MN Conservation Scientists Publish Major Paper on The Impact of Domestic Cats on Wildlife

It wasn't another cuddly cat video that's been viewed a million times on YouTube.  But it was a recently published paper about the huge impact of unrestrained cats on wildlife that generated quite a media buzz.  The paper, The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States, was published online in Nature Communications.  The first two authors have strong Minnesota conservation science connections.  Scott R. Loss recently received his Ph.D. from the UMN Conservation Biology Program.  Tom Will, is a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in  Bloomington, Minnesota.  He presented a fascinating talk (photo at right) on this topic at the 2012 MN SCB Annual Meeting.  The New York Times had a story about the paper that was it most emailed story as of this posting on January 30th.  I was amazed at how much it was shared on Facebook and tweeted as well.

Here is the abstract of the paper from Nature Communications.

The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United State 
     Scott R. Loss,Tom Will, Peter P. Marra
Anthropogenic threats, such as collisions with man-made structures, vehicles, poisoning and predation by domestic pets, combine to kill billions of wildlife annually. Free-ranging domestic cats have been introduced globally and have contributed to multiple wildlife extinctions on islands. The magnitude of mortality they cause in mainland areas remains speculative, with large-scale estimates based on non-systematic analyses and little consideration of scientific data. Here we conduct a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. 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. Scientifically sound conservation and policy intervention is needed to reduce this impact.

A pdf is available through the American Bird Conservancy here.

Policy Implications?  
There are many.  National SCB Policy Director, John Fitzgerald, sent out a message to the SCB policy list serve.  He said, "Policy implications are numerous.  We have not recommended any in particular though the Wildlife Society and others have called on the Interior Department to consider options. They range from possibly recognizing cat controls as offsets for other activities likely to take birds and protected mammals to using the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to reduce practices that extend the capacities of feral cats to kill protected birds such as spay and release programs or cat feeding stations that allow cats with claws to return to the wild."