Pussy_cats

Jeff Green | Sep 15, 2005

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Gray MerriamLegaleseGeneral information and opinion on legal topics by Rural Legal ServicesNature Reflectionsby Jean GriffinNight Skiesby Leo Enright

Pussy cats and other beings

Commentary by Gray Merriam

Some time ago, Peter Churcher and John Lawton published an article in Natural History magazine entitled "beware of Well-fed Felines." They reported on a study they did of well-fed house cats in a small Bedfordshire village. Their data were the remains of prey brought home by house cats to 173 houses by 73 cats for one year. The cat owners provided the data. One cat owner refused to cooperate.

The major prey of the cats was small mammals (64 percent). Wood mice, voles, shrews, some rabbits, a weasel, and, for one particular cat, almost always bats. Birds were 36 percent of the cats' prey. More birds were killed by the cats in the centre of the village and more mammals by the cats nearer the edge of the village and thus nearer heavier ground cover.

About 100 prey were brought home by the cats in one year. Other comparable studies have recorded up to 400 prey brought home by one cat in a year. In one small study, it was found that cats may bring home only about half their total catch, eating or abandoning the rest.

Although house sparrows made up only 16 percent of the prey brought home, Churcher and Lawton used detailed studies of house sparrow population dynamics to assess the importance of the cat predation to the sparrow population. From other, detailed studies, they knew how many sparrows normally died in one year. The sparrows killed by cats were enough to account for between one-third and half of all the sparrows dying in one year. They concluded it was unlikely that any other single predator would kill so many sparrows.

To get some idea of the importance of well-fed cats as predators over the whole of Britain, the authors multiplied the prey brought home by the cats in the village they studied by the estimated number of cats in all of Britain. The total was about seventy million wild mammals and birds killed by cats each year. Being well-fed and cared for was no safeguard against a huge number of wild animals killed by cats that could get out at night.