Small home ranges and large local ecological impacts of pet cats

Drawing on GPS-tracking of hundreds of pet cats across several countries, this study found that owned cats typically stayed close to home with small home ranges, yet concentrated their hunting in those areas to produce intense, localised predation pressure on wildlife near houses. By translating movement into a per-area impact, the authors showed that even well-fed pets exert an outsized ecological effect in the immediate vicinity of residences, often within natural areas bordering suburbs. The work refined understanding of domestic-cat impact from a landscape average to a sharply localised hotspot near homes, with implications for containment policies and the siting of sensitive wildlife.