Today's peer-reviewed study showing the enormous toll taken on
wildlife by domestic cats is getting a lot of press, and rightly
so. ("That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think" in the New
York Times is both the paper's "most viewed" and "most e-mailed"
story of the day.) In the journal Nature Communications, authors
Scott Loss,Tom Will, and Peter Marra find that free-ranging cats
cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously
thought and are likely the single greatest source of
anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals. The authors
put the numbers at 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds killed annually in
the United States, and 6.9 to 20.7 billion rodents. That's a lot
of creatures. (Over at Mother Jones' Climate Desk, former Sierra
intern Tim McDonnell helpfully put together a chart using the
new numbers to put into perspective the much-lamented damage
wind turbines do to birds, here.) But here's the curious part.
Why is this study getting so much more attention than the even
more lurid indictm