Do you let your cat out into the great outdoors? If you’re fond of other small creatures, you may want to reconsider that policy:
Those cute kittens whose faces are peer from endless posts on Pinterest are actually predators, and a third of those trailed in a county in Georgia are wandering around outdoors capturing and killing other animals.
The army of assassins was discovered by folks from the University of Georgia and the National Geographic Society, who strapped video cameras around the necks of 60 cats to record their atrocities for a year in a project known as KittyCam.
[. . .]
“In Athens-Clarke County, we found that about 30 per cent of the sampled cats were successful in capturing and killing prey, and that those cats averaged about one kill for every 17 hours outdoors or 2.1 kills per week.
[. . .]
“If we extrapolate the results of this study across the country and include feral cats, we find that cats are likely killing more than four billion animals per year, including at least 500 million birds,” Dr George Fenwick, president of American Bird Conservancy, cried indignantly.
“Cat predation is one of the reasons why one in three American bird species are in decline.”
