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Working with people is important for wildlife biologists, he said. “Our study is not saying to people, ‘Now, on you go. “By looking after the animals better, we can at least partly avert this negative consequence of letting them go outdoors.”īut, McDonald said, by no means is he suggesting people let their indoor cats outside. “The key finding was, you could intervene in a non-invasive way that changed the cats’ motivation to go out hunting,” he said. The collars reduced bird prey cats brought back by 42%, but they didn’t change the amount of mammal prey. The bells, they found, had no effect on cat hunts, and collars were more effective. “We crossed that off our list,” McDonald said. The puzzle feeders, they found, actually caused the cats to bring home more wild prey, possibly because they ate less food and sought it in the wild. When owners played with their cats using the toys for five to 10 minutes a day, cats brought home 25% less prey. The team found that when cats were fed meat-rich diets, they brought home 36% fewer wild animals than a control group.
Prey meaning trial#
But I wasn’t troubled by that because this was a trial of real life.” “There was quite a lot of active communication back and forth, so that we could deal with snags like that in our analysis. Sometimes owners couldn’t play with the cats, for example if they went away for the weekend. Sometimes the cats dislike the trial food. “Inevitably, with a large group of households, you’ll have people doing things slightly differently,” McDonald said. The experiment was a little like herding cats. Some fed their cats in puzzle ball feeders that challenge the cats to reach their food. Some played with their cats using a combination of feather and mouse toys. Some fed them pet food high in meat protein. Reaching out on television, radio and social media, they recruited 219 cat-owning households, including 355 cats, and asked them to try different methods over a 12-week period. They also looked to see if diet, play and other behaviors might affect cats’ hunting habitats. They looked at a few different strategies, from colored collar covers to bells that alert birds that cats are nearby. McDonald is the senior author of a study published in Current Biology led by his student Martina Cecchetti, where they experimented with methods to keep domestic cats from killing wildlife.
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We need to engage with people because if we berate them about their cats, people become defensive of themselves and of their animal, which doesn’t lead to constructive engagement.” “For example, almost all cats are outdoor animals. “This cultural difference in how cats are kept really marks the difference between countries,” said Robbie McDonald, a professor in the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter. even, recent research has revealed cats are killing a number of wildlife species. While the United States has made progress in encouraging pet owners’ attitudes to keep their cats indoors, the U.K. When pet owners in the United Kingdom feed their pet cats diets heavy in meat or play with them, the felines are less likely to bring home wildlife prey. Encouraging play is one way to help prevent cats from hunting wildlife.