When the Wildlife Center of Virginia, a hospital for native wild animals, took a close look at a decade’s worth of admissions records, it found the unsurprising culprits behind many of the thousands of injuries and deaths: cats.
More startling was the sheer number of native species — more than 80 — that felines had preyed upon and killed.
“It goes beyond the common perception that outdoor, free-roaming cats just attack mice and rats,” said David McRuer, the director of veterinary services at the center and the lead author of a note on the records that was published recently in The Journal of Wildlife Management.
The authors looked at close to 21,000 records of patients admitted to the center, in the central Virginia city of Waynesboro, from 2000 to 2010. Of those, almost 3,000 had been injured by cat attacks — some 14 percent, divided about evenly between birds and small mammals. Among the cat victims were mourning doves, blue jays, cottontail rabbits, southern flying squirrels and rarer animals, such as purple gallinules, a kind of water bird. Larger species such as ducks also turned up, and even a kestrel, a kind of falcon.
“It’s impressive that cats can take them down,” McRuer said of the kestrel, adding that few previous studies have documented the number of species affected by cat predation.
The researchers said they took a conservative approach, counting only mammals and birds that had been found either in the mouths of cats or brought by cats to their owners.
The study adds more fuel to a tense fight between conservationists, who view free-roaming cats as super-predators that spread disease and devastate wildlife, and cat advocates who argue that popular programs to neuter feral cats are the most humane way to handle them.
Rebekah DeHaven, the senior attorney and associate director of humane law and policy at Alley Cat Allies, which promotes trap-neuter-return programs, commended the center’s efforts to classify the cases. But she said the study did not go far enough.
“From the information shared in the study, there is no way to know how many of the mammals or birds labeled as having been subject to interactions with cats were either ill or injured, by misfortune or by another predator, prior to being found by a cat, leaving open a wide range of other possible ailments that would have led to their death even without a cat’s presence,” she said.
Cats’ proximity to people, she argued, also means attacks to wildlife that occurs near humans might be overrepresented in the data.
But the number of animals actually killed by cats is likely much higher, McRuer said. Many of the animals admitted to the center with unknown causes of trauma had injuries consistent with cat attacks but weren’t counted due to the fact that the cat interactions were not observed, he said. And cat predation also extends to reptiles and amphibians, whose admissions records McRuer said he and other researchers are examining now.
“It’s not surprising,” said Peter Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and co-author of the recent book “Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer.” “It’s really just the tip of the iceberg that we’re seeing in this paper.”
