator in the local community. That bird seed you put out for observing songbirds? Let’s just say you aren’t the only one watching the feeder. The Fish and Wildlife Service tally annual feline kill counts at 2.4 billion birds across the United States. This has had a devastating effect on the bird population. According to The New York Times, bird counts across the United States have fallen a staggering 29 percent in the last 50 years. At the same time, the popularity of cats in America has exploded.

Traditional bird conservation efforts cannot counteract a cat’s primal instincts. For my Eagle Scout project, I constructed a 14-foot tower that nests about 40 chimney swifts (a threatened bird species). Considering it was built in a neighborhood that houses an estimated 50 cats, my hard work has likely not resulted in any net increase of the bird population. Yet, attempting to muzzle our pet with a stay-at-home order is not a practical, long-term solution for cats.

Susan Willson of St. Lawrence University offers an alternative. By placing vividly colored collars on cats, Willson found that birds were much more likely to spot cats before it was too late. Consequently, collared cats killed up to “19 times fewer birds than uncollared cats.”

Collar scrunchies are a noiseless, effective alternative to the traditional “cat bell,” and still allows cats to exercise their instincts on real pests. These colorful scrunchies are effective with birds but not on colorblind rodents.

It’s not a cardinal sin to let cats be cats, but a simple colored collar around the neck will help offset their feline instincts. Plus, more cat videos sporting stylish scrunchies is something none of us could ever refuse.

Works Cited

Brulliard, Karin and Scott Clement. “How Many Americans Have Pets? An Investigation of Fuzzy Statistics.” The Washington Post, 31 Jan. 2019.

Lepczyk, Christopher A., et al. “What Conservation Biologists Can Do to Counter Trap-Neuter-Return.” Conservation Biology, 2 Nov. 2010.

Sommer, Lauren. “The Killer At Home: House Cats Have More Impact On Local Wildlife Than Wild Predators.” NPR, 18 April 2020.

Willson, S.K., et al. “Birds Be Safe: Can a Novel Cat Collar Reduce Avian Mortality by Domestic Cats (Felis catus)?” Global Ecology and Conservation, Elsevier, 20 Jan. 2015.

Zimmer, Carl. “Birds Are Vanishing From North America.” The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2019.