Sweet cuddly cat? No, evil killing machine!

Has your cat ever made you happy with a gift? Maybe with a little shrew? Or with a sweet, still living sparrow that then fled wounded under your bed? Or has she already put a slow worm in your gym bag out of pure affection? 😍

I do! To my cat’s incomprehension, the scream that escaped me when I discovered that the cattle were still wriggling had little to do with joy. Maybe that’s exactly why she increased her “gift frequency” afterward. But even the toad that looked at me in surprise from the living room carpet one morning couldn’t make me happy.

Can you think of what? The cats in my life have brought a wide selection of animals to my apartment. This not only affects me, but especially the animal world. This is now confirmed by a large study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The study – as befits scientific work – does not mince words. From the beginning, readers are shown why cats are so problematic for their environment.

According to the study, free-living cats (felis catus in technical jargon) were domesticated 9,000 years ago. This means they went from wild to domesticated. Since then, people have introduced cats almost everywhere in the world to use their services to protect against mice and other rodents. It has become one of the most widespread animal species in the world, occurring on all continents except Antarctica.

So far so good. Where is the problem now? If you’re a cat lover, hold on tight now:

Cats not only disrupt many ecosystems, they also spread many new diseases to other species, including humans. With its presence it displaces other small hunters and exploits the local wildlife, which in turn leads to the extinction of endangered species. Conclusion:

The cat is not picky when it comes to its diet. It covers its energy needs almost exclusively through proteins, i.e. from animal tissue. The cat doesn’t really care which source it comes from. According to the study, it is this undemanding nature that allows the disease to spread so globally. The cat simply eats what it can hunt. And she can hunt.

To find out what exactly is on the cat’s menu, the researchers collected the results of more than 500 studies from the past hundred years. The result is the largest existing database on cat food.

Let’s take a closer look at this data.

Cats make no distinction: whether birds, insects, mammals or reptiles, cats eat all kinds of animals that come between their paws. De Vogelwereld offers you the largest and tastiest selection. From the tiny sparrow to the 70-pound emu, the cat hunts a total of 981 species of birds. Although it can hunt the sparrow itself, it mainly feasts on the carcasses of larger animals such as the emu.

There are 463 species of reptiles and 431 species of mammals. According to the research, there are 119 species of insects and 57 species of amphibians on the menu. What initially sounds like a small number is, according to the researchers, a surprisingly high number. In many studies, the different insect species were not even mentioned. This is partly because the cat leaves too little material behind when consuming these animals to trace it back to specific species.

The study therefore assumes that the number of unreported species consumed is much higher. The researchers write:

Back to the problem: 347 species consumed by cats (corresponding to 16.65 percent of the diet) are on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. A total of eleven animals in the wild are considered extinct or completely extinct; most of these were endemic islands. Animal species that only occurred on one island.

The researchers discovered that cats on islands eat three times as many protected species as on the mainland. For example, in New Zealand, two endemic bird species are extinct: the New Zealand rock wren on Stephens Island and the New Zealand quail. In the country known for its enormous diversity of birds, the cat problem has already sparked heated debates. An organizer of a hunting competition seized the opportunity and quickly introduced a separate shooting category for wild cats at the beginning of this year.

Meanwhile, a more humane solution has been found in Australia. As The Wall Street Journal writes, in a suburb of the city of Adelaide, for example, domestic cats are prohibited from leaving their owner’s property alone between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Although the study was not intended to find solutions to the cat problem, it did provide important information to promote protective measures.