Research overview: why returned prey underestimates cat kills

A persistent challenge in measuring cat predation is that animals cats bring home represent only part of what they kill. This overview surveys research, including studies using cameras, GPS and observation, showing that cats eat or abandon many prey in the field and return only a minority to the household. It examines estimates of the multiplier needed to convert returned prey into total kills, the variation among cats and prey types, and how this gap leads owners to underestimate their cats' impact and biases studies that rely on prey returns. The survey discusses methodological efforts to capture unobserved predation and the implications for scaling up local data to population-level estimates, emphasizing that returned prey is a conservative and incomplete index of cats' true effect on wildlife.