Comment by stnikolauswagne
3 hours ago
From the abstract:
Our findings suggest 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.
I.e. cats might kill more birds and mammals than humans.
Are they counting the loss due to human-induced reduction of biodiversity? E.g. wiping native land and replacing it with houses/cities/roads.
Humanity has a cost on nature, that should be mitigated.
Humans like domestic cats, which is one contributor to the overall human-induced reduction in biodiversity.
I wonder also whether there's something about towns/cities that makes birds flourish, compared to other wild animals.
>I wonder also whether there's something about towns/cities that makes birds flourish, compared to other wild animals.
I would assume it has got do with the reason pigeons are sometimes called "flying rats", i.e. they can subsist on human trash, can survive in the environment and are not seen as negatively as rats and thus have less pest-control efforts pointed at them.
If cats are killing wild animals that happen to flourish in human environments, is that such a loss to biodiversity?
(Genuine Q. I don't know anything about what biodiversity folk look for.)
1 reply →
Read that sentence carefully.
They're counting cat-caused as anthropogenic i.e. part of anthropos-caused aka human-caused. And "single largest group" could be 1% if there are a lot of groups and each happens to be smaller than 1%.
I have read both the sentence and the abstract carefully, one of the other big antropogenic factors is "building colissions" which by itself is over one billion bird deaths.