A wildlife rehab center confirms that cats are killers

The authors looked at close to 21,000 records of patients admitted to the center, in the central Virginia city of Waynesboro, from 2000 to 2010. Of those, almost 3,000 had been injured by cat attacks — some 14 percent, divided about evenly between birds and small mammals. Among the cat victims were mourning doves, blue jays, cottontail rabbits, southern flying squirrels and rarer animals, such as purple gallinules, a kind of water bird. Larger species such as ducks also turned up, and even a kestrel, a kind of falcon.

“It’s impressive that cats can take them down,” McRuer said of the kestrel, adding that few previous studies have documented the number of species affected by cat predation.

“From the information shared in the study, there is no way to know how many of the mammals or birds labeled as having been subject to interactions with cats were either ill or injured, by misfortune or by another predator, prior to being found by a cat, leaving open a wide range of other possible ailments that would have led to their death even without a cat’s presence,” she said.

Cats’ proximity to people, she argued, also means attacks to wildlife that occur near humans might be overrepresented in the data.