SAVE THE BIRDS TAKE A KITTY TO LUNCH - INSIDE.

Byline: Erik Nelson Staff Writer

This Saturday, it's OK to let your cat out of the bag or even allow a cat to get your tongue. Just don't let Tiger out of the house if you want to observe ``National Keep Your Cat Indoors Day.''

``Cats are a threat to wild birds,'' said Gavin Shire of the American Bird Conservancy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that created this day of kitty incarceration last year.

``They kill birds by the millions. We don't even know how many cats there are out there, let alone how many birds they kill.''

Kitty keepers say: So what?

``It isn't necessarily that they like to eat birds; it's that cats require a high-protein diet. They are built to eat this kind of thing, just like cows eat grass,'' said Susie Page, corporate secretary of the Panorama City-based American Cat Association, a cat registry.

And loose cats have also benefited mankind since they were domesticated in ancient Egypt, Page pointed out. ``Since man and animals began, cats have been used to control the rodent population.''

However, Page, a former cat magazine columnist and author of the 1998 book, ``The Complete Cat Owner's Manual,'' said she keeps her own cats indoors to protect them from such hazards as cars, pesticides and disease.

``If you have a pet, you cannot control the pestilence, the fleas, the worms, the ringworm, that they pick up outdoors,'' Page said.

Cat keeper Amanda Collins is one of 32.1 million families that have 64.2 million cats, and she believes they deserve to be free-range felines. At least that is what she practices with hers, an orange tabby called Shere Kahn, a black cat named Bagheera and a white cat named Blessing.

``I had them inside for a long time, and they're just not happy,'' said Collins as her 10-year-old son, Justin, played with Shere Kahn on the family's front lawn in Woodland Hills.

``If you're responsible with them, if they're healthy, not out making babies and not out spreading disease, there should be no reason why they shouldn't be out,'' Collins said.

Justin, however, said he knows a secret about Shere Kahn.

``That one eats doves,'' he said, pointing at the tabby.

Capt. Richard Felosky, district manager for the city's West Valley Animal Shelter, knows about mixing cats and birds in the same neighborhood.

``I've personally seen the results - we get complaints all the time'' about bird baths becoming bloodbaths and bird feeders becoming cat feeders, he said.

The other side of the equation is that some people retaliate for this behavior.

``They shoot (cats) with pellet guns, they trap them, they'll spray them, stone them and poison them,'' Felosky said, adding that killing cats is illegal.

In the political arena, bird advocates can be just as ruthless, insisted Nathan Winograd, director of community programs for the San Francisco Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

`` 'Keep Your Cat Indoors Day' is nothing more than a vehicle for them to push their anti-cat rhetoric,'' Winograd said. He cited a 1994 study by the Worldwatch Institute that blamed the decline of bird species not on cats but rather on urban sprawl, overtrapping, drought and pesticides.

Besides, the cat vs. bird argument can be moot in some neighborhoods, such as the Santa Monica Mountains foothills area of Woodland Hills, where nature does a pretty good job of protecting birds from cats.

Barbara Heaton keeps her Dweezil and her son's Vanna inside - safe from ``coyote country,'' where cat skulls and bones turn up on the hillsides.

``You will not see an outdoor cat around here,'' she said. ``If you do, soon you will see it on a 'missing' sign.''

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Photo: (color) My, what fierce-looking fangs you have, Shere Kahn. To keep those fangs away from wild birds, cat owners are being asked to keep you and others of the feline persuasion indoors Saturday.

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach