For all the adorable images of cats that play the piano, flush
the toilet, mew melodiously and find their way back home over
hundreds of miles, scientists have identified a shocking new
truth: Cats are far deadlier than anyone realized. In a report
that expanded results from local surveys and pilot studies,
scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that U.S. domestic
cats — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors
and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a
median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year,
most of them native animals like shrews, chipmunks and voles
rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat. The estimated
kill rates are two to four times greater than those previously
bandied about, and they position the domestic cat as one of the
single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife. More birds and
mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from
automobile strikes, p