If your pet cat roams outside, he is probably killing a lot more animals than you think. Scientists studied the movements of 925 cats in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand by outfitting them with GPS trackers. They found the cats almost all stayed within a kilometer or so of home, meaning their territories are small compared to wildlife species.
Most of the cats spent their time in human-altered habitats, though 11 percent roamed mostly in natural habitats. Owners estimated that their cats brought home 42 prey items per year, while estimates show that cats kill one to three times as many prey than they bring home. This suggests that each cat was killing around 50 to 138 animals per year, according to estimates. The researchers didn’t find evidence to support the hypothesis that the presence or absence of other large predators, like coyotes, impacted the cats’ movement.
These kill estimates are comparable to, if not lower than, the kill rate of a typical similarly sized (around 10-pound) wild carnivore. However, wild carnivores spread those kills out over a range 10 to 1,250 times larger than the pet cats. This means that wild carnivores kill fewer animals per concentrated region, compared to cats.
Notably, the study did not reveal what kind of prey the cats were killing. After all, we domesticated them in the first place to exterminate rats and mice. One shocking fact was that only ten of the 925 pet cats were spayed or neutered. Read more about this study at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Roland Kays)