Megan
Gannon, News Editor
Date:
21 February 2013 Time: 03:58 PM ET
Though
they seem so natural in our homes, cats and dogs are natural predators, too.
Most will attack birds, lizards and smaller mammals when given the chance, and
scientists have demonstrated how their explosive populations can upset
ecosystems.
The
scourge of domestic cats has been thrown into the spotlight recently. A
campaign in New Zealand is pushing to get rid of cats, or at least keep them
confined indoors, where they can't prey on kiwis and other native birds. And a
study out last month attached some staggering figures to cats' carnage in the
United States: it found that the felines kill
between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds and between 6.9 billion and
20.7 billion small mammals, such as meadow voles and chipmunks, each year.
But defensive
cat lovers should rest assured — a new study from researchers at the
University of Oxford reminds us that domestic dogs are also killers and
disease-spreaders that can pose conservation problems when they're allowed to
roam free outdoors.
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