In the UK, cat ownership has steadily risen over the past century. At present, a quarter of all UK homes have one or more cats. But there is something that few cat owners are prepared to discuss: cats are, it is undeniable, an ecological disaster.
In Britain, a study carried out in the mid-1990s estimated that domestic cats, whose numbers were at around 9 million, killed 88 million birds and 164 million small mammals annually. (This same study found that among all activities investigated as reasons for the killing of wild animals, hunting and shooting were responsible for just 6.006% of deaths, whereas cats accounted for 82%.) A later study, carried out in 2022, revealed that domestic cats annually killed between 160-270 million wild animals, around a quarter of which were birds.
