Domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0B birds and 6.3–22.3B mammals annually

24 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by agnosticmantis
(nature.com)

28 Comments

aldanor

3 hours ago

And how can we tell for sure if it's good or bad? Does killing these birds and mammals help maintain the ecosystem balance (due to these birds and mammals not killing billions other animals down the food chain, or not spreading infections and viruses), or the other way around?

hobofan

2 hours ago

A prerequisite for there to even be a chance of cats being involved in ecosystem balance would be for the cats to exist purely as part of the ecosystem, as in being exposed to negative feedback effects to it (e.g. starvation due to overhunting). As it stands, they are being fed by humans and mostly exist outside the ecosystem, and every kill by them only drains resources from the ecosystem.

amanaplanacanal

2 hours ago

On the other hand, humans have done a pretty good job of removing most of the other predators in the environment. Domestic cats must be replacing some of the natural predation that is no longer occurring.

boesboes

an hour ago

Not saying you are wrong, but we also feed birds and rodents, intentionally and by the by products of our society existing.

andrewstuart

23 minutes ago

What a ridiculous gaslighting question.

Asking us to prove that cats killing wildlife is a bad thing.

A guy once told me that they remove the fallen logs from the Canadian forests because fallen trees are messy and ruin the forest. How do you even respond to such a stupid concept?

stnikolauswagne

4 hours ago

As a cat lover this only strengthens my opinion that they should stay inside the house, humans cause enough damage to the ecosystem without needlessly unleashing pretty efficient predators for no gain.

mugiseyebrows

21 minutes ago

by that logic, humans should stay inside too

HelloUsername

3 hours ago

> Cats should stay inside they house

Isn't putting them on a leash, or having them wear a bell around their neck outside, enough for all parties?

stnikolauswagne

2 hours ago

Mhh, intriguing.

I would also say they would at least need to be neutered in that case so they dont reproduce with the feral population, but from a predatory perspective that would probably be fine then.

I would still not let our cats go out, my wife is pregnant so toxoplasmosis is very scary and bell or not we would be terrified of them getting lost or getting run over by a car or worse.

SweetSoftPillow

an hour ago

Istanbul has very few rats compared to other major global cities, largely because hundreds of thousands of community street cats keep the rodent population under strict control.

thelastgallon

4 hours ago

> a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually.

This is US only. I wonder what the numbers would be world wide.

karlkloss

6 hours ago

And how many do wild cats kill? And how many would wild cats kill, if we allowed them to multiply as they want?

stnikolauswagne

4 hours ago

The paper is about the species of "domestic cats", which includes feral cats, strays, etc, with unowned cats making up the majority of the kills as compared to owned cats/pets

thelastgallon

4 hours ago

This fact will be used by climate change deniers, when you point out the deaths caused by climate change: "Cats cause infinitely more death, we do nothing about it, can't do nothing about it, climate change may also cause death, but we can't do anything about. Do you want (us) to kill your cat just because it does some mischief?"

thelastgallon

4 hours ago

According to current US Admin, wind turbines kill most of the birds and must be banned. I'm not sure whom to believe.

snvzz

4 hours ago

Lovely murder machines.

thelastgallon

4 hours ago

Cats are probably the ideal biological machines. Evolution keeps casting them in many form factors from the smallest (house cats) to the largest (bengal tigers?).

ferrouswheel

6 hours ago

Wait until you hear about humans.

stnikolauswagne

4 hours ago

From the abstract:

Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.

I.e. cats might kill more birds and mammals than humans.

platesmead

4 hours ago

Are they counting the loss due to human-induced reduction of biodiversity? E.g. wiping native land and replacing it with houses/cities/roads.

Humanity has a cost on nature, that should be mitigated.

Humans like domestic cats, which is one contributor to the overall human-induced reduction in biodiversity.

I wonder also whether there's something about towns/cities that makes birds flourish, compared to other wild animals.

stnikolauswagne

4 hours ago

>I wonder also whether there's something about towns/cities that makes birds flourish, compared to other wild animals.

I would assume it has got do with the reason pigeons are sometimes called "flying rats", i.e. they can subsist on human trash, can survive in the environment and are not seen as negatively as rats and thus have less pest-control efforts pointed at them.

platesmead

3 hours ago

If cats are killing wild animals that happen to flourish in human environments, is that such a loss to biodiversity?

(Genuine Q. I don't know anything about what biodiversity folk look for.)

stnikolauswagne

2 hours ago

An extreme example would be Maos Great Leap Forward, where there was a human-led drive to exterminate sparrows as part of pest control, which in turn led to famines because sparrows also served as pest control for insects.

Humans are very good at introducing invasive species (domestic cat, kudzu) and pretty bad at forseeing the impact they have

snvzz

4 hours ago

Read that sentence carefully.

They're counting cat-caused as anthropogenic i.e. part of anthropos-caused aka human-caused. And "single largest group" could be 1% if there are a lot of groups and each happens to be smaller than 1%.

stnikolauswagne

4 hours ago

I have read both the sentence and the abstract carefully, one of the other big antropogenic factors is "building colissions" which by itself is over one billion bird deaths.

theflyingelvis

5 hours ago

Wait until they hear about bacteria and viruses