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

aldanor•30 minutes 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?

thelastgallon•40 minutes 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•37 minutes 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.

defrost•43 minutes ago

Felixer feral cat grooming traps:

* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-...

* https://thylation.com/products/

thelastgallon•43 minutes ago

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

stnikolauswagne•about 1 hour 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.

karlkloss•about 3 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•about 1 hour 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

snvzz•about 1 hour ago

Lovely murder machines.

thelastgallon•38 minutes 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•about 3 hours ago

Wait until you hear about humans.

stnikolauswagne•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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•44 minutes 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.

snvzz•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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•about 2 hours ago

Wait until they hear about bacteria and viruses

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

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (18 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews