People to keep their outdoor cats from killing local wildlife would like to hear the findings of a new study released Thursday. It suggests that giving your cat meat and playing with them regularly will help satisfy their appetite for hunting.
Animal researchers in the UK enlisted the help of 355 cats from 219 households in England for their experiment; the cats were specially chosen for their habit of taking home prey. To get a reasonable baseline, all cats were observed in their natural environment for seven weeks before the experiment began. Then, over a five-week period, they let most cats experience various conditions that could affect their outdoor hunting behavior (a control group was left to their own devices all the time). These terms include various diets, toys, and devices marketed specifically to keep cats away prey, such as collars with clocks attached or a brightly colored collar easy to see by birds.
Compared to the control group and the baseline behavior of the cats, the researchers found that several methods seemed to reduce the hunting of wild animals.
In cats that require high-quality, high-protein diets with a lot of meat and few grains, for example the number of animals brought home has been reduced by 36%. In the playgroup – where owners played with their cats using feather sticks and mouse-sized toys for five to ten minutes per day: the discount was 25%. The brightly colored collars also notably reduced bird predation by 42% but had no effect on the hunting of other small animals. Cat bells had no significant effect at all, and Puzzle feeders seemed to actually increase the hunt for some reason.
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While many commercial cat foods are high quality and rich in protein, some plant-based diets may lack certain micronutrients that cats instinctively try to supplement with hunting. IIt’s not exactly clear why puzzle feeders failed like that bad. It’s possible, the authors reason, that the cats’ inexperience with them made them frustrated and hungrier.
Of course the best One way to prevent cats from killing wild animals is to keep them indoors at all times. But some owners insist that cats need a dose of outdoor activity to stay healthy, and there can be semi-haggard cats that remain adamant about living a double life. So for these situations, the researchers hope their conclusions can help at least some owners find a comfortable middle ground.
“In controlling predation by domestic cats, owner behavior is just as important as cat behavior, and to reduce killing by cats, management strategies must be both effective and implemented by owners,” the authors wrote in their paper. , published in current biology. “Positive interventions, aimed at helping cats and appealing to owners, can reduce cats’ tendency to hunt and, therefore, could be the basis for a win-win conservation situation.”
The researchers plan to investigate whether the hunting of cats can be reduced even further by behavioral tricks, such as combining two or more methods. They also plan to study cat nutrition to see if they can identify any missing micronutrients associated with lessfleshy diets.