The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife mortality

This widely cited quantitative synthesis estimated that free-ranging domestic cats in the contiguous United States kill billions of birds and tens of billions of mammals annually, with unowned cats responsible for the majority. By aggregating predation rates from many studies and scaling them to cat population estimates, the authors made cats one of the single largest anthropogenic sources of wildlife mortality. While focused on conservation impact rather than behaviour mechanics, the paper reframed the ordinary hunting behaviour of an abundant felid as a continental-scale ecological force, fuelling debate over outdoor-cat management, trap-neuter-return, and the welfare-versus-conservation tension.