Article about just how many animals and birds are killed by domestic cats. It’s been proven, using cameras attached to cats: http://www.treehugger.com/gadgets/kittycam-reveals-high-levels-wildlife-being-killed-outdoor-cats.html Video from ‘KittyCam’ showing same: http://www.kittycams.uga.edu/photovideo.html#videos
‘Of the 60 cats wearing the cameras, 30% captured and killed prey with an average of one kill for every 17 hours spent outside, or 2.1 kills per week. The study also showed that cats bring home less than one quarter of their kills, so owners aren’t fully aware of just what kind of slaughter is going on in their own yards. It takes a little bit of high tech spy gear to reveal how murderous our fluffly little bags of purr really are.’
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Peter,
Hypnotized by cats is not wide of the mark. There has been a bit research on the mental effects of Toxoplasmosis gondii in humans. In certain people, it seems that toxoplasmosis infection can cause overly protective behaviour towards cats. It is as if the secondary host protects the primary host. It is thought that the classic “mad cat lady” behaviour in some people is a result of long term infection by Toxoplasmosis gondii
Toxoplasmosis can certainly cause strange behaviour in humans. A young member of my extended family recently suffered an acute infestation, and he went very potty. It certainly fooled the medicos, until one discovered that the lad often slept with cats and/or a dog. A shrot course of appropriate medication brought him back to earth.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
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…you are feeling very, very sleepy…and like giving me some salmon and a belly-rub!
No criticism intended there – our dog practices her moves in front of the mirror to improve her game. “Pet training” runs both ways. ===============================
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44% at least stalked, that sounds more believable, but it still seems too low. I wonder if this reflects prey availability. It might be difficult to tell if a cat is searching for prey but not finding any.
Australian figures might well be quite different, given that lack of equivalent native predators here, and the resulting lack of natural defences in native animals.
“hypnotized by cats” is a good description of some of the deniers I’ve come across.
Peter Shute
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Whew, I’m glad someone else threw this rock in the pond…I wasn’t sure that I wanted to start it. Here’s a link to the study’s public home page:
http://www.kittycams.uga.edu/
This is a science project based on real field data – not just a set of guesses. Such studies are never the final word, but at least they’re bringing some real data to some questions that are often addressed only with passion and opinion.
The study looks to be a PhD project and then some that involved 60 cats in one area of which 55 provided good enough data for analysis. They had an average of 37 hours of footage per cat spread over various seasons. So, a pretty decent slice of real-world behavior caught on film. It must have required an enormous amount of work to do all of this. Just imagine the hours spent teaching the cats to use the cameras alone 😉 The site includes a 200MB video of a presentation on the project given by Kerrie Anne T. Loyd, about her dissertation. (The project.) She comes across quite credibly and seems very comfortable talking about the quality of their numbers and what they mean.
The project doesn’t seem to be anti-cat per se. They look to be bringing some science to the controversy and they’re reaching out to pet owners with research showing that letting cats roam about loose is *dangerous to cats*. So, wildlife-lovers want cats contained because they kill local wildlife and cat owners should want cats controlled to keep their pets safe. So, the implications are relevant both to wildlife welfare and cat welfare.
It wouldn’t make sense to make precise and absolute numeric predications about cat behavior from a data set of only 55 cats. Still, you can make some pretty reasonable assertions about cat behavior from that data. In fact, a lot of the study findings seem pretty common-sensical, at least to someone that hasn’t been hypnotized by cats. (Full disclaimer: I’m a total dog person. Dogs are natural-born hunters and ours stays on a lead or in a controlled area all of the time.)
A few of the findings:
Cats Love to Hunt Love it. It’s what they do. Millions of years of evolution have honed these pure carnivores into incredibly efficient hunters. A few thousand years of hanging around humans hasn’t ended that. The project witnessed 44% of the cats stalking and 30% capturing prey. Given the number of free-roaming cats in the world, those are terrifying numbers.
Cats Are Loyal Four of the cats had two families. Bet the cats never told…just have been a shock to family #2 when Mr. Winkles showed up with a camera around its neck…
Cats Like Risk Cats are much bigger risk takers than their owners know, including cross roads (45%), eating and drinking mysterious things (25%), getting into tight and potentially dangerous spaces (20%), and so on. All-in-all, 85% of the cats were seen doing something on their list of risks. Not a shocker but younger and male correlates with higher risk.
People Have no Idea What Their Cats Do People really haven’t the faintest clue what their kitties are up to. At all. How could they?
* See “Cats are Loyal” (cough-cough)
* See “Cats Like Risk”
* I can’t find it now but when I first looked at the materials I saw or heard that only a minority fraction of the cats that caught prey brought any evidence of it back to the house. The number I remember is 25% of the cats that caught prey – so that would be 7.5% of the cats. If someone else spots the right numbers, I’d like to know.
How would such a study play out here in Australia? I’d guess it would be quite similar regarding behaviors. (Wildlife biologists say that the template for feline behaviors is pretty limited across feline species. Big cats. Little cats. They’re all cats. Leaving out lions with their unique social structure and various other obvious differences amongst cats in breeding behaviors and habitat preferences or requirements.) The numbers and types of prey killed would depend on where you did it. The prey availability is wildly different here than in the US – but feral cats manage to survive in, what, every Australian landscape? So, they’re presumably eating something. ===============================
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Thinking about this further, the paragraph Debbie quoted says “… 30% captured and killed prey …”, which doesn’t actually say that the other 70% didn’t try. Just being stalked would be enough to make life difficult for most wildlife, and might make breeeding impossible in some situations. So I’m not convinced yet.
Peter Shute
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Which is why my dear cat only goes outdoors on her harness and lead! Keeps garden safe for skinks and birds. Helen
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This is interesting: “The technology reavealed that not every outdoor cat feels the call to hunt. A minority of the cats studied went after wildlife.”
I would have thought that a minority wouldn’t hunt, if any, but apparently not.
Peter Shute